Re: Ripple

On 11/18/2013 04:08 PM, Evan Schwartz wrote:
> The purpose of having XRP in the network as an asset is twofold: 
> first it helps bridge between different currencies and second it's 
> used for very small transaction fees that help prevent people from 
> spamming the network.

Right, so let's split the requirement of XRP into two parts.

1) As a bridge currency
2) As a network attack prevention mechanism

This email concerns the second item, which is as a network attack
prevention mechanism.

The most concerning downside about XRP that I can see is that there are
a finite number of them (100B XRP, IIRC?). The probability that Ripple
will last more than 30 years as a financial network is slim (not having
done the math, but I'd imagine that ~3B transactions per year is being
conservative wrt. the transaction volume that will happen over the
network if it becomes popular). I do realize that many of these
transactions may be rolled into one to support pseudo-anonymous
transactions, but if Ripple is successful, maybe many would not choose
to roll the transactions into one and may eat to the XRP space at an
accelerated pace?

All that to ask, did the creators of Ripple consider a proof-of-work and
a self-destructive short term currency as the attack prevention mechanism?

That is, whenever you submit a payment to the network, you have to do a
proof-of-work for the network to accept it as a valid transaction. You
can cache these proofs-of-work up to one day in advance (that is,
"cached XRP" once created, vanishes from existence in a day if it goes
unused). This lifts the 100B XRP limit while providing a network attack
mitigation technique.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
http://blog.meritora.com/launch/

Received on Tuesday, 19 November 2013 19:48:40 UTC