Quote from: ivanc on May 29, 2013, 06:23:46 PM

Quote from: nameface on May 28, 2013, 05:30:13 PM

I have a sneaking suspicion TradeFortress, MPOE, and some of the major Ripple detractors may be working in Ripple's favour. Their impact on these forums is may really be a net positive for Ripple, since Katz and Co. clearly have the ability to respond to any questions or legitimate criticisms, and are open to debating Ripple's features.

As a user and entrepreneur who is still fairly new to these modern payment solutions, it's very easy for me to be supportive of Ripple. Meanwhile MPOE and his/her ilk are diminishing my like for Bitcoin ttytt.

Let me tell you, with no disrespect, that if you really were an entrepreneur, you wouldn't be that naive. Those who are buying into Ripple at this premature stage are either the naive/hipster types or the accomplices that Opencoin has managed to buy into the scheme. Once Opencoin releases the full spec and the source code of Ripple, we can start evaluating it and decide what its real value is. Before that, it is just vaporware speculation.

It is a fact that Mircea's arguments sometimes go a bit overboard and the personal accusations (maybe sometimes wrong) should be avoided, but if you can look behind the sarcasm then what you find is simple and basic logic. And guess what, at the end, logic always wins.
Ripple might have bought fanboys and convinced dodgy VCs into the scheme, but it doesn't change the foundations of what it relies on. Their algorithm is flaky to say the least.

I wouldn't go like Mircea and make personal accusations of scam against members of their team, or against the naive types that they have managed to buy out. Surely someone like David Schwartz is not malicious and he's the one being used here, not the scammer. Throughout his posts, he comes accross as a curious scientist eager to explore a novel type of consensus system. Obviously, I wouldn't put the guy who created the card exchange website and who is now fiddling around with VCs in the same category. Both of them surely would like to become richer, however... anyway, back to the argument.

For the lazy types who can't be bothered thinking too much, the reality is as follows: the algorithm that Ripple would like to use for their system has no stable fixed point. Not if it's open source, not if it's honest, not if it's decentralized. It boils down to a deeper and abstract (and unproven) argument, that I'd formally sum up as this: "only Proof-of-work cannot be faked". This, in turn, comes from a deeper and general law of the world we live in, the law of "conservation of energy". For those without any scientific background, this law implies that energy cannot be faked. This is why the consensus system of Bitcoin was made to rely on Proof-of-work (= energy) and nothing else.

Now, if you prefer to believe in the marketing of Ripple rather than the hard facts, logic and mathematics of Bitcoin, it's entirely up to you. I would strongly advise people to let the Ripple developers do their work first though. Until they release a working (and open source) product, as far as I'm concerned Ripple doesn't exist yet.

You just wasted ~500 words to say: "Once Opencoin releases...the source code...we can start evaluating".

I agree that "logic wins", but I don't see logic in your post. It's pretty much just baseless insults Cheesy

What do you have against Jed now? His project has potential and he's been offered big VC funding, and this should reflect negatively on him because he doesn't come across on this forum like as much of a cutesy scientist as JoelKatz? These character analyses aren't pertinent to the discussion, other than the fact that many of us believe JoelKatz and Jed to be trustworthy.