Quote from: ~Coinseeker~ on March 11, 2014, 05:05:18 PM

I think a lot has do with people simply not understanding monetary systems, payment networks, distributed exchanges, currency exchange and pretty much everything hypostatization just laid out. Most people's extent of knowledge on these subjects is limited to what they learned from Bitcoin and thus, they can't see anything but "coins" because everything else is beyond their current knowledge base. Understanding "coins" is simple enough for even children to understand.

The simplest way to understand the benefits of Ripple to Bitcoin, is to just look at Gox. If Gox had been plugged into Ripple, users would had flexibility over their Gox IOU's. While an exchange closing is never going to have positive results, those IOU's could have still been moved into other currencies, like Bitstamp.BTC or XRP and then moved into any other currency where liquidity exists. This is much like what Bitcoinbuilder did, except you don't need a central clearing house to move your IOU's. Instead, Gox users have taken a total lost because they prefer centralized exchanges over distributed exchanges. Why? IDK...maybe a few more need to fail before people finally get it.

Now no ones perfect and RL's is no exception. Things can always be improved upon and the necessity to effectively communicate Ripple's feature set and benefits, should remain an on going process. But keeping blinders on and refusing personal responsibility to understand the tech in the space, is also not an excuse for not educating ones self on the tech, that brings increased value and utility to Bitcoin and all crypto-currencies.

Ripple can bring the entire digital currency space to worldwide ubiquity and that's just a fact.

So you prefer contagion, bail outs and collusion when a large gateway/exchange goes down?
The incentives in Ripple push bail outs, debt and encourage other holders of Gox IOUs to turn a blind eye to Gox's trouble's, giving them more credit lest a default leads to loss of Gox IOU values throughout the system. This is what many critics of Ripple have said for years.

Bitcoin related businesses can never be too big to fail.
Ripple businesses can be too big to fail.