Parallel Projects
Adam Harper
As far as I can tell, ripple protocol is indeed the money system of
the future. I have been looking for it and it's brothers and sisters
for quite some time.
I would like to try to describe what I see as the "family" of
solutions of which ripple is (or will be) a part. I am doing this in
an attempt to either locate and therefore connect) or create the other
family members.
This is not something easy for my mind to label so if anyone knows
what I'm talking about, please put it in better words.
I will loosely describe the common characteristics of this family of
solutions:
1. Open Protocol
2. Absence of any central regulating authority
3. Addresses a problem of monopoly
4. Addresses the problem of information overload due to infinite
choice leading to arbitrary/confused decisions
5. Transference of some form of trust without a single leap of faith
as all transfers are peer to peer.
Maybe I should elaborate on number 4. If you want to keep your money
safe or invest it, there are very many banking services begging you to
use them. How can one possibly make an informed decision? Ripple
addresses this problem, since any service using the ripple protocol
will basically offer the same service, then it is only a matter of
choosing (if necessary) between the people you know and trust.
The purpose of ripple (as I see it) is to transfer value via
decentralised (anarchist) principles.
The only other "family members" I have been able to identify
conceptually (although I have not been able to locate as healthy a
project as this one) so far are for the transfer of information, and
for the transfer of force.
The closest description of the "information" equivalent of ripple I
have found is http://www.cbloom.com/NoT.html although I disagree with
the author on quite a few points.
Just as ripple only allows transfers between (indirectly) connected
and trusting users, so would Charles Bloom's Network of Trust, filter
out all content that was not indirectly trusted. When you do a search
and it comes up with a site that is so completely useless that you
don't even want it to be connected to YOUR internet, you flag it, and
everyone in your network blocks the creator of that website or
content. The guy can't just make a new email address because the
people who blocked him would have been either his friends or their
friends. Imagine a clean and tidy personal internet...
Anyone able to actually make that project happen, or know where it is
already happening?
The other sibling, for the transfer of force is to address the current
monopoly our governments have over the use of violence. Basically,
this sibling seeks to demonopolise what we might call "Government".
Not by asking the government to take on a new model, but simply by
starting to use the new model until it simply out-competes the current
model.
I see information as the oldest member of the family (I hope you have
been able to follow the family analogy). Communication came before
trade and politics (I'm guessing) so the reason why ripple is in
"chicken and egg" is because it's parents haven't been born yet.
If we had a functioning communication web that filtered information
depending on who connected you to it, then telling everyone "ripple is
better than banks, lets all use it now" would actually have an
immediate effect.
Thomas Hartman
This is a hard problem.
Ryan, myself, jevenij solov and mats eriksson worked together for
many weeks in a donated house trying to "pierce" the barriers to entry
for something like ripple to go viral, and didn't have much success.
I encourage you to use your excitement and energy to think things
through, but focus on concrete product ideas, markets, and even
interfaces where ripple could be applied today (or not too distant
future). There's something about this space that seems to bog even the
most intrepid in a turing tarpit.
Imagine yourself using ripple... imagine talking to people you know,
and getting them to use it. Imagine enough people doing this that
ripple can sustain itself from transaction costs, or if not the
nonprofit infrastructure that would be required. Figure $250,000 for a
version 1 prototype that would interface with facebook, mint, etc.
Somewhere around here is where we got stuck.
If you can use your brain to unstick the project, I guarantee you,
you will make a lot of people a lot of dough :)
cheers :)
thomas.
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Adam Harper
With your current approach it seems clear to me that these barriers
cannot be overcome without resorting to "product" mentality which is
entrely contrary to the spirit of the project.
I'm sorry, I don't believe in hard work.
I do not think that ripple can be applied today. I think that the
"terrain" is unfavorable. My proposal is to alter the terrain. My
proposal is to work on an entirely different project that has nothing
to do with money but that involves people in an ever expanding network
of trust. Once the network has propogated sufficiently, ripple will
spread through it like a, well, a ripple.
OK, I'll try to put it another way. You (your little group trying to
make ripple work) and me are similar in thinking otherwise we would
not both be discussing how to make ripple work. There are lots of
people like us, all over the world. They are often in groups, but
those groups are not connected to each other, so each group has to
come up with the same ideas by themselves. Also, the solutions those
groups have, are not compatible, not called the same thing as the
solutions other groups come up with. The only way people have of
sharing with other groups is by viewing the entire internet. I guess I
am talking about social bookmarking, except the problem with it is
that you are connected to the choices of others or not connected to
them depending on whether they use the same site as you, rather than
how well connected to you they are.
It's the friend to friend network that needs to be established. It's
such a simple idea, why doesn't it exist? Why is there no function
anywhere on the internet in which I can search for other people who
are indirectly linked to me by a chain of friend's friends, who have
"alternative currency" listed as one of their interests. If there is
such a service, please point me in the right direction. If not, then
how difficult would it be to make such an open protocol. Surely some
of its operation would be quite similar to ripple.
I wish I was a programmer and could just read through the code for
ripple and take bits out and make what I mean and show you.
>
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Thomas Hartman
"alternative currency" listed as one of their interests."
http://openmoney.ning.com/
even this mailing list.
problem is "alternative currency" isn't a very common hobby
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cjen...@googlemail.com
How goes it?
For Adam's benefit, and as we have previously discussed, I see Ripple
as a methodology for clearing and settlement of obligations rather
than a currency.
Ripple is agnostic in terms of the nature of the "money's worth' or
currency object used for settlement of the obligations, and also
agnostic in terms of the "Value standard" or unit of account eg $, £,
€ or 10 kilo watt hour energy units.
In particular Ripple clearing and settlement requires a framework of
trust, which typically resides in a community of interest, but as
Comrade Stalin put it the real world requirement is that people
typically "Trust....but Validate".
My proposal for this trust framework is what I call a Guarantee
Society.
This presentation went down well in Norway this summer, and gives a
holistic view.
http://www.slideshare.net/ChrisJCook/money-30
Best Regards
Chris Cook
On Dec 9, 6:31 pm, Thomas Hartman <thomashartm...@googlemail.com>
wrote:
Adam Harper
who (a) are consciously aware that they are interested in alternative
currency and (b) have chosen this particular website to state their
preference on.
I have a way to illustrate my suggestion in more concrete terms.
Why can't you just send an email to everyone in the world saying
"Start using ripple"? I think if you could do that then it would
probably work. The reason you can't do that is because nobody
publishes their email address on any accessible data base. The reason
they don't is because of spam. And if by chance you did manage to get
a message into their inbox, they would treat it as spam anyway.
