1) So you can reliably tell the source of funds. If I make lots of deposits from Bittrex and lots of deposits from Bitfinex, if they each deposit into a different address, it's easy to track the source of funds.

2) To help resist $5 wrench attacks. If someone can figure out one of my transfers to Poloniex, they can figure out all of them. That can let them know when I have cash and when I have cryptos and how much. That can be leveraged into them knowing when to kidnap me and make it hard for me to convince them that I have fewer bitcoins than I actually have.

Also, you can't so easily dismiss privacy. Privacy isn't just about personal dignity, it's also often a matter of necessity. There's a reason businesses don't tell every employee how much every other employee gets paid. There's a reason your competitors don't tell you how much they pay from distributors you also do business with. This is especially true with cryptos where people might read things into other people's actions and act on the basis of them.

No. There is no way in the protocol to say "I just created 50,000 coins out of nowhere". The software is open source, you can check it out yourself.

Even if you want to argue that our servers might run some other software, that wouldn't matter, because nobody else's servers (like exchanges and explorers) would listen to us if we told them that a transaction had made funds appear out of nowhere.

You can check out the software yourself. Not only is there no way to say that coins were created out of nowhere, there is explicit code that checks for this condition and reject it just in case a bug or subterfuge let through some way to do it:
https://github.com/ripple/rippled/blob/develop/src/ripple/app/tx/impl/InvariantCheck.cpp#L25-L81

The only thing you can't do with deterministic rules is ensure that everyone tries to execute transactions in the same order. That is the key function of validators.

You can try jatchili's minimalist Ripple client or the old Ripple desktop wallet (if you can find a copy of it somewhere).

That's very strange. Maybe there's a typo in it somewhere? Maybe you confused an I with a 1 or a 0 with an o? Or maybe you got the case wrong on one letter?

Perhaps these four things will help:

1) There are no zeroes.

2) There is no capital I.

3) There is no lower case l.

4) There is no capital O.

Legal characters are:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a A b B c C d D e E f F g G h H i j J k K L m M n N o p P q Q r R s S t T u U v V w W x X y Y z Z

That's strange. Does the secret start with an "s" and is about 29 characters long?

That probably means that your account was re-keyed. The only tool I know that can do this is jatchili's minimalist Ripple client which has a "rekey" button.

What do you mean by it did not work? What happened or didn't happen?

It depends what you mean by "the tech".

XRP and ILP are open. Anyone can use them however they want.

Ripple also sells software to banks that integrates things like XRP and ILP with banking systems. This handles the parts of the transaction that XRP and ILP don't handle, primarily end-to-end pre-payment messaging and integration with banking systems and processes.

If we had to give it away for free to drive adoption, we probably would have. But charging for it also ensures that we're only working with partners who have a level of commitment.

Think about it this way:

Ripple holds over 60 billion XRP. Given the way that's being escrowed, Ripple will almost certainly be the largest holder of XRP for the foreseeable future. For every penny the price of XRP goes up, the notional value of Ripple's XRP goes up by six hundred million dollars. Ripple can only materialize that value for its shareholders if that value and liquidity are preserved over the next several years.

Sure, Ripple makes money by selling software to banks. But how many banks do you think Ripple would have to close to make six hundred million dollars in license/support fees? That would equal the value of a sustained one cent increase in the price of XRP.

It's very simple to add a new signature scheme to Ripple. We did it to add Ed25519 support. You don't have to change your Ripple address and accounts that use different signature schemes can interoperate seamlessly.

If we added a quantum-resistant crypto scheme now, we'd be stuck with it forever. And all of the currently-known such schemes have massive downsides such as very large public keys.

It just makes a lot more sense for us to wait until there's some reason to think it's needed. We could easily deploy a new signature scheme in 3 months (or faster if the need was urgent). We think it makes more sense to choose a scheme as late as safely possible to give us the most information and best choices of what scheme to adopt.

But we watch closely.

If anyone knows of a quantum-resistant signature scheme that permits multiple signatures and has performance and key sizes not much worse than Ed25519 or SECp256K1, that could change things.

My understanding is that they contacted the people who they were erroneously sent to and convinced them to return them. I believe they bought some XRP to make up the difference so that they could return XRP to customers while their recovery efforts were still ongoing.

If XRP appreciates in price, it's almost certain that Ripple does well just because it holds so much XRP. But you could imagine Ripple completely failing to get XRP adopted for international payments but nevertheless XRP gets adopted for other uses and still succeeds. On-ledger XRP transactions are faster, cheaper, and more predictable than bitcoin transactions.

