Some ideas for building the network

[Ryan Fugger]

I received some ideas for building the Ripple network today and
thought I should share them with the group:

----------------------
- Bootstrap the network by giving things away. Go bake some muffins
and just hand them out in the neighborhood. Then set up an account in
ripple for each neighbor. Your credit limit with them is $5 and theirs
with you is $8 because of the muffin. If 100 people just put up 3-5
items for sale/purchase then you have something going.
- Find networks of people that have a lot of 'facetime'. Seriously, I
don't know how your town is socially structured, but the average North
American metropolitan suburb is a complete social basketcase and the
last place you could set up something based on trust. Although I live
in a suburb, my real friends are artists that work in warehouse
studios and live in coop housing in the bohemian parts of town and --
this is important -- meet 10-15 of their circle of 250+ friends
face-to-face every day. Yes, some of them also use Facebook but it's
considered to be a gimmick, not a substitute for social interaction.
- Find situations where people already use ways of mutual credit. Such
as a baby-sitting/car pooling/dinner cooking co-op etc. Or, in some
pubs, if you're a regular, you can get a free beer and the barman will
put a little marker on a beer mat with your name on it as a debt
obligation. In some situations suppliers in the supply chain use
mutual credit. A fridge wholesaler will deliver fridges to a retailer
but only ask for payment three months later, an unofficial way of
giving a loan to a retailer whose economic wellbeing is in the
interest of the wholesaler.
- Move to a 3rd world slum like Dharavi. In Dharavi, 650,000 people
produce an estimated US$ 2000 per person per year, 85% of them have
jobs in the slum itself, working in one of its 15,000 unofficial,
unlicensed factories, and they are desperate for some form of money to
structure their internal economy. At a population density of ~300,000
per square km they can't walk 100 meters without bumping into 1000 of
their closest friends and, with sleeping up to 10 people in a room,
they literally are 'close' enough to each other for a scheme based on
mutual trust.

The bigger picture here is:
- With next to no resources of your own you have to rely on some sort
of environment that fosters an evolutionary, organic growth, where
each little step in growth results in an immediate material benefit
that justifies the next step in growth. And you have to find that
organic environment.
---------------------

Ryan

[Romualdo Grillo]

Many good ideas, I propose to organize the main ones in the wiki.

Many scenarios fall in the category:
A and B meet face to face they make a deal and pay with Ripple.
This is realistic only if they can easily access the web, for example
both have a smart-phone with cheap internet connection.
This excludes the Dharavi scenario , maybe in the future...

Romualdo

[Thomas Hartman]

These are great ideas.

How well can the existing ripplepay website / code, support these scenarios?

I know they are gaps -- can we pinpoint them, figure out the most important ones, and fill them?

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[Ryan Fugger]

On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 5:01 PM, Thomas Hartman
<thomash...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> These are great ideas.
> How well can the existing ripplepay website / code, support these scenarios?
> I know they are gaps -- can we pinpoint them, figure out the most important
> ones, and fill them?

I don't think we're missing anything technically, although we can
certainly improve what we have. I think the ideas are more about
identifying groups of people who can benefit from Ripple and reaching
out to them.

Ryan

[mcn...@ml1.net]

> This is realistic only if they can easily access the web, for example
> both have a smart-phone with cheap internet connection.
> This excludes the Dharavi scenario , maybe in the future...

Huh, how do you know that, back of the envelope calculation or rich
white snobbery? People live in informal settlements, presumably,
because they can't afford the rent or purchase price of the city's
property. 1 month's rent of a flat in Bombay would be ... how much?
Compare that to a $100 Blackberry you can get on eBay. Or compare it
to the price of a sewing machine, bakery oven, plastic recycling
injection mold, taxicab or whatever their business is.

I think the much more critical question whether there are closed-loop
supply chains entirely within the community -- the baker makes bread
for the tailor who supplies the laundry guy's family who washes for
the baker, that kind of thing. Hm, if I had a directed acyclic graph
that provided me with a bird's view of the economy I could run some
simulations ...

[Thomas Hartman]

Poor people increasingly have internet through internet cafes, but handheld internet for the third world is a ways away. Mobile phones, yes. Android phones, not for a while.

