Quote from: Zangelbert Bingledack on May 11, 2013, 04:56:22 PM

There is one of the paradox that no one has ever been able to resolve: in order for OCRipple to work, XRP must have both almost no value and also - at the same time - substantial value. I have asked about this many times and never heard a good answer.

Both statements are more or less false. I assume the "almost no value" is so that it's easy for people to create new accounts and process transactions, and the "substantial value" is in order to act as DDOS prevention.

The various reserve requirements are adjustable, so they can remain low no matter what value XRP have. And the expected behavior of transaction fees is the following: typically they will have a very low XRP cost (transactions should be cheap, assuming the network can support it), but during a DDOS they will automatically increase in order to make the DDOS uneconomical. In order to continue the DDOS, they need to keep the network at maximum load as the fees compound to do this for any extend period would require paying truly extraordinary fees. In the mean time, anybody wanting to use the network will just need to prove that their transactions are more important than the DDOSer's transactions by paying a higher fee than them on *one* transaction. (Rather than the many transaction fees per second the DDOSer is paying.)

What this means is that you will usually only need a very small amount of XRP to use Ripple (leading to a possibly low XRP price overall), but a determined attacker can pay an extraordinary cost in order to make the network temporarily more expensive to use. Remember that if a DDOSer makes it so that getting a transaction through costs a dollar, they're paying for many transactions per second at the same cost, or tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of dollars per hour. If such an event happened over a long period of time, the price of XRP would probably spike as people realized they needed it to send transactions this is where the apparent paradox of almost no value and substantial value is resolved. However, given the built in cost and lackluster effects of running a DDOS on Ripple, it's hard to imagine that anybody would actually try to do this, and the price of XRP would remain low. The mere presence of this variable XRP transaction cost acts as an effective anti-spam device.

Of course, this has been explained to you before, so I don't expect that you'll be convinced by this repetition of the argument...