Re: Ripple

"Ultimately, I think humanity will settle on "energy" as the unit of
direct exchange since that's the only really stable currency over the
long term."

Absolute naive lurker here... any recommendations for reading about
this? I could be completely misunderstanding what this means.

My first thought is, how could that be? Currency is virtual and can be
exchanged virtually for relatively little energy.

Energy is not (yet) at all stable and is not efficiently exchanged
across significant distance. In fact in the US at least for multiple
reasons, we need to put a lot of energy *into* decentralizing our
energy generation.


On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 11:38 AM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
> On 11/19/2013 03:01 PM, Arthur Britto wrote:
>> 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).
>>
>> The transaction fee is set by network consensus and can be lowered.
>> There should be enough XRP to last for thousands of years. The
>> greatest loss of XRP happens due to lost funds (lost passwords).
>
> Ah, I see. The flaw in my thinking then was assuming that the
> transaction fee was fixed at 1 XRP. A variable amount based on consensus
> makes much more sense, thanks. :)
>
> I can now see that we're talking much longer timeframes for the Ripple
> network than I had originally thought.
>
>> 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?
>>
>> Proof-of-work was considered. In particular, proof-of-work is poor
>> for mobile devices. The current mechanism is exceedingly simple.
>> Adding another currency would be more complicated.
>
> The reason I suggested a short-term self-destructive currency was for
> the mobile device/low-powered use case. You could have your other
> devices (laptops, desktops, etc.) do the proof-of-work and store it w/
> your XRP Ripple account. Your mobile device could then use the pooled
> XRP before they vanished out of existence to do a transfer. I do admit
> that it's a more complicated solution, and it doesn't address the "XRP
> as a unit of direct exchange" and "XRP as a motivation for Ripple Labs
> to make the network successful" use cases.
>
>> Proof-of-work could likely be used in someway. But, it is possible
>> for bad actors to easily generate proof-of-work through hijacking web
>> site client machines to do the work via JavaScript and through
>> botnets.
>
> True, but then the proof-of-work would just be raised to the level that
> it's no longer profitable to operate those botnets. The only thing you
> get to do by operating one of those botnets is to spam the network, and
> I don't quite understand how one could gain financially from that,
> except in really contrived situations like high-frequency trading.
>
> In any case, proof-of-work isn't a replacement for the current XRP
> scheme w/o it also being able to address the "XRP as a unit of direct
> exchange" use case.
>
> Ultimately, I think humanity will settle on "energy" as the unit of
> direct exchange since that's the only really stable currency over the
> long term. Tying a proof-of-work to energy generation or consumption
> seems like a better solution than XRP and Bitcoin mining, I was just
> curious if you guys had gone down that path yet or not.
>
> What I'm hearing is that the creators of Ripple were practical in the
> design of XRP. XRP is a "good enough" solution with some nice
> side-effects for the initial creators, forex traders, and reduction of
> code complexity.
>
> -- 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 Wednesday, 20 November 2013 20:33:18 UTC