My proposed solution is the information equivalent of ripple. A new
kind of peer to peer email system where you simply can't receive
messages from anyone who you are not connected to, and for every
message you recieve, you can see the route it has taken. Surely such a
simple protocol would be very easy to code.
The conventional spam filter system does not allow you to specify
"allow emails from people who think that I will want to know what they
have to say".
Guys, are you really not seeing what I'm getting at? Should I just
stop posting?
Adam Harper
the essence of ripple quite well. It's beautiful. Quite right it's not
a currency. It is as undefined as possible. The units are just a way
of measuring "value" since "value" does not naturally have units.
On 10 Dec, 00:05, "cjensc...@googlemail.com"
Kevin Smith
suggest. I confess that I'm not into facebook or myspace, but sites like
LinkedIn and Orkut certainly have the concept of friends-of-friends.
The big problem that immediately concerns me with your proposal is that
you seem to be asking me to trust that anyone in my immediate circle of
friends should be allowed to send email to everyone else in my immediate
circle. And beyond, where a message sent by a friend-of-a-friend would
pass through me, not just to my friends but to their friends as well.
Especially when you consider how many Windows computers are compromised,
that sounds like it would take us right back into a world of spam.
Frankly, I don't trust the judgment of all of my friends, let alone
their friends. A ripple debt is actually less of a concern for me,
because I can coerce my immediate friend to step up and pay back the
obligation. With email, by the time I see that there is a problem, my
friends have already been annoyed by spam.
One of the reasons that spam is such a problem in our conventional email
world is because it allows you to receive email from "unknown" people.
That's an intentional feature, because someone I went to school with
might want to get a hold of me. Or one of my friends might want to send
me email from an account they don't normally use (maybe their primary
service is down).
If you consider that to be a "bug" and not a "feature", there are
already "whitelist" email filters available that allow you to restrict
incoming email to only messages originated by people you have
pre-approved. You seem to be asking for implicit whitelisting of people
who have been whitelisted by your whitelisted "friends", but that leads
to the problems I mentioned above.
So with all of that in mind, can you describe how your vision would
overcome these issues? Are you imagining something more like email, or a
mailing list/newsgroup, or instant message, or web browsing, or a
facebook page, or...?
Maybe google's wave would be a good foundation for your ideas, since
(based on what little I have read), people can easily add/invite other
people to existing conversations, which I think could facilitate that
friend-of-a-friend connection you are looking for.
Kevin
Adam Harper
Social Networking sites (as far as I am aware) are not implementing
open protocols and do not allow you to be contacted by "friends of
friends of friends" (infinitely). Or do they?
I think they don't, because of the problems you just mentioned.
I propose to combine this new email system with ripple, and to add a
new feature to ripple whereby you can send people a UOme as well as an
IOU. When users receive a UOme, they can either accept it (in which
case it is the equivalent of them paying the author of the UOme) or
return (reject) it. The ripple interface should allow you to send
messages with a payment (an IOU), a bill (a UOme) or no money
transaction at all.
You can set a UOme to be only payable by paypal or whatever, to bridge
trust gaps between users who haven't physically met.
There should be a commonly agreed charge for spam, perhaps it is
reasonable to earn . When they recieve spam, they click on the "report
spam" button and it sends a message/UOme (with a copy of the spam) to
the person through whom you received the spam. If they see it as spam
too, then they pay forward the UOme to whoever they received it from
(until the next person pays it, your account balance goes down).
Perhaps there can be more automation and simplification to this
process, I'm just describing a way it could work. Of course if a
spammer really was part of the network and was sending stuff to
everyone, all of his contacts would be flooded with the accumulated
UOmes and would have to pay for him and would therefore be very angry.
The mail network split between a person who pays their UOme and a
person who does not. The last person in the line is the one who pays
The potentially massive penalty for simply being an intermediary for
spam would make being responsible for not introducing any potential
people who don't apply the same attention to detail as yourself.
Everyone would have to be very careful about who they trust and the
learning curve would be very steep. Of course there could be a
"probationary connection" feature and even a "do not make me a node"
feature so you can limit the amount of damage your trust choices can
do. People who are highly skilled at knowing who to trust will
naturally drift to the centre of the network and can set their system
to "automatically forward spam associated UOmes".
The issue of windows computers being compromised. Surely we can solve
that one. If we are using a far more "delecate" form of communication
system, people will understand why there are some extra security
features. Anybody who does not understand their responsibilities, will
not last very long in the network. Perhaps all mail can be web based
and require a human test just to get into your account? would that
work?
If you don't trust the people you call friends, don't add them to your
network.
> A ripple debt is actually less of a concern for me,
> because I can coerce my immediate friend to step up and pay back the
> obligation. With email, by the time I see that there is a problem, my
> friends have already been annoyed by spam.
not coerce them to pay for spam they allowed into the network? If they
don't want spam, they will require the same of their friends, and so
on.
I'm thinking of perhaps a limit on the amount of email that can be
sent out by any user, dependent on their balance with the person
through whom they are sending. maybe every time you send an email to
someone who doesn't have you on their "whitelist", you provisionally
pay them and if they like your email then they return the payment.
Then everyone can set their own spam charge. Then you can spam people
as much as you like, but it'll cost you.
Oh, have I just come up with a completely new system that means the
whole peer to peer bit is unnecessary? Not sure. i'll have to think
about that one. But maybe it is good because if you pay to send
someone a very helpful message and they don't return the payment, that
is very rude and you don't want to be connected to them so you might
send a UOme, which if unpaid would have to be resolved by
disconnection. probably a similar process as described a few
paragraphs above. Again all of this would be simplified into the most
automatic process possible.
Google wave is nowhere near what I am talking about.
Have I resolved your questions/criticism sufficiently? Please ask
more, please criticise constructively. I'm sorry that I kindof changed
the model part way through, I hope you can follow my description and
reasoning.
Adam
>
> read more »
Adam Harper
>
> read more »
Adam Harper
On 10 Dec, 10:58, Adam Harper <harperea...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> read more »
Thomas Hartman
people who don't apply the same attention to detail as yourself."
which do you think most people would choose?
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Kevin Smith
Have you actually looked at wave? I have spent maybe an hour researching it, and still only have a very loose understanding of it. As I said, it seems to provide some of the dynamic-friend-of-friend conversation features that I think you were talking about in your earlier messages. It is an open protocol.
