Quote from: tjsherlock on March 07, 2014, 06:40:26 PM

Quote from: Zangelbert Bingledack on May 15, 2013, 02:00:24 PM

Erik Voorhees made an excellent post on OC Ripple here. That and his followups are very interesting. I basically agree entirely with his position. Not a scam, not too greedy, but too greedy to succeed long-term. Just a glorified pre-mined altcoin.

I have been following Ripple at a distance for the last several years since it was created by Ryan Fugger. So first I want to thank you Zangelbert for qualifying the altcoin here as OC Ripple, because that's what it is. It is definitely a fork of Ripple original. Ripple was conceived and developed before 2009. It just never got any commercial traction until OpenCoin came along.

I don't really see Ripple as being a competitor to Bitcoin, but rather as a complementary currency. But I'm really talking about Ripple (or Ripple Original) not OC Ripple. I'm not sure what to make of OC Ripple. it seems to be a hybrid with two masters. Ripple Original is not really a currency but rather a payment system or means of exchange without being a store of value and without being a means of price discovery. XRP on the other hand was introduced to simply be a unit of account without being a store of value and without being a means of exchange.
If XRP is still representing only a unit of account in OC Ripple, then it makeS sense that it would be destroyed at some point. The XRP should get created when a currency enters the system and should be destroyed when the currency leaves the system. It does not depend on a blockchain. Not sure about the general ledger, however; I've forgotten.

Someone here mentioned that OC Ripple represented debt. Essentially that it is true. The most fundamental definition of currency is debt. When you give me a valuable or provide me with a service I am in your debt. If I do not have a valuable or service that you want I give a promissory note or an IOU. In the US that IOU comes in the form of FRN, in Europe as Euros, in Japan as Yen, in Ithaca, NY as Ithaca HOURS, etc. You accept this IOU because you know you can pass it on to someone else who provides you with a valuable or service.

One of the driving forces behind Ripple Original is Trust. A payment travels through the Ripple system over a route of least resistance as determined by Trust. Ripple was meant be to decentralized (similar to the direction that Chris Odom wants to take Open-Transactions minus the trust). Each node doubles as a server with the ability to create currency as well as act a as a pass-through for payments from trusted nodes. Each node has the option of charging a toll before allowing a payment to flow through from Bob to Sally. OC Ripple convolutes all of this while still ideally intending to create a decentralized system based on Trust.

It's nice to know that Erik Voorhees is quite the evangelist for Bitcoin ( I see a lot value in the cryptocurrency and hold some myself), I'm disappointed however that he is so down on Ripple, but not surprised as it is really OC Ripple.

ripple is a scam, you thread necromancer and shill.