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It's not a cryptocurrency in the sense that it is centralized and pre-mined by a central authority who could mine even more whenever it feels like it just like

It's not a cryptocurrency in the sense that it is centralized and pre-mined by a central authority who could mine even more whenever it feels like it just like fiat. Still, it's an improvement on swift if it succeeds but that would not be a "cryptocurrency success" in my opinion.

snuxoll 9y ago
Personally I think it would be considered a success, swift sucks, ACH sucks - Ripple giving us a way to apply a lot of the benefits a decentralized cryptocurrency purports to provide (cheap, fast transactions) would be wonderful. Hell, I would love if I could track payment remits through Ripple someday - stop dealing with the terrible EDI formats our bank dumps to us on a daily basis and just monitor the blockchain. We could have knowledge about payments in real-time AND have a much saner time dealing with them.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  slightly offtopic: But I am currently building a ACH parser and I am shocked the banking system works at all.
base698 9y ago
I think since it uses digital signatures to send the transactions it's a cryptocurrency. It's not a decentralized one sure.
- shepardrtc 9y ago
  It uses a distributed consensus algorithm to validate transactions. Anyone can run a validator node, and there are many companies/institutions out there doing that (Microsoft, MIT, etc).
  - lawlessone 9y ago
    They have no reason to use XRP though, they could just use the technology to launch their own token.
    - shepardrtc 9y ago
      Yes, they can use any currency or crypto with the technology, but there still is a transaction cost. Using XRP will lower that by 30%.
      - lawlessone 9y ago
        >but there still is a transaction cost. And that will be higher if they're using the same token that the general public are speculating on.
  - makomk 9y ago
    The key property of Ripple you have to understand is that the consensus is decided by a set of nodes controlled by the Ripple team and their partners, and those nodes don't care about the opinion of any other node that's not on their whitelist. Everyone else just listens to what they decide the consensus is and follows along. While in theory you could listen to a different set of nodes, it'd be daft to: if those nodes ever come to a different consensus than the default nodes then you're screwed, and who you trust has no effect on who the default nodes listen to or how their consensus is formed.

snuxoll 9y ago

Personally I think it would be considered a success, swift sucks, ACH sucks - Ripple giving us a way to apply a lot of the benefits a decentralized cryptocurrency purports to provide (cheap, fast transactions) would be wonderful. Hell, I would love if I could track payment remits through Ripple someday - stop dealing with the terrible EDI formats our bank dumps to us on a daily basis and just monitor the blockchain. We could have knowledge about payments in real-time AND have a much saner time dealing with them.

paulie_a 9y ago
slightly offtopic: But I am currently building a ACH parser and I am shocked the banking system works at all.

base698 9y ago

I think since it uses digital signatures to send the transactions it's a cryptocurrency. It's not a decentralized one sure.

shepardrtc 9y ago
It uses a distributed consensus algorithm to validate transactions. Anyone can run a validator node, and there are many companies/institutions out there doing that (Microsoft, MIT, etc).
- lawlessone 9y ago
  They have no reason to use XRP though, they could just use the technology to launch their own token.
  - shepardrtc 9y ago
    Yes, they can use any currency or crypto with the technology, but there still is a transaction cost. Using XRP will lower that by 30%.
    - lawlessone 9y ago
      >but there still is a transaction cost. And that will be higher if they're using the same token that the general public are speculating on.
- makomk 9y ago
  The key property of Ripple you have to understand is that the consensus is decided by a set of nodes controlled by the Ripple team and their partners, and those nodes don't care about the opinion of any other node that's not on their whitelist. Everyone else just listens to what they decide the consensus is and follows along. While in theory you could listen to a different set of nodes, it'd be daft to: if those nodes ever come to a different consensus than the default nodes then you're screwed, and who you trust has no effect on who the default nodes listen to or how their consensus is formed.