Quote from: Ix on February 11, 2014, 10:35:11 PM

Quote from: Sukrim on February 11, 2014, 04:17:20 PM

Anyways, that picture does not mean what you think it means, it is incorrect in nearly everything that's written on or below it and even though a lot of people suddenly seem to act as if they got a PhD in distributed systems design just by looking at this, they did not. Sorry. It's very nice to look at and apparently easy to understand though, so it might have some value as example.

I might not have a PhD in distributed systems design, but I'm pretty familiar with them, and at least at this point I think those pictures are fairly accurate representations. Although one could very well argue that bitcoin is more similar to the picture on the right as well with mining pools being the centralized authorities.

No. You do not need to connect to mining pool servers directly, also miners have very high incentives to directly peer with at least 50% of the total hashing power of the network, ideally even more. It depends a lot though what you actually are representing with the stuff in the pictures - if it is miners connecting to pools, then it would be kinda ok I guess. Still not a very good way to explain things and still wrong with the examples.

Quote from: Ix on February 11, 2014, 10:35:11 PM

Well most altcoins are crap that don't solve the distribution problems of bitcoin, they specifically want to emulate it for a pump n dump. Ripple, on the other hand, made no secret that they would have control. And it's been what, 1.5+ years now and bitstamp is still really the only major gateway? I may be way off on this, I haven't kept up with Ripple. I would like to think that is because of the XRP distribution, but it's probably more because the world isn't really ready yet for it. There is still ample opportunity for a new contender that will obviate the need for RippleLabs. For the future of all forms of cryptocurrency, people really need to tell centralizing schemes to fuck off.

It's been 1 year and 1 1/2 months now, Bitstamp seems to still be a major player, other ones are SnapSwap, RippleCN, Peercover, RippleIsrael, JustCoin, TheRockTrading, WisePass, RippleUnion and DividendRippler. I would rather see for example Altcoins or native BTC implemented into Ripple as native asset in some way or another (yes, I know that this means tracking an external blockchain for validators) competing with XRP rather than having a mining fork, I am nevertheless still excited for Splash (if it ever materializes that is...).

@TheWhale:
Was that huge blockquote really necessary for that one-liner? Sad