To my knowledge (mostly thinking LinkedIn), existing social networks give you the limited ability to communicate with people 2-3 layers out. You can send limited numbers of individual messages to someone in your distant circle, or you can post broadcast messages that can be seen by the wider circle, but only if the recipient actively looks for them. In other words, they probably don't support the ability to "spam" the 5000 people in your friends-of-friends-of-friends circle.
Your ideas in this latest message seem to address my concerns about spam, but if that is all you want, people have been proposing systems similar to yours for over a decade. This article outlines some of the challenges: http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040305/NEWS/403050357/1001/BUSINESS
Here is another page with designs, discussion, and critiques:
http://www.halfbakery.com/lr/idea/Anti-spam_20_27stamps_27
The HashCash system probably got the farthest along in terms of development and adoption. It might be possible to start with the HashCash design, but pass around ripple debts instead of hash work. Any ripple debts (IOU or UOMe) would have to be signed somehow, which raises other security challenges (I would have to think through them to judge their difficulty). I actually think that's a cool concept. But the biggest problem with any new email protocol like this is that nobody wants to go first. That applies to software developers, and to end-users. There is no value until many other people are already using it. It's the same challenge faced by ripple itself, and by Esperanto for that matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
If a Windows computer is compromised, all is lost. If you require going to a web site and entering a password, the malware can read the keystrokes and learn the password, which it can use later for its own nefarious purposes. I trust my friends intentions, but not always their diligence (in running anti-spam software and not downloading and running random fun-looking applications), nor their judgement (some "friends" already send me spam-like internet jokes and scare-hoaxes). I suppose I could put those friends in a category of "I will accept their email but will not automatically forward it", but realistically that's the setting I would probably use for everyone, to avoid damaging my own reputation.
It seems like a core feature would have to be the ability for each recipient to decide whether or not to forward a given email to their friends, after having read and reviewed the email content. Many people who only have one email account would then also need the ability to forward only to certain groups of friends, such as "professional contacts" or "other conspiracy theorists". I have about 5 personas, personally, each with its own email account and circle of friends. Generally I don't want people in one circle to even know the other personas exist. So the sender would need to flag a message with something like "Please forward to any of your friends who might be interested in X", where X is some loosely-defined tag.
It might also be helpful to attach one or more subjective "scores" to the email, both at the point of creation, and at each forwarding step. Maybe I would give this email a 5 for importance, and a 2 for being interesting. I might set up filters to ignore anything below a 3 that comes from a friend or below 5 that comes from a friend of a friend. Lots of room for design there, but basically some kind of system to reduce the flow of email into my inbox (and into everyone else's).
Here are some pages related to open protocol social networking that you might find interesting:
http://sites.google.com/a/opensocial.org/opensocial/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network
http://appleseed.sourceforge.net/theory/future.appleseed.php
http://blog.faves.com/2007/08/is-future-of-social-networking-free-and.html
http://journal.planetwork.net/article.php?lab=reed0704
http://benwerd.com/2009/06/social-networking-beyond-the-silo/
Kevin
> wrote: > > > >> > I apologise in advance if this has already been discussed. > > > > >> > As far as I can tell, ripple protocol is indeed the money system of > > > >> > the future. I have been looking for it and it's brothers and sisters > > > >> > for quite some time. > > > > >> > I would like to try to describe what I see as the "family" of > > > >> > solutions of which ripple is (or will be) a part. I am doing this in > > > >> > an attempt to either locate and therefore connect) or create the other > > > >> > family members. > > > > >> > This is not something easy for my mind to label so if anyone knows > > > >> > what I'm talking about, please put it in better words. > > > > >> > I will loosely describe the common characteristics of this family of > > > >> > solutions: > > > > >> > 1. Open Protocol > > > >> > 2. Absence of any central regulating authority > > > >> > 3. Addresses a problem of monopoly > > > >> > 4. Addresses the problem of information overload due to infinite > > > >> > choice leading to arbitrary/confused decisions > > > >> > 5. Transference of some form of trust without a single leap of faith > > > >> > as all transfers are peer to peer. > > > > >> > Maybe I should elaborate on number 4. If you want to keep your money > > > >> > safe or invest it, there are very many banking services begging you to > > > >> > use them. How can one possibly make an informed decision? Ripple > > > >> > addresses this problem, since any service using the ripple protocol > > > >> > will basically offer the same service, then it is only a matter of > > > >> > choosing (if necessary) between the people you know and trust. > > > > >> > The purpose of ripple (as I see it) is to transfer value via > > > >> > decentralised (anarchist) principles. > > > >> > The only other "family members" I have been able to identify > > > >> > conceptually (although I have not been able to locate as healthy a > > > >> > project as this one) so far are for the transfer of information, and > > ... > > read more » -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ripple users" group. To post to this group, send email to rippl...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rippleusers...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rippleusers?hl=en.
Jeffrey Cliff
Kevin, thank you.
Social Networking sites (as far as I am aware) are not implementing open protocols and do not allow you to be contacted by "friends of friends of friends" (infinitely). Or do they?
http://www.petekrawczyk.com/lj_connect/
example:
themusicgod1
-> xkcd (1 hop)
xkcd
-> en_ki
-> gustavolacerda
-> natowelch
-> themusicgod1 (4 hops)
Is that what you were looking for?
Jeffrey Cliff
themus...@zworg.com!ripplepay.com
Ryan Fugger
named Sylvain Poirier who had thought of this kind of monetary system
too, but who first wanted to implement a messaging system on the trust
network for the purposes of eliminating spam:
http://spoirier.lautre.net/en/#proj
Personally, I find my gmail spam filter to be quite effective, but I
think you're talking about more than that: you're talking about being
able to broadcast a message through a social network, and I think
that's an interesting idea. To a certain extent Facebook works that
way with your status -- if you want to repeat something to all your
friends, you just set your status to that and they all get the message
(if they're following their feed). Twitter is the same.
What's got me thinking a bit is how to use this for economic
transactions. You could use this kind of system to advertise offers
and wants through your friends to the greater community, and stand a
good chance of being able to use Ripple for any resulting transaction
-- or use this system to get friends involved in Ripple by first
passing on messages to help you (quite a low barrier to entry compared
to Ripplepay).
On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Kevin Smith <kev...@qualitycode.com> wrote:
> It might also be helpful to attach one or more subjective "scores" to the
> email, both at the point of creation, and at each forwarding step. Maybe I
> would give this email a 5 for importance, and a 2 for being interesting. I
> might set up filters to ignore anything below a 3 that comes from a friend
> or below 5 that comes from a friend of a friend. Lots of room for design
> there, but basically some kind of system to reduce the flow of email into my
> inbox (and into everyone else's).
