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Ripple is officially open source

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Re: Ripple is officially open source

#11

Post by rxl »

Ripple has several huge problems that will prevent it from gaining as much steam as other cryptocurrencies.

First, OpenCoin pre-mined the XRP's so they could hack the cryptocurrency trend and make tons of money if their currency took off.

Second, Ripple is NOT a decentralized currency, but in fact a "distributed" currency, which is actually a much bigger deal than you might think. This means it has a single point of failure, can be easily abused by the creators, and is extremely vulnerable to intervention by governments and other big players.

(You can read all about it here: http://ripplescam.org/)

Bottom line: the strength of a currency depends almost entirely on the trust in that currency, and I have no reason whatsoever to place trust in ripples. It's a wiser move to put your money in a non-scam currency, like Bitcoin or Litecoin.

Re: Ripple is officially open source

#12

Post by nullc »

neur0mancer wrote: post #3

If you are wondering "what is Ripple?" Wikipedia's definition[1] is the best: "Ripple is an open-source protocol for a payment network. In its developed form, the Ripple network is intended to be a peer-to-peer distributed social network service with a monetary honour system based on trust that already exists between people in real-world social networks" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_monetary_system

Careful what you read about ripple. A yearish ago some business people bought the ripple name from the academic who was working on it, and built something almost but not quite completely different under the same name. Anything written about the old system probably doesn't apply to the new one.

Re: Ripple is officially open source

#13

Post by turingbook »

Sidnicious wrote: post #5

For anyone who doesn't grok Ripple, I looked into it a bunch a while back. (Feel free to correct me on any of this.) The Ripple network works a lot like the Bitcoin network: units of value can be stored at a wallet address, and whoever owns the wallet's private key can send funds to other wallets. The big difference is that while Ripple does have its own, internal currency (XRP, which right now is used mainly to pay…

I think it is worthy noting that one of founders is Jed McCaleb, the original developer of ed2k and MtGox.

Re: Ripple is officially open source

#14

Post by SJoelKatz »

nullc wrote: post #9
Sidnicious wrote: post #5

For anyone who doesn't grok Ripple, I looked into it a bunch a while back. (Feel free to correct me on any of this.) The Ripple network works a lot like the Bitcoin network: units of value can be stored at a wallet address, and whoever owns the wallet's private key can send funds to other wallets. The big difference is that while Ripple does have its own, internal currency (XRP, which right now is used mainly to pay…

>The Ripple network works a lot like the Bitcoin network It doesn't work like the Bitcoin network at all. Except that its computer software for handling transactions. Bitcoin is based on a primarily zero trust model, where every node validates all the data completely and cannot be tricked— except for transaction ordering which (due to relativity) can't be evaluated like that, and so Bitcoin uses a computational lotte…

Each Ripple server does validate all the data completely and cannot be tricked. Ripple uses consensus to establish transaction ordering.

Ripple does have only a small number of server nodes today, but that should be growing over time. A node cannot freely set balances. Each node signs each ledger and any change to a ledger entry (such as a balance) must be accompanied by a signed transaction justifying that change or other nodes will reject it.

Nodes are in fact called "validators" and they validate each ledger to ensure that any changes are justified by transactions. They sign these ledgers every few seconds.

As for the peering needing to be centrally controlled, I assume you're referring to each node's set of validators. While that does need to be sanely managed, it doesn't need to be centrally controlled. A number of organizations can publish lists of validators they believe to be reliable. The algorithm is very tolerant of things like minimal overlap or bad apples. Every honest node wants to agree with every other honest node, and dishonesty is impossible to hide, so the problem is not that difficult.

(I'm one of the architects of the Ripple network.)

Re: Ripple is officially open source

#15

Post by SJoelKatz »

nullc wrote: post #12
neur0mancer wrote: post #3

If you are wondering "what is Ripple?" Wikipedia's definition[1] is the best: "Ripple is an open-source protocol for a payment network. In its developed form, the Ripple network is intended to be a peer-to-peer distributed social network service with a monetary honour system based on trust that already exists between people in real-world social networks" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_monetary_system

Careful what you read about ripple. A yearish ago some business people bought the ripple name from the academic who was working on it, and built something almost but not quite completely different under the same name. Anything written about the old system probably doesn't apply to the new one.

That description kind of fits both classic Ripple and the new Ripple, but it does fit classic Ripple better. The new Ripple does fully support social/community credit. But it's targeted more, at least for the near future, at acting as a payment system.

Re: Ripple is officially open source

#16

Post by dllthomas »

I love the very basic premise of ripple - route payment in trust networks, P2P. I am more skeptical of the particular implementation, and especially the "pre-mined currency needed for transactions" bit, but after some thought and discussion don't think it's as big a problem as I worried (though I'm still not quite confident in that). In any event, open sourcing the server software is a good thing.

