6 ms·

Ripple is officially open source

92 points by npongratz 13y ago

npongratz 13y ago
Code repo here: https://github.com/ripple/rippled/ https://github.com/ripple/rippled/ Bitcoin Magazine writes about the announcement here: http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7275/ripple-is-officially-open-source/ http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7275/ripple-is-officially-open-so...
neur0mancer 13y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_monetary_system
- nullc 13y ago
  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.
  - SJoelKatz 13y ago
    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.
lnanek2 13y ago
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 about it myself.
- weland 13y ago
  > 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. Nope, it's about a program which satisfies a legitimate technological need. Sorry you were disappointed.
- nanexcool 13y ago
  Cared enough to comment that you don't care, right?
- ionwake 13y ago
  http://iruntheinternet.com/lulzdump/images/gifs/waynes-world-get-a-load-of-this-guy-cam-pointing-cut-and-suck-1369254775m1.gif http://iruntheinternet.com/lulzdump/images/gifs/waynes-world...
Sidnicious 13y ago
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 transaction fees to the network), you can also send ”IOUs“ — units of value issued by some third party. So, some party might take USD (could be your bank, or a third party like PayPal or Stripe), Bitcoin (could be your favorite Bitcoin exchange), Euros, etc., hold them, and issue IOU to your Ripple wallet. So you give $100 USD to PayPal, they send an IOU worth $100 PayPal USD to your Ripple wallet (signed by them and stored in the Ripple blockchain). You can send all/part of that PayPal-issued $100 to anyone else via Ripple, just like you'd send XRP. Whoever wants to can redeem them for USD at PayPal — you just deposit it into a special Ripple address that PayPal gives you and, boom, the money shows up in your PayPal account (because PayPal was holding it all along). Here's where it gets even cooler. The Ripple protocol includes an “order book” where you can trade currencies. So, if I'm buying something online and use Euros and the company I'm paying uses USD, my Ripple client could automatically get an IOU for x Deutsche Bank EUR (from my bank), trade it on the Ripple network at the current exchange rate for y Bank of America USD (the seller's bank), and then pay them via Ripple in USD that they can deposit straight into their bank account! Eventually most transactions might be done in straight XRP so we save on transaction fees (from trading). That's the plan anyway, as I understand it. Ripple ain't there yet. But, there are companies out there right now that issue IOUs in a few currencies and are trusted enough that people might accept them for payment. So I’m pretty excited.
- gwern 13y ago
  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?
  - nowarninglabel 13y ago
    Legitimate businesses. We had a great conversation the other day at this Virtual Currency Talk: http://cr.perkinscoie.com/rff/ff00120bf2ac2fdfe524c63378439ae3cd97be08 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.
teeja 13y ago
Ah, darnit. I thought you meant the wine.
- teeja 13y ago
  Sorry, I forgot this isn't really a forum full of hackers. Just news about hackers. I'll remember not to comment without wearing my tie.
rxl 13y ago
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/ 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.
- SJoelKatz 13y ago
  Don't confuse the Ripple payment network with ripples, its native currency. You can use the payment network to transact in currencies like dollars and Euros.
  - nullc 13y ago
    > Don't confuse the Ripple payment network with ripples, its native currency Funny, you were arguing that XRP wasn't a currency not so long ago. It looks like from the code that all the orderbooks are XRP<>other. Seems like you can't opt out of trading XRP for your other stuff... so the fact that you and the other opencoin people own zillions of XRP is pretty material.
    - SJoelKatz 13y ago
      You can have an order book between any two assets. The pathfinding engine will prefer whatever path is cheapest, assuming it's not too long for it to find. For example, the USD/Bitstamp <-> BTC/Bitstamp order book is quite popular. This is important because the price of XRP is not very stable now. If you wanted to keep offers up for USD to EUR, it would be very irritating if you had to pull down and replace a USD->XRP and XRP->EUR offer every time the price of XRP changed (to prevent one order from being too good and the other too bad). Also, if you couldn't place a USD->EUR offer, what would you do if you really wanted to trade USD for EUR? You can't place an XRP->EUR offer because you don't have the XRP yet. And if you place a USD->XRP offer, you wind up with XRP that you didn't want. In the future, if the price of XRP becomes more stable, order books to and from XRP may become more popular. But still people who just don't want XRP will place offers on order books directly between assets other than XRP. Whether or not XRP is a currency is really an arbitrary thing. I just want people to understand what XRP is and what its role in Ripple is. If they think that makes it a currency, then fine. If they think it doesn't, also fine.
dllthomas 13y ago
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.
- simlevesque 13y ago
  Will you do something about it ? Personally, thinking about the possibilities of the network and the protocol makes me eager to develop software that use it. I feel like someday everybody will have a ripple account but they won't know it. Ripple is interesting because it is transparent and fast enough to enable developpers to create the future of everything around money.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    I'm not sure exactly what you're asking.
glitch003 13y ago
When will the creators of Ripple explain why they've premined all the Ripples and kept most of them for themselves?
- thisiswrong 13y ago
  I have been following the progression of Ripple for some time. But I also get the feeling that Ripple is a huge pyramid scheme. To quote the 2 main criticisms from Wikipedia: 1. Ripple Labs will hold half of all the XRP in existence, in the hope that they will gain value 2. Ripple Labs have repeatedly made claims that they would give away 50 billion Ripples (XRP), but have not done so. So rather than reward early adopters of the currently (with future deflation), like Bitcoin did, Ripple Labs will hold onto 80 billion XRP in hope that its value will increase. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_monetary_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_monetary_system
  - SJoelKatz 13y ago
    Either the value of the currency will increase or it won't. If it won't increase, then Ripple Labs will have no reward. If it will increase, then early adopters who buy and hold XRP will be rewarded. Say Ripple Labs currently holds a chunk of XRP worth $X. Say by January, it goes up to $Y. Then Ripple Labs will turn $X into $Y between now and January. Except an early adopter who bought $X worth of XRP today would also turn $5X into $Y over that same time frame. The cost to buy Bitcoins is usually pretty close to the cost to mine them, so Bitcoin early adopters didn't get their Bitcoins for free either. Using mining to reward early adopters has proven to be economically infeasible. The cost and reward of mining will adjust, as mining becomes profitable or unprofitable, such that mining will not generally be more rewarding than anything else people might do. Bitcoin took a lot of criticism for rewarding early adopters. So this is really a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of thing.
- SJoelKatz 13y ago
  The concept of "premined" doesn't really apply to a scheme that has no mining. For currencies that use proof of work to solve the double spend problem, mining is a good way to reward miners for providing the useful service of ensuring sufficient proof of work to secure the currency and make it useful before it's possible to do so with transaction fees. Because Ripple has no need for mining, implementing mining to distribute the currency would basically just be paying people to waste electricity. It would make no sense, and an actual valuable asset (electricity) would be destroyed in the process. Bitcoin has demonstrated that mining at a significant profit quickly becomes impossible. So long as mining is particularly profitable, more people will do it. More and more resources compete for ever smaller shares of the pie. Where it secures the currency and the transactions, as it does in Bitcoin, it's an essential service that is worth paying for. Where it is not needed for that purpose, it's a colossal waste of a significant fraction of the value that Bitcoin creates.

