Quote from: nicolaennio on January 12, 2014, 08:27:50 PM

http://ripplescam.org/

TradeFortress's lies. And quite ironic, considering that he should know a thing or two about centralized vs decentralized, due to his first-hand experience losing/stealing 4,000+ BTC from users of his inputs.io wallet service.

Quote from: Ibian on January 13, 2014, 12:11:29 AM

Quote from: BittBurger on January 12, 2014, 07:10:20 PM

Quote from: afbitcoins on January 12, 2014, 12:27:50 AM

Do you know how many times i've heard ripples mentioned in mainstream media? zero.

Its just not interesting

Believe me. Its interesting. Its just too difficult to grasp. You think Bitcoin is hard? Try getting a grip on Ripple. Or rather .... try getting grandma to get a grip on Ripple. If I am understanding it correctly, whereas Bitcoin can send bitcoin anywhere in the world, instantly, free of charge .... Ripple can send *any currency* anywhere in the world, free of charge - and convert from any currency to any other currency in the process, free of charge (or for the cost of an XRP, which is 2 cents right now). Ripple can also do conversions between Bitcoin and all alt coins. So one might say that Ripple is Bitcoin on a mega dose of steroids. But grasping and using the system is currently too difficult for the average person.

And I believe Ripple markets itself as ultimately being the invisible backbone to the banking system. I don't believe its intended to be B2C but B2B and as such, you aren't going to see "Joes coffee shop now accepting Ripple". The question is whether the Ripple people are going to pour the millions of dollars necessary into (1) simplifying the system and (2) selling it to the world economy. Because believe me, what it does, is new, interesting, and extremely needed.

And yet you explain nothing of how it works.

It has bid/ask offers and trade matching built into the protocol - so its "decentralized exchange". Instead of a new "block" every few minutes, there's a new "ledger" every few seconds. So whereas blocks in a blockchain only keep track of how much coin is at each address, the ripple ledger also keeps track of bid/ask trade offers.

Now, in order to trade on ripple, you still have to trust an "issuer" aka gateway. But that's no different than any other way you can currently trade bitcoins - by depositing bitcoin at an exchange, you implicitly trust that exchange (the exchange could disappear overnight and steal your deposited funds).

There's another thread where people are trying out ripple - someone created one quadrillion FUNcoins and is giving them out, just for learning purposes:
Start using Ripple, learn with no risk. The FunCoin Gateway