>
scoring and also the Ripple account/economic history between you and
the friend who is sending you the message. If you owe them, then you
should be more interested in helping them obtain things they want, and
if they owe you, then you should be more interested in helping them
offer things to others.
I've been thinking it might be nice to have a system that encouraged
people to express their wants (pull advertising) and discouraged
constantly expressing offers (push advertising). Our world is full of
push advertising, which people often resent, but I think people don't
mind pull advertising so much. When a friend asks for help with
something, don't you scour your brain for a way to help them?
Advertising through a social network might be a way to amplify this
effect over multiple friends simultaneously, and exponentially
outwards for multiple hops.
Finally, an original goal of mine in developing Ripple was to make
money more personal and informal, reducing the need to keep numerical
score, so we can become more aware of the qualitative aspects of our
economic lives and work to improve our real *quality of life* rather
than just achieving a higher score and then wondering why we're not
happy. So I wonder if we can't build a Ripple system that could work
on anecdotal histories of the economic relationships between pairs of
people, as well as handle hard numbers if necessary? I'm thinking
about accounts that simply keeping track of favors done for each
other, and allowing a numerical score on that, without necessarily
requiring it.
Without the numerical score, or course, it is impossible to know
precisely when obligations are fulfilled in order to cancel out old
debts. But that's never been the goal of the system. The goal is
just to get people to help each other out.
So I'm thinking about a Ripple system that:
- broadcasts requests through the social network
- acknowledges fulfilled requests back along the request path as a
"favor" at each hop (eg, me finding someone to fulfill your request is
a favor from me to you, and also a favor from them to me,
Ripple-style)
- allows users to consider past favors when handling new requests,
including some degree of automation on which requests get priority (an
individual scoring system)
- allows for precise monetary-type values to be assigned to favors
where appropriate (a shared scoring system, like Ripplepay)
I'm looking at my to-do list right now -- get cutlery, furniture,
clothes, vitamins, and do some plumbing work -- and thinking it would
nice to be able to put them out as requests on this system and have
people help me accomplish them, either by giving me old items of
theirs, shopping for me and having me give them cash, or coming and
working in my home. They aren't important enough that I'd want to put
them on my facebook status, but I wouldn't mind if my friends were
invited to peruse my list at their convenience, and maybe get their
friends involved too, in a gentle kind of way. I'm guessing a
facebook app would be the place to start.
Does that sound interesting to anyone? (I know others have suggested
similar things in the past -- it just takes me time to wrap my head
around these things.)
Ryan
Annette Loudon
In Sydney LETS we're always encouraging people to list their wants.
It's a great way to generate trading.
It could get quite contagious.
I can see people trying Ripple before they get rid of something via Freecycle. And it's a great way to piggyback on existing networks, eg: social media networks, Craiglist, Gumtree, etc.
And slightly off topic, but related to building momentum.
The other woman that runs Sydney LETS with me had the great idea of signing Sydney Permaculture members in bulk. We've been growing steadily, but the addition of the Permies looks like it's going to bring a a whole bunch of new energy. Many off them already know one another from working on Permablitz projects together. They are already geographically sorted, and very well organised. It's early days for this experiment, so I'll report back in 6 months.
Also - we finally have a publicly viewable list of Sydney LETS offers.
Not useful to most on the list, but to give an idea of what is being traded.
http://www.community-exchange.org/offerings.asp?xid=syce
We're trading about 1000 operas a month, and that's with all services capped at 20/hr (an odd, but lovely quirk of our system).
- Annette
Sepp
I believe much of what you are thinking about is going to be part of a
future p2p application that allows us to link up in an open and secure
environment. Facebook and Ripple and Craigslist and Ning all folded
into one application that is free and open source, and that will
eventually evolve to run on direct p2p connections that can be growing
from local wireless connectivity into a global network that's largely
independent yet closely linked in to today's internet.
The idea for such a network is evolving. My thoughts and some comments
by others are on the p2p foundation's ning group here
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/2003008:Topic:1067
A much more complete discussion has been recently written by Pezzi in
http://www.socialcloud.net/papers/ITtools.pdf
Somehow social networking must shake off the limitations posed by
commercial, server-based applications and combine all those elements
that are needed for social and economic interaction between peers in
an open and secure environment that is substantially more under
individual control than our internet connectivity is today.
I see Ripple as an integral part of this development.
Miles Thompson
Ryan wrote:
> I'm thinking about a Ripple system that:
>
> - broadcasts requests through the social network
> - allows users to consider past favors when handling new requests..[snip]
> where appropriate (a shared scoring system, like Ripplepay)
> similar things in the past -- it just takes me time to wrap my head
> around these things.)
I especially like the idea of trying to balance 'gentle'
acknowledgment with the more hard number accounting side of things.
Actually, I think I was part of the conversation about a facebook app
for ripple (http://bit.ly/8yacXW) a few months ago. And since that
time I've received a grant from the local council which has let me
hire an intern to help me work on some of the pieces of this puzzle.
The first step seemed to be – related to your point above - a system
to encourage and support ‘broadcasting requests through the social
network'. Currently we have a message parser, that just watches the
twitter stream for messages tagged as 'offers' and parses them into a
more useful format (which we then republish as a json feed). That's
pretty much it so far, but definitely support for requests and
‘transaction’ messages (such as ripple acknowledgements, and trust
links etc) would be a likely next step. Also support for more 'message
streams' like facebook, the freecycle email list, etc.
Ripple was always about a linking up a network of *people* not
building a new machine level method for distributing data. People can
sometimes get so caught up in that they don't realize that the
important parts of these desirable social messaging/social trust
systems is *already here*. Pure p2p is nice, but that's an
implementation level thing. Personally I think we should be focused on
the person-to-person level network, which is another level up (and
already here).
I think the key is make the messages human readable (and writable),
that way we can leverage the normal *social* networks that are already
in place and people already have tools they understand for controlling
what messages are visible to what groups and what by which method they
are delivered. It's not that we necessarily want to deluge our friends
with requests and offers but that the exchange can become a normal
*gentle* part of our day to day messaging and we can control how many
people (or bots) need to see what.
For instance rather than signing into a special app, how easy would it
be to just point your cameraphone at, say an old desk and post that to
posterous with the subject line 'desk available #free to a good home'.
This auto-posts to twitter and not only do your friends get to see it
(or not) but its also entered into something a bit more searchable and
permanent. Or you just private tweet (direct message) maybe even via
your old sms phone 'd @venServer transfer 20 #ven to @mikeRow for the
help in the garden yesterday' and boom its done and publically
recorded and acnowledged.