No. There are only two ways to destroy XRP. It can be used to pay transaction fees or it can be sent to an address that is provably unable to transfer it out. Both of those cases require a transaction to execute and apply in a ledger. If a transaction is rejected by the consensus process, it doesn't do anything at all, not even ever appearing in a ledger or authorizing any changes to ledger state. If a transaction is accepted into a ledger by the consensus process, deterministic rules control what the consequences of that transaction are.

I'm not sure what you're referring to. What change in the number of coins?

Ripple's design does not require history for the system to make forward progress. Storing historical data is always optional.

In the very early days of Ripple, there were only three servers running. All were validators and all were on Amazon's EC2 platform. They were essentially identically configured.

Early versions of rippled did not check disk free space and would continue running even if the disk got full. In addition, they didn't save the ledger header into the node store. All three validators ran out of disk space at substantially the same time.

I took snapshots of the databases of all three validators and attempted to recover the missing ledgers. As I recall, I was able to recover several thousand ledgers and got stuck at 32,570.

All of this occurred before the network was open to the public, before XRP was traded, and before XRP had any value at all.

After the network was opened to the public, several volunteers offered to assist with the recovery process and we made the snapshots from all three servers public. No additional ledgers were recovered.

I owe you guys an apology. I was just shown the full text of an email you had already sent to customers several days before my comment that actually answers most of these questions. I had previously seen another email and an excerpt from this one, but not the part that answered my questions.
I should say that I have no special knowledge about this incident, nor have I communicated with anyone else at Ripple about it other than briefly to offer assistance and was told that it was not needed.

Some questions to ask coinpayments:

1) Are the specific funds missing their funds or their customer funds? Who owned the funds that were stolen?

2) Are they accepting or conceding their liability for the missing amounts? Their emails are ambiguous.

3) In what units are they tracking the missing funds? Are they planning to return the amount of XRP missing or the equivalent USD value?

4) If they are not liable, what is their theory for why they are not liable?

5) If they are liable, what is their theory for why they can impose this loss entirely on one class of their customers? What is their legal theory justifying them imposing their choice of which customers suffer from the loss and which don't?

6) Are they going to disclose what happened in sufficient detail to allow affected customers to evaluate the these questions themselves? If not, do they agree that this virtually forces affected customers to either trust them on no basis at all or sue them?

I think it's quite common to see this type of cycle. When an asset has a large, sudden increase, lots of people will buy the asset just to ride the surge. That pushes the price up and you can have a large rally. As soon as there's a hint that the rally is over, all the people who bought in just for the rally will try to cash out before the price crashes. This causes a huge correction in the price.

Bitcoin just surged to $3k. That nice, round number probably provoked enough selling to cause the price to drop. That drop triggered all of the people who aren't a long-term believer in bitcoin to try to get out so they miss the drop and maybe get back in when it's over.

XRP had a similar experience, surging from less than a penny all the way to 42 cents or so with lots of people buying in just to ride the rally. When the rally had a hint of ending, all of those "rally riders" got out as quickly as they could, correcting the price all the way down to 20 cents or so. Now XRP seems to be consolidating back up, just as bitcoin probably will shortly.

What odd about this is that it largely doesn't involve any activity on the part of those who believe in the asset and are holding it for the long term. So the behavior is largely independent of how rationally good or bad the asset is.

This is really implausible. An increase in the price of XRP benefits Ripple more than anyone else. And you're suggesting that the price of XRP would go up but for Ripple's conduct. Essentially, you are saying that we will act in a way that harms us. We are most definitely playing the long game. We are primarily VC financed, and this allows us to use our stockpile of XRP as a strategic weapon rather than a bank account.

Banks using XRP directly is not our short-term strategy, though that may change as we have recently been seeing much more direct interest in XRP from banks. See https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/4029-explaining-xrp/#comment-39074 and https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/5280-valuation-models-xrp-the-digital-currency-vs-ripple-the-company/#comment-50182

See this too: https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/6233-ripple-vs-ethereum-not-the-price-but-the-merits/#comment-59463

Since then, the price of XRP has changed by a factor of 40 or so. It's hard to justify assuming that the level will remain constant. At 27 cents (the price as I write this), that would be about $80 million per month. So long as we're the largest holder of XRP, anything that significantly pushes down on the price of XRP and its prospects for long-term success in terms of value and liquidity is against our interests. Our investors are not looking to make a quick buck.