Quote from: bitaccumulation on May 19, 2013, 04:39:46 AM

Quote from: Este Nuno on May 19, 2013, 04:30:31 AM

What about people losing their bitstamp BTC? That's the damage I was thinking of when I wrote that.

He claims he was not the one who ended up redeeming peoples bitstamp BTC, but that he just set in motion events that enabled people to effectively lose their bitstamp BTC. By lose, I mean have them replaced by TradeFortress BTC.

If people trust TradeFortress AND Bitstamp USD, they are saying that they will accept both equally (just like you'd accept a balance at Bank of America and Citibank for US dollars equally).

Douchebag TradeFortress understands that Ripple is a ledger system that keeps track of IOUs but wants to play stupid while he allows people to be scammed because of his actions.

Ripple is a distributed ledger system that allows you to keep track of IOUs. That's its function. It allows you to take control of who you do and don't trust when accepting IOUs. It allows this trust to "ripple" if you want it to (optional). That's a feature of the system. It's not like Bitcoin. TradeFortress is playing on most people's ignorance of this and making it seem like it's a flaw because it doesn't work the way Bitcoin does. He's a douchebag.

Unfortunately he obviously has friends on this board that will continue to allow him to scam Newbies either because they are ignorant of what he is doing or they just don't care.

Please stop repeating stuff, here:

I would not accept a BoA balance equal to a Citibank's balance if the nearest BoA atm is a hour's drive away compared to 5 minutes, for example.

Quote from: Deprived on May 18, 2013, 12:06:03 AM

Quote from: arsenische on May 17, 2013, 09:49:32 PM

Quote from: Deprived on May 17, 2013, 09:21:58 PM

For one thing, before we can distinguish between the two sample responses you give we need a defined point in time at which the IOU issuer is obliged to give a response at all (a settlement date).

IOUs (taken as meaning any acknowledgement of debt) don't necessarily EVER have to be redeemed. For example perpetual bonds are never intended to be redeemed - yet are debt.

Thanks for your valuable arguments. You might be right and I think I understand now why theymos said IOU is not a binding contract. But now I feel totally confused. What is debt then, if it is doesn't ever have to be repaid?

Debt is something that you owe - a claim someone else has against you. Not all debts are created with the intention of being repaid (e.g. loans that are made for tax reasons without either party to the loan having an intention of there ever being a repayment). Perpetual bonds are another example of debt that will never be repaid (talking RL ones not the pretend mining ones on here). The bond issuer borrows money that will never be repaid - paying interest (a dividend) on it regularly. The only way to get your cash back is to sell it to someone else.

That's why debt/IOUs with no agreed terms is worthless.

Maybe an example will help - for the examples below the assumption to be made is that I WILL honour any commitments I made (in practice all debt should be discounted in value based on your confidence that I'd repay):

If I said I'd owe you 20 BTCs to be settled in a week in return for 10 BTCs from you now then (IF you had total trust in me) you could reasonably value those 20 ripple BTCs at similar value to 20 actual BTCs.

If I said I'd owe you 20 BTCs to be settled in 5 years in return for 10 BTCs from you now then (IF you had total trust in me) you would STILL have to value them at a lot less than 20 actual BTCs (as they'd generate no revenue in the meantime and were illiquid).

In ripple BTCs of each of the above scenarios are treated as being interchangeable (whether its 2 sets from same issuer or from 2 different issuers) - despite the fact they have very different actual value.

Now consider a third scenario (equivalent to perpetual bonds):

I say that if you give me 10 BTC now I'll owe you 10 BTC on ripple. I will never repay those BTC but on the first of each month I'll send 0.01 BTC for each BTC owed to whoever currently holds them. Again - to ripple those are just BTC - and swappable with anyone else's BTC (provided someone trusts both me and the other issuer). These BTC may have more or less value than the other ones - depending on how people value 1% interest/month against liquidity. But I'll never repay them - and am NOT a scammer for issuing them.

Now the final case. I say if you give me 10 BTC now I'll owe you 20 BTC on ripple but will only ever repay them if I win the lottery. What are those BTC worth? Nearly nothing (even ignoring the fact that I don't play the lottery).

Do you see how the value of a debt/IOU is defined by the TERMS that apply to it - not by its face value? But ripple treats them all based on face value.

TF's ones were pretty much explicitly worthless. In the absence of terms the only way to reasonably assess value of something is to look at what consideration was given in return for them - and assume a similar value. Nothing was given - so their value is gong to be around zero.