Quote from: Crypto Canary on April 18, 2013, 05:21:33 AM

Quote from: Matthew N. Wright on April 18, 2013, 05:16:57 AM

We can start by not requiring a mining hardware race just to protect the network. Torrents don't need ASICs to protect their files. I realize it's all much more complicated than that, but not when you take the "money generation" part of it. Ripple could be Bitcoin's absolute replacement, as long as we can build a network of *actual* trustworthiness. Right now it'd be a bunch of random dudes on bitcointalk.org who've never met before granting frivolous amounts of trust that could never be recouped if they were scammed.

Isn't Ripple centralized? I don't think that could do what bitcoin sought to achieve by definition.

I think it's decentralized by nature, but being centralized for the time being (so yea, no way to argue that at the moment). It will not be Bitcoin, it will never be Bitcoin, and it shouldn't try to be Bitcoin though. Bitcoin is supposedly the "trust-less currency". Ripple is the "exchange medium that cannot function without trust" if you will, and frankly, in a world run by social networks and microlending, I think *that* is a much more realistic concept than needing to be a new ASIC every 6 months to keep your "currency" from deflating.