Anyway, to this end, I've just released the code for Tradeify: "A
library to support and encourage the gentle exchange of goods and
favors via open messaging on the social web"
(http://github.com/utunga/tradeify ) such as it is so far, and I would
love it if anyone wanted to be a part of, or interact with this
project.
Thing is, it's C#/Javascript currently, though based on an open source
stack of Debian/Mono/Apache/CouchDB. Howeverm I think there is every
chance that folks will want to interact with this thing at the REST
level (JSON/XML feeds using oAuth/OpenID etc), or just at the level of
reading and writing mutually compatible and human readable messages
into the social stream. That is, if we can agree on basic formatting
of messages, and the types of messages we want to support, then we can
build applications/widgets/iphone apps that interact with each other
at all sorts of levels depending on how tightly we want to integrate.
To get specifc apps that might be cool would be something to guide
you to create messages in the right format, or something that reads
the JSON feed and draws all offers and requests on a map (fresh
vegetables on offer two streets over!) or that aggregate the
statements and figures out and recommends the best return path to
maximize cycles of reciprocity or (related) something to visualize the
health (eg number of outstanding/unclosed debts) of particular groups
or particular forms of payment.
I'm the first to admit that what we have so far is not all that
exciting to look at, but for what its worth, right now, if you post a
message like the following to twitter:
"#offr I have some old firewood that I can give away #free in Kelowna
#firewood #freecycle" then not only would it be sent to your friends
but it would also become available (all parsed up, geocoded, and
searchable as a JSON feed) from
http://tradeify.org/offers_json.aspx?group=freecycle. We’re working on
a couchdb back end that will make the parsed data feed more readily
available and arrangeable in different ways.
To be clear its *only* offer messages so far, but
transaction/trust/acknowledgement on which we can then build a
real/gentle ripple network is something I am definitely keen to
tackle, and was the aim from the start.
Please let me know your thoughts and if you are at all interested in
contributing.
--
I also want to give a shout out to Annette who I think is bang on when
she talks about bringing home grown produce and the 'permies' into the
equation. I really believe that alternative currencies (of any kind)
need to be built (or rather, 'grow' up) where the activity is. They
need to both learn from and support the activities of real people who
already sharing and trading together. Furthermore 'food' is a great
place to start something new - because everybody needs food and so it
provides a natural release valve to 'unclosed loops' (aka a good
backing to the marketplace). Unfortunately great ideas about currency
can stay locked away in an ivory tower of technological or monetary
theory geek-dom if we get too far from the practice of things. Getting
your hands dirty (literally) with real people and real vegetables
seems like a great antidote to that.
To that end we plan to launch the first beta version of the service on
ooooby.org (out of our own back yards) in December this year (hey
that's this month ! ;-). This will take the form of an open social
widget that will make it easy to post offers of produce from right
within http://ooooby.org and also to find offers near by. Ooooby is a
community of food growers and food eaters (locavores) led by a
brilliant guy Pete Russell who is also really into this alternative
currency thing. We're all about building resiliance and robustness
into our economy to help us weather the coming downturn and all of
this is just a part of that.
Anyway (back to earth) right now since nobody knows about this format
the stream is mostly just 'spam' that happens to match the pattern.
But one of the things we'll definitely have in place by December is a
way to filter out messages from non-trusted sources and show only from
the group/s or trust network/s you want to be a part of.
Ooooby actually already has a form of alternative currency going
(called 'rooobies') which you can earn by taking vegetables to the
stand at a local farmers market and exchange for other peoples
produce. So, one of the first things to do would be to enable this
type of roooobies trade to take place by online/device based means
during the rest of the week. However, from a monetary geek perspective
I actually have misgivings about the structure of a pure LETS based
system (such as Roooobies), and think a system based on a more
distributed 'network' of trust would be a more robust way to go in the
longer term.
For that reason, I'd love glad to see if this thing can evolve more
into the direction of a more 'ripple based' type system and would love
to work with ya'll to help make that happen, if you are interested.
Let me know. Thanks
Miles Thompson
http://blog.tradeify.org
miles
http://google.com/profiles/utunga
Adam Harper
all of the above comments. Given that the original purpose of this
thread was to establish a clear idea of what I mean by ripple's
"family", I will try to simply indicate which comments and links match
what I am talking about.
I am not saying that the ones which don't match are bad ideas, just
that they are not what I am talking about/trying to point to.
google wave is cool, but it is almost entirely unrelated to my vision.
Linked in is business oriented. Anything that has narrowed it's scope
in such a way is not what I am looking for.
I'm not even going to comment on HashCash.
Here's another way to put this idea. I'm going to use a current
example to illustrate the real need for the system in my vision. I am
looking for a new flat. I went to see one the other day. The landlady
seems very nice and I imagine that she will not involve an estate
agent. When we come to signing a contract and me giving her some rent
and a deposit, what stops her from simply taking the money and
disappearing. Maybe she doesn't even own the flat, but happens to have
obtained a key and knows that it's open. I doubt that this is the
case, but when it comes down to it, I actually have no way of knowing
truly that she is who she says she is. A signature means absolutely
nothing, because anyone can make up a signature. If anything went
wrong, then the only people I can complain to are the police and
therefore the vast and combersome criminal justice system.
On the other hand, if we had this network (the one in my vision), then
I could simply complain to the person who links me to her, and they
would have to pay me back my rent money. If they didn't, I would
complaint to the person who linked me to them, and so on.
It's just like a government complaints process. I have been involved
with complaints to Social Care Services (UK) recently. There are
several "stages". You start with the individual, and if that doesn't
work you move on to someone not involved, then you get that
investigated and if the investigation doesn't work you write to the
ombudsman and so on. Each step up the hirarchy takes longer and gets
more "national", eventually you are dealing with the national
government who ultimately answer to the voters.
But there is no complaints system for ordinary people. If someone does
something "dishonerable" like fraud, the only thing you can do about
it is to pass the problem on to the police/courts who may or may not
be sympathetic.
On another note, the reason why I suggest everything should be based
around a kind of email address is because everyone only has one email
address per persona and there is only one person (in the entire world)
per email address, also people don't change their email address when
they move house or their computer breaks or they start using a new
website. 2 people can easily have the same name (eg in facebook) and
each person can use many social websites.
Anyway, where was I?
Kevin, I think I must not have explained what I meant very well, I'm
sorry. I have written a more full response to you, but I won't post it
here. If you want it, let me know and I will email it to you.
http://www.petekrawczyk.com/lj_connect/ does not seem to be quite at
the level of functionality that is needed for a functional information
distribution and decentralised complaints system. Correct me if I am
wrong.
