Quote from: kgo on April 18, 2014, 06:51:57 PM

Quote from: ~Coinseeker~ on April 18, 2014, 06:09:17 PM

The best thing that happened to Ripple, was speculators and single-currency thinkers, not rushing to Ripple to "pump" the internal currency, XRP. It's not a speculative currency. I know that's hard for many of you to understand. After all, that's all blockchain coins are good for...speculation. Not knocking it, just saying, I get the limited thinking.

Ripple is the value web. It doesn't take an ideological position as to which currencies the world will use and try to jam those down everyones throats. Just as the web doesn't attempt to dictate what type of information is available. Instead, it offers the ability to remove centralized exchanges and central clearing houses, allowing the use of IOU's, you already possess (In those exchanges, bank accounts, Paypal, etc.) and gives you freedom to exchange them for other things of value. As apposed to having your IOU's trapped in those central entities. Think Gox. Total loss for people with IOU's there. With Ripple, those same IOU's Gox is sitting on, could have been exchanged for other things of value, even after they halted withdrawals. Even right now. They're your IOU's after all. Shouldn't you have control over them?

Truth is, most of you should avoid Ripple at this point because the raw protocol is really beyond the comprehension of most novice crypto users. Developers will love it. No question about it, but where single currencies are very simple and easy to digest, Ripple is a true monetary system and monetary systems are very complex by nature. Trying to fit Ripple into a "coin" box, will always leave you frustrated, confused and of course, blaming the protocol because it's something you don't understand. Typical way of saving face, I suppose.

Nevertheless, hang in there. Whether you get Ripple or not, it's going to change the way the world transacts and that is a good thing for Bitcoin and all things of value. So don't make Ripple the scapegoat or competition to your little currencies. Nope, your currencies are individually responsible for their own success or failure. Ripple is just here to see that there's a way they can reach everybody, where the live, and with what they use locally as currency, without all the middlemen.

Welcome to the world of distributed exchange. The future is so bright. Cool

What you're talking about is money. Something that everyone agrees to use to eliminate the double coincidence of wants when trading. Ripple fans never seem to be able to explain to my satisfaction why I'd trade one money, bitcoin, for another money, ripple, just so I can trade that for whatever I really want, recreating the double-concidence-of-wants problem it's supposed to avoid.. Why not just trade bitcoin for what I want? What does adding ripple in the middle of things add to the process?

The main thing ripple attempts to accomplish is to create a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala system, where brokers trade IOUs and then at some point settle up after cancelling out IOUs, so they don't need to actually send money back and forth all the time. This is done because it's difficult to transmit traditional money over a long distance or across international borders. However, crypto-currencies don't have this problem. Why do I need a broker to send my money half way across the world when I can just send money half way across the world by clicking my mouse button?

That's exactly what he's talking and why Ripple is intriguing. Currently to send money across distances you need a clearing house. You are correct that Hawala does this without a clearing house & Ripple is a digital version of Hawala.

The reason why you want this is because people use different local currencies. If my Chinese supplier only accept RMB as payment and if I want to use BTC how can the transfer take place? Either there is a clearing house that takes my BTC and gives him RMB or something like Ripple.