Quote from: twiifm on April 18, 2014, 09:53:49 PM

Correct me if I'm wrong but that Ripple IOU exists only to do the exchange. So why is there counter party risk? Once the exchange is finished there is no risk.

Lets say I wanted to send you $100,000. That $100K leaves my bank account and goes into the Ripple gateway, then gets converted to XRP, then goes into your account as $100K. Where is the risk?

The bolded part is where you're wrong.

Unlike Bitcoin (where you indeed have to exchange the 100k USD to BTC to transfer them), you can send them along just fine as USD held by this gateway, in case we both use it. There is no inherent need to exchange them for XRP.

Quote from: BittBurger on April 18, 2014, 10:33:01 PM

I agree that Ripple has potential.

Fair enough: they're not a consumer oriented technology.

However, I'm pretty sure they're not doing jack shit in the way of courting banks and other financial institutions either.

That's what I meant by not doing jack shit.

It seems as if they're sitting stagnant. Someone has to go out there and sell the idea to financial institutions.

Is anyone doing that?

Ripple Labs has several people working in business bevelopment positions, probably more than any other Bitcoin related company. I'm quite sure they are not publicly going to talk about their deals and negotiations with the public (or you...) before their partners are ready.

Quote from: zzojar on April 18, 2014, 10:33:47 PM

My opinion is because Ripple just makes no sense. Can anyone explain it to a 5th grader? Nope. I've tried to read about Ripple on several occasions and I end up totally confused. Bitcoin at least makes sense to me, but nobody can explain Ripple in terms that make sense.

You want to trade something on a market. Since it is a big place, you take whatever you want to trade to a stand/warehouse at the gateways of that market place, deposit your goods there and get a receipt that is signed by the person you deposited with. You then proceed to trade these receipts for whatever you want to have and at the end of the day take you different receipts to a different stand/warehouse and get the thing back that you bought. To make sure receipts are not faked, they are signed by the warehouses and to make sure they don't fill the whole market place with paper, they are required to put an official stamp (XRP) on that too. Some people also like to collect/trade these stamps, they are useless and worthless outside of that marketplace though.

I could go on with that analogy, but is that around the level of your understanding?