Quote from: TaunSew on November 24, 2014, 04:12:28 AM

Quote from: JoelKatz on November 24, 2014, 03:44:08 AM

Quote from: kelsey on November 22, 2014, 01:33:03 AM

Quote from: JoelKatz on November 22, 2014, 12:25:06 AM

Quote from: thomastaylor on November 21, 2014, 10:33:47 PM

Correct me, if I'm wrong:

Ripple was developped and held (50%) by a company, wasn't it?
In this case I absolutely prefer bitcoin.

Are there some control mechanism to prevent price manipulation by their own company?

You're talking about the currency inside the Ripple payment system, often called XRP. That's really not intended to be used as a means of exchange or a store of value (at least in the near term), so it's not really fair to compare it to Bitcoin (which is).

Yet funnily enough its the way the company behind Opencoin was to generate revenue (not to mention individuals within to generate a personal wealth...no?) Roll Eyes

Don't confuse the system with the revenue model. Google is good if it's a really good search engine. Google makes money if it generates really good ad revenue. But it would be kind of odd to judge Google as a search engine based on its ability to generate ad revenue.

To carry the analogy a bit too far, the way Google might think about it is like this -- if we make a really good search engine, it will generate lots of ad revenue. So if you care about the long term, you design it to be a great search engine and judge design decisions based on that, not on their affect on revenue.

Ripple was designed to be a great payment system and to federate existing payments systems. It also has features to support social/community credit and other types of possible future economic activity. We weren't trying to build something whose primary purpose was to generate revenue for us. Those priorities are reflected in the design.

If you build something whose primary purpose is to make you money, there's a good chance nobody will ever use it. And if you try to decentralize it, it will fail because there's no shared goal to make you money.

Build something great first.

Nice rhetoric. Too bad it's all bullshit considering Ripple is a centralized premine scam intended to make Jed and its' founders incredibly wealthy. You know it's not winning over the public if they have to send their employees to write replies, knowingly that nobody in the public is going to root for them.

I'll say what maybe JoelKatz wants to say: What do you call BTC, a speculative scam mined by the few, and controlled by the capitalist investors who pump the price? Look at the facts, weigh the pros vs. cons and consider your risks...

Ripple is not a scam, founders and Jed are contractually bound by lock-up agreements, and also have distribution strategies (except for Jed). So the founders will likely distribute some of their XRP to the underbanked, like mentioned by Chris Larsen.

The point is everyone has an opportunity to invest in a stable digital currency / protocol and profit from the value that JoeKatz describes in the design of the ripple protocol. Based on risk and volatility alone, I'll take my chances with XRP any day.

That's obvious, I doubt RL sends their employees to the forum to win over the public, it seems Mr. Katz is only here educate people on ripple and btc. Ripple may or may not compete with BTC as a store of value or payment mechanism, but the ripple protocol will definitely support BTC as a currency / form of payment / store of value as ripple will with every other form of value on the planet.

This is the first and last post I will ever make on this forum