I think I would like to thank all of you for your responses. They are
much appreciated.
Ryan, I still have some unfinished arguments with Sylvain Poirier both
by email and in wave. I abandoned them in response to what seemed to
be irreconcilable differences between his conception and mine. I may
return to that discussion but at the moment I am focusing what
energies I have for this project (my vision), here, since you have
created a simple working prototype and Sylvain has not.
gmail does not allow you to pay for goods and services and then
complain (effectively) when the goods are not what they were claimed
to be. See my landlady example above. and indeed as you say, it does
not allow you to broadcast information. You cannot search facebook
pages for "flats to let in Aberystwyth" and if you got any hits, it
wouldn't even tell you whether you are connected to them through a
chain of friends. Facebook doesn't come anywhere near the "family" I
am talking about.
the subjective scoring system is not part of my vision. I don't know
why it isn't, it just isn't.
pull advertising is part of my vision. actually, I kindof imagine
everyone just having their own kind of "page" where they advertise
both what they want and what they have to offer. the page would have
clear "fields" to aid in searching.
Making money personal and informal is not part of my vision. I thought
the entire POINT of money was that it wasn't personal. Money is about
applying measurement to the value of something. The measurement is
subjective but once made can be compared to someone elses measurement
of the value of something else. That's the point of money. I
personally would never use a system which tracks favours. If I owe
something to someone, I want to know how much, and visa versa.
Sepp, is there a simple working prototype like ripplepay, in which you
can sign in and say who you are connected to, and then interact with
people you are not connected to except through the people you said you
were connected to? If not, then ripple is still way ahead in my book.
The first link you posted was mere speculation and is interesting, but
not a core part of my vision. The second link is longer than I care to
read at the moment, but thanks for your contribution.
Miles,
"Ripple was always about a linking up a network of *people* not
building a new machine level method for distributing data. People can
sometimes get so caught up in that they don't realize that the
important parts of these desirable social messaging/social trust
systems is *already here*."
- exactly! my vision is not about the creation of something new, it is
the consolidation of an already existing network into a faster, more
efficient system. I could manually ask/tell all of the people I trust
to ask/tell all of the people they trust (etc) anything I want. We
need a system that performs that function without needing to
consciously involve each intermediary in every transaction. So far
ripple appears to be the only system which does this. ripple only
transfers a measurement of value. can we combine that with email
please? I mean, just as a start? we can add other features later. For
a start, is what I am suggesting possible/easy to program?
> (http://github.com/utunga/tradeify) such as it is so far, and I would
> searchable as a JSON feed) fromhttp://tradeify.org/offers_json.aspx?group=freecycle. We’re working on
> withinhttp://ooooby.organd also to find offers near by. Ooooby is a
> community of food growers and food eaters (locavores) led by a
> brilliant guy Pete Russell who is also really into this alternative
> currency thing. We're all about building resiliance and robustness
> into our economy to help us weather the coming downturn and all of
> this is just a part of that.
>
> Anyway (back to earth) right now since nobody knows about this format
> the stream is mostly just 'spam' that happens to match the pattern.
> But one of the things we'll definitely have in place by December is a
> way to filter out messages from non-trusted sources and show only from
> the group/s or trust network/s you want to be a part of.
>
> Ooooby actually already has a form of alternative currency going
> (called 'rooobies') which you can earn by taking vegetables to the
> stand at a local farmers market and exchange for other peoples
> produce. So, one of the first things to do would be to enable this
> type of roooobies trade to take place by online/device based means
> during the rest of the week. However, from a monetary geek perspective
> I actually have misgivings about the structure of a pure LETS based
> system (such as Roooobies), and think a system based on a more
> distributed 'network' of trust would be a more robust way to go in the
> longer term.
>
> For that reason, I'd love glad to see if this thing can evolve more
> into the direction of a more 'ripple based' type system and would love
> to work with ya'll to help make that happen, if you are interested.
>
> Let me know. Thanks
>
> Miles Thompsonhttp://blog.tradeify.org
>
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Annette Loudon <niftyc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I like it.
> > In Sydney LETS we're always encouraging people to list their wants.
> > It's a great way to generate trading.
> > It could get quite contagious.
>
> > I can see people trying Ripple before they get rid of something via Freecycle. And it's a great way to piggyback on existing networks, eg: social media networks, Craiglist, Gumtree, etc.
>
> > And slightly off topic, but related to building momentum.
> > The other woman that runs Sydney LETS with me had the great idea of signing Sydney Permaculture members in bulk. We've been growing steadily, but the addition of the Permies looks like it's going to bring a a whole bunch of new energy. Many off them already know one another from working on Permablitz projects together. They are already geographically sorted, and very well organised. It's early days for this experiment, so I'll report back in 6 months.
>
> > Also - we finally have a publicly viewable list of Sydney LETS offers.
> > Not useful to most on the list, but to give an idea of what is being traded.
> >http://www.community-exchange.org/offerings.asp?xid=syce
> > We're trading about 1000 operas a month, and that's with all services capped at 20/hr (an odd, but lovely quirk of our system).
>
> > - Annette
>
> > On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 1:01 PM, Ryan Fugger <rfug...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> Adam, when I was first thinking about Ripple, I came across a guy
> >> named Sylvain Poirier who had thought of
>
> ...
>
> read more »
Kevin Smith
reply to some details here, but it's pretty clear that I will never
"get" what you are trying to propose.
On Tue, 2009-12-22 at 18:04 -0800, Adam Harper wrote:
> google wave is cool, but it is almost entirely unrelated to my vision.
Before reading the rest of your message, I was going to ask if you meant
that it is technologically unrelated, or culturally unrelated (or both).
But now I'm not sure it actually matters.
>
> Linked in is business oriented. Anything that has narrowed it's scope
> in such a way is not what I am looking for.
Same question.
(snip)
> When we come to signing a contract and me giving her some rent
> and a deposit, what stops her from simply taking the money and
> disappearing.
(snip)
> On the other hand, if we had this network (the one in my vision), then
> I could simply complain to the person who links me to her, and they
> would have to pay me back my rent money. If they didn't, I would
> complaint to the person who linked me to them, and so on.
Really? Count me out. I would love to have some kind of network where I
could get feedback on someone before entering into a transaction with
them. And I wouldn't mind a system where I could scold people who gave
me a bad reference. But holding them financially responsible for a
transaction they didn't even know was happening and had no way to
affect? No way. And under that system there is no way I would ever act
as a reference for anyone for anything. I wouldn't even recommend my
brother or my spouse to someone.