92 points by npongratz 13y ago

Code repo here: https://github.com/ripple/rippled/ https://github.com/ripple/rippled/ Bitcoin Magazine writes about the announcement here: http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7275/ripple-is-officially-open-source/ http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7275/ripple-is-officially-open-so...

neur0mancer 13y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_monetary_system

nullc 13y ago
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.
- SJoelKatz 13y ago
  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.

lnanek2 13y ago

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 about it myself.

weland 13y ago
> 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. Nope, it's about a program which satisfies a legitimate technological need. Sorry you were disappointed.
nanexcool 13y ago
Cared enough to comment that you don't care, right?
ionwake 13y ago
http://iruntheinternet.com/lulzdump/images/gifs/waynes-world-get-a-load-of-this-guy-cam-pointing-cut-and-suck-1369254775m1.gif http://iruntheinternet.com/lulzdump/images/gifs/waynes-world...

Sidnicious 13y ago

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 transaction fees to the network), you can also send ”IOUs“ — units of value issued by some third party. So, some party might take USD (could be your bank, or a third party like PayPal or Stripe), Bitcoin (could be your favorite Bitcoin exchange), Euros, etc., hold them, and issue IOU to your Ripple wallet. So you give $100 USD to PayPal, they send an IOU worth $100 PayPal USD to your Ripple wallet (signed by them and stored in the Ripple blockchain). You can send all/part of that PayPal-issued $100 to anyone else via Ripple, just like you'd send XRP. Whoever wants to can redeem them for USD at PayPal — you just deposit it into a special Ripple address that PayPal gives you and, boom, the money shows up in your PayPal account (because PayPal was holding it all along). Here's where it gets even cooler. The Ripple protocol includes an “order book” where you can trade currencies. So, if I'm buying something online and use Euros and the company I'm paying uses USD, my Ripple client could automatically get an IOU for x Deutsche Bank EUR (from my bank), trade it on the Ripple network at the current exchange rate for y Bank of America USD (the seller's bank), and then pay them via Ripple in USD that they can deposit straight into their bank account! Eventually most transactions might be done in straight XRP so we save on transaction fees (from trading). That's the plan anyway, as I understand it. Ripple ain't there yet. But, there are companies out there right now that issue IOUs in a few currencies and are trusted enough that people might accept them for payment. So I’m pretty excited.

gwern 13y ago
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?
- nowarninglabel 13y ago
  Legitimate businesses. We had a great conversation the other day at this Virtual Currency Talk: http://cr.perkinscoie.com/rff/ff00120bf2ac2fdfe524c63378439ae3cd97be08 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.

teeja 13y ago

Ah, darnit. I thought you meant the wine.

teeja 13y ago
Sorry, I forgot this isn't really a forum full of hackers. Just news about hackers. I'll remember not to comment without wearing my tie.

rxl 13y ago

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/ 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.

