- If XRPs are just stamps/tokens to throttle spammers, not the transaction payload; and you expect the current supply of XRPs to last everyone on Planet Earth for their lifetime of transactions, why would you expect XRP's to appreciate in value at all?
The price of XRP is just a matter of supply and demand. We believe that broad adoption of Ripple as a payment platform will drive demand.
- What's the revenue (not asset) model for OpenCoin to make money? It doesn't seem like there's anything intrinsic to the Ripple network that allows you to grab, for example, a transaction fee. Are you planning to be one of the gateways, among other peer gateways?
We don't currently plan to do anything but develop and promote the Ripple payment network.
Thanks for the clear responses. So it sounds like you plan to let third party companies come in to help facilitate all of the other functions required here (helping existing companies get onto the Ripple network, monitoring/audit/security tools, fraud/risk modeling, POS, etc, etc) as opposed to building up that application suite yourself.
Another question -- is it possible to create, say, hundreds of new currencies (with distinct exchange rates against the existing currencies) within the Ripple network in a day without causing network problems? This would be for a genuine use case, not as spam.