> On another note, the reason why I suggest everything should be based
> around a kind of email address is because everyone only has one email
> address per persona
I'm glad you acknowledge that a *person* can have more than one. But
even some of my *personas* have several email addresses, and I'm sure
I'm not alone.
> and there is only one person (in the entire world) per email address,
Uh. No. It used to be common, and is probably rare today, but I still
know couples who share a single email address between them.
> also people don't change their email address when they move house
Uh. Yes they do, if they use a local cable or telephone company as their
email host, which lots of people still do. Or if they decide that gmail
is better than hotmail, or that a real mail server is better than yahoo
(or vice versa). Not to mention all the people who use their work email
as their primary/only email address, who have to change it when they
switch jobs.
> Kevin, I think I must not have explained what I meant very well, I'm
> sorry. I have written a more full response to you, but I won't post it
> here. If you want it, let me know and I will email it to you.
I would be mildly interested. I suspect I would just get more confused,
but one never knows.
(major snippage)
> - exactly! my vision is not about the creation of something new, it is
> the consolidation of an already existing network into a faster, more
> efficient system. I could manually ask/tell all of the people I trust
> to ask/tell all of the people they trust (etc) anything I want. We
> need a system that performs that function without needing to
> consciously involve each intermediary in every transaction.
But that takes away control, which is a pretty serious trade-off. As a
real-world analogy, I don't mind if friends occasionally borrow my car
with specific permission. But I sure don't want them to lend it to
friends of friends of friends of friends without me giving an ok.
> So far
> ripple appears to be the only system which does this. ripple only
> transfers a measurement of value. can we combine that with email
> please? I mean, just as a start? we can add other features later. For
> a start, is what I am suggesting possible/easy to program?
I'm ok loaning $5 to a friend of a friend of a friend without prior
approval, as long as I know my friend is good for it (which I must have
already decided for ripple to perform the transaction). I'm not ok with
a friend of a friend of a friend spamming my friends with even one
email. Maybe it's just me.
Email is a push medium, which makes it intrusive. I'm ok propagating
individual messages to my different circles of friends, but that sounds
more like wave to me (from what little I know).
Or, I would be ok with automated message propagation within a system
that works on a pull basis, like visiting a web site...but doesn't that
take us more toward the LinkedIn or Facebook model?
Anyway, I wish you well in your quest. Whatever you can do to narrow
down and clarify your goals will help. Maybe you could write up a dozen
case stories like your landlady example, to show the various key
features of the perfect system you are envisioning. If you could
identify one simple "killer feature", that could be the key to getting
the system started. Then over time you could add all the other cool
things on top of it.
Kevin
Ryan Fugger
sure it's easy to hold social intermediaries financially responsible
for buyer and seller behaviour, but I think having a system where
people are somehow socially accountable for their actions would lead
to better behaviour generally. Something like a generic reputation
system, where bad behaviour would "ripple" down chains of social
connection by some kind of reputation score. This kind of system has
been proposed quite a few times, but I'm not sure if it's really been
implemented that often. The trick might be finding the right gimmick
to get people involved and participating.
You might also ask what problems exactly you are trying to solve, and
how desperately they need solving. I don't think the problem of the
imposter landlady is necessarily very compelling, but there probably
exist some quite good use cases. If you can focus on the right ones,
it might take off.
Ryan
Joe Edelman
People "vouch" for one another by reading a kind of a termsheet and
then signing off by clicking a button. Someone appears as "vouched"
if they've been vouched by a default of 3 other people. But we also
track reviews after one person stays with another, and in particular
whether they had a negative experience and how trustworthy they
thought the guest or host was. If someone has low trustworthiness
with a high certainty (because they've been visited by or visited many
people who have given otherwise consistent trust scores) and they have
been vouched, then the vouchability of those who have vouched them is
reduced, and those people's vouches now count less for a vouching.
This is a complicated system, but we believe that "reputation" is not
one thing. In particular:
* direct interpersonal trustworthiness
* value to the community in various roles
* ability to provide positive experiences, and
* ability to gauge others' trustworthiness
are all separate skills or attributes and need to be evaluated that way.
And indeed, the data bear us out, because different populations on our
website appear to excel or suffer using these different metrics, and
when you look at other aspects of their behavior and talk with people
who know them (we have a safety team that does this and a variety of
logs) you can see why.
--
J.E. // nxhx.org // 413.570.0001
Adam Harper
>Wow. This email provides yet another completely different vision. I'll
>reply to some details here, but it's pretty clear that I will never
>"get" what you are trying to propose.
I believe you will at some point "get" what I am trying to propose.
Your difficulty in "getting" it is coupled with my difficulty in
squeezing a multi-dimensional fractal concept that I myself cannot see
all of at once, into the narrow confines of one dimensional sentence
structure.
When trying to express a 3 dimensional object in 2 dimensions, you can
only take "slices" through the 3 dimensional object at different
angles, and of course each "slice" is going to look completely
different. I hope you follow my analogy.
>I was going to ask if you meant
>that it is technologically unrelated, or culturally unrelated (or both).
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the difference between
technology and culture.
As far as I can tell, google wave can connect me to anyone else using
a service that implements wave protocol. I don't want to be connected
to everyone. I want to be connected only to the people I am already
indirectly connected to and I want to be able to see the connection
between me and them. As far as I am aware, google wave does not have
that limitation. Limitation in this sense a positive attribute. ripple
is so brilliant because it does NOT let you think you have more value
than you do, nor does it let you have a bank balance than the total
that you have agreed others may be endebted to you, nor does it allow
you to make any transaction with someone you are not (indirectly)
connected to. If anyone still don't get the idea of limitations being
beneficial, then why do you use search engines?
Linked in is culturally unrelated, but probably technologically
related. Ah yes I think in this context I understand what you meant by
that. So google wave may be seen as culturally related but
technologically unrelated. Or perhaps I have still misunderstood.
>Count me out
I understand that my vision is a radically different approach to
transactions and it will take many people a while to get their head
around it.
>I wouldn't even recommend my
>brother or my spouse to someone.
So, why not? What do you fear would happen if you linked to your
brother? What's the worst case scenario?
>even some of my *personas* have several email addresses, and I'm sure
>I'm not alone.
Why do some of your personas need more than one email address?
>I still
>know couples who share a single email address between them.
Couples with more than one email address can be treated as one entity,
just as they are when they share a bank account. The point is that
email address are a more accurate reflection of actual identity than
anything else I can think of. A passport does not reflect the many
personas that most people are composed of etc.
If someone does change email address, this is nolonger a major
problem, all they need to do is inform the few people they are
directly connected to, and everything can just be re-routed.