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[mcn...@ml1.net]

On Dec 1, 2:51 pm, Thomas Hartman <thomashartm...@googlemail.com>
wrote:

> Poor people increasingly have internet through internet cafes, but handheld
> internet for the third world is a ways away. Mobile phones, yes. Android
> phones, not for a while.

I'm not convinced yet that, at least that while there may not yet be
an existing fleet of smart phones that can be piggy-backed on, that
they aren't something that could be procured on short notice should
the utility of them become apparent.

However it's a completely moot point since -- has has been discussed
on this group many times before -- SMS is all that is needed for a
ripple transaction. Even you agree:
http://groups.google.com/group/rippleusers/tree/browse_frm/thread/58d66d6e74f0daae/f8c2c3bd1be0ccb2?rnum=1&q=m-pesa&_done=%2Fgroup%2Frippleusers%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fthread%2F58d66d6e74f0daae%2Ff8c2c3bd1be0ccb2%3Flnk%3Dgst%26q%3Dm-pesa%26#doc_f8c2c3bd1be0ccb2

Did you actually look into the M-PESA system that your friend
advertised in the above post? I haven't been to Kenya or Afghanistan
as of late but according to what you can Google on the Internets this
is a Pretty Big Thing. I have seen a similar thing in Indonesia where
an abstract currency called pulsa is used to pay for airtime on
prepaid mobile phones. Pulsa are sold to the end-customer through
intermediaries who have contracts with the network provider. Pulsa can
be transferred from phone to phone via some sort of SMS, so anyone can
start a pulsa business with any old mobile phone and an upfront $100
to buy an initial allotment of pulsa that they can then transfer to
their customers via SMS in exchange for cash.

[mcn...@ml1.net]

> I don't think we're missing anything technically, although we can
> certainly improve what we have.

See my other reply to Thomas just now, I think there is definitely
something missing technically, and it's the whole mobile/SMS thing.
Apart from the "Internet for the 3rd world" aspect of mobile I discuss
in my other post, mobile payments are important in the 1st world no
less, mostly because they let you complete the financial transaction
right then right there where the corresponding physical transaction is
happening.

In addition, mobile devices have nifty device-to-device communication
such as Bluetooth or NFC (http://www.pcmag.com/
article2/0,2817,2372746,00.asp) or even Bump (bu.mp). You can plug
into that to e.g. transmit the ripple user ID of the recipient of the
payment, saves you from typing it into the device's tiny keyboard.
Remember credit cards would never have worked if you'd have to type in
the cc# every time.

A quick search shows that mobile has been on the table in this group
at least since 2007, so what's keeping you?

[Thomas Hartman]

I did correspond with saul (cc'd).

As far as I know though, m-pesa didn't get funding or otherwise traction. Happy to be be wrong about this though!

I do think it would be useful for someone to gather the facts on existing sms-based banking systems (for some broad definition of "banking") and summarize for the ripple list.

Yes, I agree the poor increasingly have mobile phones with sms, they just don't have smart phones with the full stack of internet available. Only a matter of time of course, but still. Could be a while.

I did think about doing ripple with sms. Problem is, sms messages are extremely limited in what they can transmit, in particular they are limited to 140 characters. I can imagine some kind of sms banking system, however I have trouble envisioning it being "ripple" style. Happy to be wrong about this as well.

Thomas.

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[Miles Thompson]

Just FYI

I have heard that the protocol support for SMS type protocols is actually better in Africa (and elsewhere?) than in the 'developed world'. A capability that is supported even in very old 'green screen' type mobile phones but usually disabled at the network level in the west for some reason.

The barrage of protocols and different groups is confusing but I believe keywords involved include better support for USSD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Service_Data
than is available in the west.

Which is probably an enabling technology for things like M-Pesa.

miles

[Jeffrey Cliff]

Now that WhatsApp is larger than the SMS neetwork, whoever's still
thinking about making Ripple work over SMS should probably take a look
over in that direction. It's just as centralized of a platform as SMS
was if not more, but with more users it's going to have a larger
network effect for potential 'killer apps' (though the longer we wait
the more chances some other payment app will fill any space Ripple
could have filled)

https://twitter.com/EconMEastAfrica/status/581642642200616960

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/03/messaging-apps?fsrc=scn/tw/te/dc/ed/whatsup

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