A few points:
"Others have been promised to early investors in agreements that are not public."
Absolutely false. We very carefully made the decision that no XRP would go to early investors. At the time, the legal landscape was entirely uncertain and people even argued that all cryptos were inherently counterfeit. We absolutely did not want to put any of our early investors at any legal risk and we absolutely would never have considered an agreement like this.
"The XRP had been sold, so Ripple froze the $1 million USD from the sale. This did not require intervention by the courts; Ripple simply used their power to freeze any transactions on the network (!) and since it happened through Bitstamp's Ripple gateway, the funds were on-network."
Absolutely false. Ripple has no such power. Bitstamp froze the funds because there was a legal dispute over their ownership. The same thing would happen at, say, Poloniex if there were a dispute over the ownership of funds there.
With respect to Jed's agreement: Ripple has the primary right to determine what volume is legitimate and what volume is not. As you can probably figure out, Ripple and Jed are not exactly buddies right now and we have historically done everything we possibly could to keep Jed from dumping. I can't imagine us releasing XRP to Jed (remember, Ripple holds it) if we weren't convinced the volume was legitimate. He would have to sue us if that was his plan.
Ripple's litigation with Jed was not about us trying to take anything from him or keep him from making money. In fact, because he was prevented from dumping, the XRP he holds is worth much more than he would have gotten by dumping it. Ripple's litigation posture has always been to protect the market for XRP from insider dumping.
Also, Chris Larsen resigned his position as CEO. He's still a board member and almost as active as ever. In fact, I still report to him, as do two other people.
This article gives a very good explanation as to why a valueless token has clbed to #2 cryptocurrency.
IF YOUR SAYING WORTHLESS YOUR AN IDIOT, IF YOU MEAN PRICELESS YOUR EXACTLY RIGHT. YOU DO UNDERSTAND RIPPLE IS TAPPING A 27 TRILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY RIGHT?
It is still centralized.
What is the "it" you are referring to? Bitcoin -- where three companies in China choose which transactions go in?
I don't have anything that satisfies my trust requirements that the actors in control are not colluding. These are the types of trust assumptions Bitcoin builds on.
With bitcoin, the actors are whoever has the best price on power and the best ASICs. There's no way to know whether or not such actors will collude and, today, they're all controlled by the government of China should it choose to exercise such control. By contrast, Ripple's consensus algorithm is not inherently centralizing in this way. It won't decentralize itself, but it's possible for it to be, and remain, truly decentralized. Ripple is committed to making this happen and has absolutely no incentive not to make it happen.
Well, RCL is a very worthy technology for a mostly decenteralized settlement network, I hope to see better node decentralization in the future. The same does not apply to XRP IMO.
Bitcoin and Ripple are very different projects - I do not find it entirely accurate to compare the projects in this way. I don't want to argue about the hypothetical collusion between Chinese miners; we can do that some other time :).
I disagree with this statement. See, I just don't like taking your word for it.
Nobody knows how to build a perfect system yet. If you're not interested in an objective comparison of Ripple to its "competitors", I'm not sure what other conversation we can have.
I agree; there is a difference however, between the RCL system and the XRP token that follows along. I am all for the tech behind RCL - I am skeptical about the use of XRP when in the end it comes down to 'trust us'. I don't want to trust anyone.
Hate on Bitcoin security all you want. Your a developer? for a pseudo-decentralized consensus ledger.
I don't hate on bitcoin security. I just have a realistic, rather than a naive, view of what it can, and has, accomplished. If you don't realistically see the weaknesses of one scheme, you can't rationally compare it to another.
The problem with bitcoin is that the stakeholders are chosen by external, inherently centralizing, factors. And worse, the stakeholders have a strong incentive to see the transaction fees be high. This is not by any stretch a fatal flaw, and bitcoin would probably have already gotten past it if people were honest about it. It just shows that the naive view that mining is inherently decentralizing and governance will take care of itself through everyone acting selfishly, doesn't always work out as well as you might hope.
I'm still very bullish on bitcoin and expect it to be the dominant cryptocurrency for some time, maybe forever. But it will always have poor censorship resistance due to its reliance on PoW -- unless that reliance changes.
Not to mention that some actors are much more selfish than others.
Thus, you have inherently different levels of selfishness which ultimately lead to the emergence of some dominance hierarchy that creates a disproportionate power differential over time.
As you, I am not saying that this is bad, but I am far more willing to place my trust in a company that has something to lose from fucking up (e.g.: 20 billion Ripple). The stake that the owner's of the company hold are what insures their integrity.
Are we talking about the RCL or XRP... Becasue I have a realistic understanding of the security that Bitcoin offers.
I think there are a lot more to these two statements than you make it seem. I agree with most of what you detail, although with with many small caveats. I think there is a place in this space for many different systems - each offering degrees of 'security', 'decentralization' and such. XRP and BTC will coexist dispite their large differences in centralization.
I agree. I'm a huge supporter of both systems. Since XRP doesn't have to fight the inherently centralizing tendency of PoW, XRP should be more decentralized that bitcoin by the end of the year. And, I suspect, bitcoin will improve its decentralization and censorship resistance as well.
Expect for the fact that XRP is inherently centeralized in the first place or am I just entirely off base here?
To be clear - I am a huge supporter of both systems also.
Are u a part of ripple company?
I am the first employee, hired in November of 2011. I was on Ripple's Board of Directors during the Jed fiasco. I am currently Ripple's Chief Cryptographer.
Wow!! That is impressive glad to know u. I'm big fan of ripple. I like the system n the transaction.. very fast.. u do a good job buddy
@olyup @joelkatz Thanks for post
For interesting read for ripple https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@pps/ripple-things-you-need-to-know-about-ripple
Ripple is the king of shitcoins. If you are into Ripple, you are against the very ideology of blockchain, against free market and freedom in general.
Choose the future you want to build with your wealth wisely or crash with your friends banksters. Natural selection... ;)
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@evolutionnow/how-to-make-millions-on-shitcoins