Re: Stellar launches - Ripple-like decentralized ledger

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On Wed, 17 Feb 2016 at 8:57 PM, Adrian Hope-Bailie <adrian@hopebailie.com>
wrote:

> Much has changed since August 2014. This is some context from me in my
> personal capacity.
>
> I now work for Ripple for starters, so I have a far better informed
> opinion on the motivations for "self-mining" (funding the development of
> enterprise grade distributed payments software by 80+ world-class engineers
> for starters) and our relationship with our former co-founder and this
> settlement than I did in August 2014. Let's just say that there are two
> sides to every story and leave it at that.
>
> In the year and half since this thread began most observers would have
> noticed Ripple's strategy change to be very focused on cross-border
> settlement and distributed financial technology as opposed to last mile
> payments and financial inclusion which appears to be the primary focus of
> Stellar.
>
> I joined Ripple in April 2015 to focus on open payments standards as the
> company had made the strategic decision that these were crucial to fixing
> global payments.
>
> Many misunderstood this to mean Ripple wants to "make the Ripple protocol
> a global standard" whereas the company had long since acknowledged the
> scalability challenges with trying to standardize on a single ledger (this
> was the beginnings of the research that lead to the development of the
> Interledger Protocol).
>
> Many people are coming to that same conclusion now[1] and my hope is that
> it drives them to support the development of ILP rather than stick with
> their "one ledger to rule them all" mentality but unfortunately the fact
> that ILP was invented by Ripple sometimes counts against it among specific
> communities.
>
> As one of my colleagues once said: "Haters gonna hate." As an employee I
> can confirm that one of the most prized values at Ripple is being
> constructive (as opposed to intentionally disruptive). There are a lot of
> people that believe working with, rather than against, the banks pits
> Ripple as a direct competitor to Bitcoin and other similar technologies but
> that's certainly not how Ripple views the world.
>
> As has already been pointed[2] out elements of the Bitcoin community may
> have their own reasons for not supporting an open inter-operability
> standard but I don't want to be drawn on that. The good news is that often
> a good explanation if ILP will turn even the most ardent anti-Ripple minds
> to the fact that ILP is a very good idea and deserves their support.
>
> The development of ILP and the promotion of it as a global, neutral, open
> standard was Ripple's acknowledgement that our ledger will have a specific
> use case but that the world will ultimately be filled with ledgers (open,
> closed, distributed, centralized, etc) that all fulfill a specific purpose
> and that what is required is a way for these to inter-operate.
>
> In an ideal world there would be representatives from all of the major
> ledger vendors (both commercial and FLOSS, including Stellar) in the ILP CG
> making sure that the protocol evolves in a manner that will ensure their
> ledger is able to easily implement the necessary functions such as escrow
> and crypto-conditions.
>
> The good news is that we have over 100 attendees already registered for
> the ILP workshop next week (40+ in person) from a huge variety of
> organizations including large silicon valley tech companies, global
> payments companies, banks, blockchain/crypto start-ups, central banks,
> universities and more. Ripple engineers are already assisting other
> organizations to develop their own implementations of ILP so that the
> protocol becomes a true standard and not just a specification published by
> a standards body with a single implementer. ILP is gaining traction and we
> (the ILP community) have an opportunity to be part of something truly
> game-changing.
>
> I sometimes compare ILP and Ripple to SPDY and Google. SPDY/3 was adopted
> as the first draft of HTTP2 with minor changes but not without some
> push-back purely based on the fact that it was developed by Google
> initially who had benefited from having control over a browser and a
> significant server population.
>
> I think what many struggle to reconcile is why a commercial,
> venture-backed entity like Ripple would be promoting something that could
> ultimately be used by its competition. I mean, if ILP is an open standard
> what's stopping other people implementing it and competing with Ripple's
> commercial products? You could ask the same of the browser vendors at the
> W3C. They are all co-operating on the development of open standards because
> they believe they can win customers on their ability to execute. A rising
> tide raises all ships.
>
> Personally, I have been a long time believer in open standards as an
> enabler of better inter-operability in payments. That's why I started
> OpenPayee and subsequently joined the Web Payments CG many years ago.
>
> It was sheer luck that I crossed paths with Ripple last April just when
> they were looking for someone to advocate for open payments standards and
> they have employed me to do this ever since.
>
> [1]
> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600781/technical-roadblock-might-shatter-bitcoin-dreams/
> [2] http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-bad-reputation-payments-standards-w3c/
>
> On 16 February 2016 at 21:28, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 1 August 2014 at 16:19, Adrian Hope-Bailie <adrian@hopebailie.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> My theory is that Ripple have realised that they will not get wide
>>> spread support given that their intermediary currency is mostly held by
>>> themselves.
>>> i.e. They invented a network that will make them rich if everyone starts
>>> to use it.
>>>
>>> My hope is that the change of heart is because those involved in Stellar
>>> genuinely want to use the technology for good.
>>>
>>> By the way they don't hide the fact that they have history with Ripple
>>> (see Jed McCaleb's entry on the team page) or their indirect support of
>>> Ripple (see the Bitcoin Program under their mandate).
>>>
>>
>> For those that have been following this work, there has been a new
>> development together with an announcement on Jed's blog
>>
>> http://jedmccaleb.com/blog/my-settlement-victory-with-ripple/
>>
>>
>>>
>>> The Bitcoin program is very interesting reading. (
>>> https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Bitcoin_program)
>>> As I understand it they are encouraging people to buy Bitcoin over the
>>> next 6 months and donate their XRP to charities for the best return on
>>> whatever XRP they had on 24 May.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 31 July 2014 21:51, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 07/31/2014 03:11 PM, John Packel wrote:
>>>> > Not a fork but a new project/company (non-profit, apparently). McCaleb
>>>> > was a founder of Ripple's precursor and then left after a dispute with
>>>> > the other founders. Several press stories about it last year.
>>>>
>>>> If it's not a fork, then why are all the main contributors to Ripple the
>>>> main contributors to Stellar? Look at the frequency and magnitude of
>>>> commits by author between stellard and rippled:
>>>>
>>>> https://github.com/stellar/stellard/graphs/contributors
>>>> https://github.com/ripple/rippled/graphs/contributors
>>>>
>>>> I get that the code base is now managed by a non-profit and that the
>>>> disbursement model is different than Ripple, but other than that, it
>>>> looks like it's basically the Ripple protocol (even most of the codebase
>>>> is shared).
>>>>
>>>> >From where I sit, and this is just conjecture again, it looks like Jed
>>>> (or this new organization) is trying to resolve the long-standing
>>>> "private entities own a significant amount of the pre-mined currency"
>>>> criticism.
>>>>
>>>> -- manu
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
>>>> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
>>>> blog: High-Stakes Credentials and Web Login
>>>> http://manu.sporny.org/2014/identity-credentials/
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>