Re: Ripple is officially open source

#17

Post by rxl »

SJoelKatz wrote: post #14
nullc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The Ripple network works a lot like the Bitcoin network It doesn't work like the Bitcoin network at all. Except that its computer software for handling transactions. Bitcoin is based on a primarily zero trust model, where every node validates all the data completely and cannot be tricked— except for transaction ordering which (due to relativity) can't be evaluated like that, and so Bitcoin uses a computational lotte…

Each Ripple server does validate all the data completely and cannot be tricked. Ripple uses consensus to establish transaction ordering. Ripple does have only a small number of server nodes today, but that should be growing over time. A node cannot freely set balances. Each node signs each ledger and any change to a ledger entry (such as a balance) must be accompanied by a signed transaction justifying that change or…

First, let me quote http://ripplescam.org/:

  But wait – you can become your own validator! [...]
  The consensus system ensures there is only one ledger – the most accepted one.
  If you run your own validator, you must connect with OpenCoin Inc servers, or you
  will be building a different ledger. In practice, it is not possible to
  “dethrone” OpenCoin Inc as you have to co-operate with OpenCoin Inc.
Second, I'll point out that while minimizing the number of validators may be attractive, it also makes the currency much more vulnerable to top-down control, via governments, corporations, etc.

Last, if you're reading this, I'd suggest that you read up a bit about Ripple on Bitcoin Forum before you make conclusions about the currency - there are a lot of interesting discussions about its viability (like this one: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=146964.0).

Re: Ripple is officially open source

#18

Post by nowarninglabel »

gwern wrote: post #8
Sidnicious wrote: post #5

For anyone who doesn't grok Ripple, I looked into it a bunch a while back. (Feel free to correct me on any of this.) The Ripple network works a lot like the Bitcoin network: units of value can be stored at a wallet address, and whoever owns the wallet's private key can send funds to other wallets. The big difference is that while Ripple does have its own, internal currency (XRP, which right now is used mainly to pay…

It is cool, but the irony is, the IOU stuff will soon be mimicked by Bitcoin with 'colored coins', and Ripple will lose the last major feature it had over Bitcoin. And at that point - who wants a pre-mined backdoored e-currency which can't be made anonymous or used places like Silk Road?

Legitimate businesses. We had a great conversation the other day at this Virtual Currency Talk: http://cr.perkinscoie.com/rff/ff00120bf2ac2fdfe524c63378439a... about the reputational risk of Bitcoin. There is a need to legimatize Bitcoin with governments or use a virtual currency that is able to establish legitimacy, so that large businesses which only have a marginal gain from incorporating Bitcoin will actually have an incentive to do so.

Furthermore, there was a very strong consensus among all parties, most especially by Patrick Murck (President, Bitcoin Foundation) that Bitcoin is not an anonymous or "private" currency, and that many people who believe it can be made anonymous are most likely in store for a rude awakening when government scrutiny and regulation catches up with the pace of the technology.

Re: Ripple is officially open source

#19

Post by ionwake »

lnanek2 wrote: post #4

Thought this was going to be about the Ripple emulator used for making Chrome act like a device while you are working on PhoneGap apps. I think that was open source anyway, but it is always way behind the current PhoneGap version and buggy, so it would have been nice if it merged with PhoneGap, excuse me, Cordova or whatever, and was going to be better supported... Never heard of this Ripple and don't care anything a…

http://iruntheinternet.com/lulzdump/images/gifs/waynes-world...

Re: Ripple is officially open source

#20

Post by SJoelKatz »

rxl wrote: post #17
SJoelKatz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each Ripple server does validate all the data completely and cannot be tricked. Ripple uses consensus to establish transaction ordering. Ripple does have only a small number of server nodes today, but that should be growing over time. A node cannot freely set balances. Each node signs each ledger and any change to a ledger entry (such as a balance) must be accompanied by a signed transaction justifying that change or…

First, let me quote http://ripplescam.org/ : But wait – you can become your own validator! [...] The consensus system ensures there is only one ledger – the most accepted one. If you run your own validator, you must connect with OpenCoin Inc servers, or you will be building a different ledger. In practice, it is not possible to “dethrone” OpenCoin Inc as you have to co-operate with OpenCoin Inc. Second, I'll point ou…

The quote from ripplescam.org just says what we all know, we all have to agree on a blockchain (in the case of Bitcoin) or a ledger (in the case of Ripple) or the system breaks. Part of it is false though, you can connect to servers not run by us. So long as they're also trying to agree with us (or those who are trying to agree with us), it will work. Ripple uses a distributed agreement protocol to order transactions. You have to try to agree with other people who are trying to agree. The group of people trying to agree that includes us defines the dominant transaction ordering (at the moment). But this is equally true of anyone else in the group we are in. It's the group that matters.

I don't see why minimizing the number of validators is attractive. We want as many as possible precisely because that ensures that administrative control can't be seized. It's just like mining in Bitcoin -- you want it distributed into the hands of as many people as possible as evenly as possible. We are working on making this happen now. Obviously, open sourcing the server was a necessary stop to broadening the validators.

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