Quote from: QuantumQrack on April 15, 2013, 02:07:40 PM

Joel, since the majority of XRP has not been distributed, doesn't that mean a very small number of people or entities have most of the XRP? Thus, if a sufficient market demand is generated and XRP reaches USD parity and provided there is sufficient liquidity, doesn't that mean that Open Coin Inc, is "fantabulously" wealthy?

Yes. But if the price of XRP drops, they'll lose the present value of their holdings. They have the same opportunity everyone else has -- they hold a position today that has some value. They can sell it for its present value, or they can hold it in the hope that its value will increase but at the risk that its value will decrease. Anyone can buy XRP at its present value and have this exact same future opportunity/risk.

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Is there a public list of who owns and how much XRP?

No, and I don't think anybody knows.

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Also, a different question: How do we know more XRP won't be created--faith?

Right now, OpenCoin could create more XRP by modifying the software. However, that would be disastrous to our business, possibly subject us to lawsuits, and so on. So we're not going to. It would be insane. In the future, the network will be decentralized and it will take a consensus of validators to do that. If, in the far future, the majority of Ripple validators want more XRP to be created, nothing could stop them from doing so. That would probably cause a network fork, so it's almost inconceivable. It would be similar to Bitcoin miners getting together and trying to force a change to keep the block reward at 25 bitcoins forever. It could happen, there would be revolts, there would be hard forks, but if enough people wanted it, it could possibly happen.

Quote from: Calavera on April 15, 2013, 02:08:54 PM

Is the Transfer Fee stored in an address's root node alterable or will it be permanent once set?

We originally had planned a way to lock the transfer fee for a particular amount of time and require you to announce a higher transfer fee in the ledger. The whole scheme got unreasonably complex, and we ditched it. We hope gateways will contractually obligate themselves not to raise the transfer fee without sufficient advanced warning. No transfer fee applies when a balance is returned to its issuers and issuers must accept their own balances at face value. So you can't really raise your own transfer fee as a way to make your debts worthless. (You'll just make them less desirable, likely causing people to stop letting you hold their money.)