Quote from: misterbigg on April 16, 2013, 01:33:07 AM

Quote from: Terpie on April 16, 2013, 01:25:58 AM

Except it seems they have a chicken/egg problem. The whole idea of using a crypto-currency is to avoid counterparty risk to the extreme (along with the speed/portability of digital media). That is the principle that most bitcoiners want in their currency. Here, we have Ripple/OpenCoin saying, hey look, theoretically we would have no incentive to dump our coins, stay closed source & centralized, harm other forks, comply with onerous government demands. However, the counterparty risk still currently exists. I don't care if they say, "We won't do that!". I want to know that they can't do that.

Except that Ripple serves TWO functions (not just one, like Bitcoin). You can create a Ripple wallet, deposit money into your preferred gateway, send and receive payments in a cryptographically secure way, and redeem money at your preferred gateway, all without ever using XRP as a currency or holding a position in XRP.

People from Bitcoinlandia tend to view other crypto-currency systems with in a myopic way. XRP are there only if you want them. They can be pretty useful to provide liquidity between U.S. dollar denominated IOUs from different gateways (and with the liquidity provider / arbitrageur making a small profit on the trade). Regular users won't see these behind the scenes activities, they will just enjoy the benefits of highly liquid markets and the network effects that Ripple allows.

Quote from: Terpie on April 16, 2013, 01:25:58 AM

I feel very uncomfortable using a currency where one entity effectively controls 99.99% of all currency units.

Right. And as I said you don't have to use XRP as a currency if you don't want to.

Do you have some kind of affiliation or connection Ripple? Just asking because I see a lot of your posts are about Ripple...