SJoelKatz 13y ago
Don't confuse the Ripple payment network with ripples, its native currency. You can use the payment network to transact in currencies like dollars and Euros.
- nullc 13y ago
  > Don't confuse the Ripple payment network with ripples, its native currency Funny, you were arguing that XRP wasn't a currency not so long ago. It looks like from the code that all the orderbooks are XRP<>other. Seems like you can't opt out of trading XRP for your other stuff... so the fact that you and the other opencoin people own zillions of XRP is pretty material.
  - SJoelKatz 13y ago
    You can have an order book between any two assets. The pathfinding engine will prefer whatever path is cheapest, assuming it's not too long for it to find. For example, the USD/Bitstamp <-> BTC/Bitstamp order book is quite popular. This is important because the price of XRP is not very stable now. If you wanted to keep offers up for USD to EUR, it would be very irritating if you had to pull down and replace a USD->XRP and XRP->EUR offer every time the price of XRP changed (to prevent one order from being too good and the other too bad). Also, if you couldn't place a USD->EUR offer, what would you do if you really wanted to trade USD for EUR? You can't place an XRP->EUR offer because you don't have the XRP yet. And if you place a USD->XRP offer, you wind up with XRP that you didn't want. In the future, if the price of XRP becomes more stable, order books to and from XRP may become more popular. But still people who just don't want XRP will place offers on order books directly between assets other than XRP. Whether or not XRP is a currency is really an arbitrary thing. I just want people to understand what XRP is and what its role in Ripple is. If they think that makes it a currency, then fine. If they think it doesn't, also fine.

dllthomas 13y ago

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.

simlevesque 13y ago
Will you do something about it ? Personally, thinking about the possibilities of the network and the protocol makes me eager to develop software that use it. I feel like someday everybody will have a ripple account but they won't know it. Ripple is interesting because it is transparent and fast enough to enable developpers to create the future of everything around money.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  I'm not sure exactly what you're asking.

glitch003 13y ago

When will the creators of Ripple explain why they've premined all the Ripples and kept most of them for themselves?

thisiswrong 13y ago
I have been following the progression of Ripple for some time. But I also get the feeling that Ripple is a huge pyramid scheme. To quote the 2 main criticisms from Wikipedia: 1. Ripple Labs will hold half of all the XRP in existence, in the hope that they will gain value 2. Ripple Labs have repeatedly made claims that they would give away 50 billion Ripples (XRP), but have not done so. So rather than reward early adopters of the currently (with future deflation), like Bitcoin did, Ripple Labs will hold onto 80 billion XRP in hope that its value will increase. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_monetary_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_monetary_system
- SJoelKatz 13y ago
  Either the value of the currency will increase or it won't. If it won't increase, then Ripple Labs will have no reward. If it will increase, then early adopters who buy and hold XRP will be rewarded. Say Ripple Labs currently holds a chunk of XRP worth $X. Say by January, it goes up to $Y. Then Ripple Labs will turn $X into $Y between now and January. Except an early adopter who bought $X worth of XRP today would also turn $5X into $Y over that same time frame. The cost to buy Bitcoins is usually pretty close to the cost to mine them, so Bitcoin early adopters didn't get their Bitcoins for free either. Using mining to reward early adopters has proven to be economically infeasible. The cost and reward of mining will adjust, as mining becomes profitable or unprofitable, such that mining will not generally be more rewarding than anything else people might do. Bitcoin took a lot of criticism for rewarding early adopters. So this is really a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of thing.
SJoelKatz 13y ago
The concept of "premined" doesn't really apply to a scheme that has no mining. For currencies that use proof of work to solve the double spend problem, mining is a good way to reward miners for providing the useful service of ensuring sufficient proof of work to secure the currency and make it useful before it's possible to do so with transaction fees. Because Ripple has no need for mining, implementing mining to distribute the currency would basically just be paying people to waste electricity. It would make no sense, and an actual valuable asset (electricity) would be destroyed in the process. Bitcoin has demonstrated that mining at a significant profit quickly becomes impossible. So long as mining is particularly profitable, more people will do it. More and more resources compete for ever smaller shares of the pie. Where it secures the currency and the transactions, as it does in Bitcoin, it's an essential service that is worth paying for. Where it is not needed for that purpose, it's a colossal waste of a significant fraction of the value that Bitcoin creates.