There are other interesting advantages. In the case of distributed exchanges, the chronology can determine market winners and losers. How do we decide who gets to bid on trades? What if we wanted an auction? who decides who wins the auction if it depends on TIMING? This also solves this problem for the users so long as they feel properly represented in the order of authorities. If we tried to do this with PoW, then the miners might compete to put the chain in a favorable order. In my system we make this negotiation explicit.
this order can be defined in many ways. For instance you could have one singular FIAT authority who rules all, very easy to manage, but not very easy to sell to the public. You could have a TRIUMVIRATE- or three equal authorities- which is fairly easy to coordinate and also non-biased. You could extend this principle geometrically to five or more authorities. You can also have different weight ratios for instance 1 primary authority but a school of smaller authorities that can outweigh it if unanimous(called KING AND COURT in my terminology).
I still miss the point.
You talk about exchanges, but at some point there must be one entity which accepts a valuable (fiat, gold, whatever) and emits a corresponding digital IOU.
Which is exactly like Ripple.
If this doesn't work that way, how do you suggest to do it? It's totally unclear.
Re. Ripple, specifically how this idea differs from whatever Ripple is at the moment is anyone's guess. They have no released their source code. At this point I dont think they can drift significantly from the core concepts, and I do know that those concepts work quite differently than what I have. Confidence Chains is very familiar to Bitcoin developers. ASMOF, you can use the transactions AS IS, in the system- which is very convenient for Bitcoin users and developers.
I know that Ripple claims to be open but it isn't, and this is bad.
But what aims to do is known, and your project can't be "like Ripple, but open", because on paper Ripple itself "would" be open, while in practice Ripple isn't open, but your system
doesn't exists at all, so...