By the way, this conversation would be much easier via wave, do you
have a wave account?
>I don't mind if friends occasionally borrow my car
>with specific permission. But I sure don't want them to lend it to
>friends of friends of friends of friends without me giving an ok.
Just for the sake of argument, why not? How might you be negatively
affected if your friend lent your car to someone else who lent it to
someone else etc? again, let's go with the worst case scenario.
>I'm not ok with
>a friend of a friend of a friend spamming my friends with even one
>email. Maybe it's just me.
I think this has already been covered, if not here then in the private
email I sent you (to be posted here if you feel it necessary).
>Maybe you could write up a dozen
>case stories like your landlady example, to show the various key
>features of the perfect system you are envisioning. If you could
>identify one simple "killer feature"
My problem is that to me, the whole thing is obvious, so I don't know
which bits aren't filled in without feeback from you. It's faster to
do it in this seemingly haphazard way than to try to write it out in
full because at some point it'll hopefull all just go "click" and then
I don't really need to say anything more.
The "killer feature" is probably the ability to "sue" anyone you are
(indirectly) connected to, without the need for external authority or
legal council. You can even decide for yourself how much you want to
"sue" them for. Of course the amount you can sue them for is limited
by the amount of credit you indirectly grant them through the ripple
network and this being the case, you can make an informed decision
about what level of interaction to have with someone based on how much
the system says you can sue them for if it all goes wrong.
This feature may be very appealing for people who are sticklers for
detail. When someone rips you off, but only by a few pennies/cents,
you can sue them for those few pennies/cents. I am guessing that I
will need to elaborate on the mechanics of this feature, in response
to your excellent feedback.
Adam Harper
>I'm not
>sure it's easy to hold social intermediaries financially responsible
>for buyer and seller behaviour
I disagree, clearly. Let's say I am connected to you and you are
connected to Kevin. I buy something off Kevin with ripple. Now I owe
you and you owe Kevin. You are responsible for my debt. If Kevin wants
you to settle up, and I want to default on my debt to you, then you
have a choice between paying for my bad debt (gosh, to think you
trusted an evil fraudster like me!) and defaulting on your debt to
Kevin. My suggestion is only a development of this principle.
Reputation score is not part of my vision. It seems to me an
unnecessary complication considering the ability to resolve all
disputes one way or another by a kind of authority-less law-suit.
On 23 Dec, 07:00, Ryan Fugger <rfug...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Adam, I think I understand your idea. As Kevin points out, I'm not
> sure it's easy to hold social intermediaries financially responsible
> for buyer and seller behaviour, but I think having a system where
> people are somehow socially accountable for their actions would lead
> to better behaviour generally. Something like a generic reputation
> system, where bad behaviour would "ripple" down chains of social
> connection by some kind of reputation score. This kind of system has
> been proposed quite a few times, but I'm not sure if it's really been
> implemented that often. The trick might be finding the right gimmick
> to get people involved and participating.
>
> You might also ask what problems exactly you are trying to solve, and
> how desperately they need solving. I don't think the problem of the
> imposter landlady is necessarily very compelling, but there probably
> exist some quite good use cases. If you can focus on the right ones,
> it might take off.
>
> Ryan
>
> >http://www.petekrawczyk.com/lj_connect/does not seem to be quite at
> ...
>
> read more »
Kevin Smith
> I believe you will at some point "get" what I am trying to propose.
> Your difficulty in "getting" it is coupled with my difficulty in
> squeezing a multi-dimensional fractal concept that I myself cannot see
> all of at once, into the narrow confines of one dimensional sentence
> structure.
Fair enough.
> As far as I can tell, google wave can connect me to anyone else using
> a service that implements wave protocol.
I'm sure you know more about Wave than I do. Where I see wave
overlapping with your earlier system descriptions is with the ability to
broadcast messages out to third-degree friends. With wave, as I
understand it, you could start a conversation, and invite your friends
to it. They would invite their (relevant) friends, and so on. The end
result would be an announcement or conversation that would have reached
out to your universe of fofofofof's.
It wouldn't happen automatically. It would require each circle to invite
their circle. Which fits my current way of thinking better (propagate
only with permission, not automatically), but doesn't seem to meet your
goal of having it be automatic.
> Linked in is culturally unrelated, but probably technologically
> related. Ah yes I think in this context I understand what you meant by
> that. So google wave may be seen as culturally related but
> technologically unrelated. Or perhaps I have still misunderstood.
Right, unless my description above shows that wave is not entirely
unrelated, technologically speaking. It also indicates that perhaps a
free, non-commercial re-implementation of something like LinkedIn might
approach what you want.
> >I wouldn't even recommend my
> >brother or my spouse to someone.
>
> So, why not? What do you fear would happen if you linked to your
> brother? What's the worst case scenario?
I guess what you're saying, which I missed the first time, is that since
this would be run through the ripple system, I would only be liable up
to the amount that I had pre-authorized to my immediate friend. So if I
trust my brother up to $500, and he screws up, that's the most I would
lose. Even if his total liability to you were a million dollars. That
makes it a lot more palatable.
You would have some tricky issues related to what the limit was at what
point in time. Maybe at the point you bought something my limit with him
was $1 but by the time you wanted to sue it was $500, or vice versa. Not
a showstopper...just an interesting corner case you'll have to define
and solve.
Also, I might want to set different "loan" and "liability" limits with
my friends. I might trust them more in terms of repaying money and less
in terms of liability, or vice versa. I would have to think more about
that.
One thing that would solve both of those would be for you to put in an
"insurance request". At that moment, I would see the request, and could
judge how much I was willing to put up *for that one transaction*. But
that moves back toward control and away from automation, which seems
opposite of your goals.
> >even some of my *personas* have several email addresses, and I'm sure
> >I'm not alone.
>
> Why do some of your personas need more than one email address?
They don't necessarily need them. They just have them. Like sometimes I
might have Firs...@example.com, Fir...@example.com, and
Fi...@example.com for convenience.
>
> >I still
> >know couples who share a single email address between them.
>
> Couples with more than one email address can be treated as one entity,
> just as they are when they share a bank account. The point is that
> email address are a more accurate reflection of actual identity than
> anything else I can think of. A passport does not reflect the many
> personas that most people are composed of etc.
>
> If someone does change email address, this is nolonger a major
> problem, all they need to do is inform the few people they are
> directly connected to, and everything can just be re-routed.
Fair enough. I agree that email is a reasonably unique identifier for a
persona. I was just objecting to your specific claims.
>
> By the way, this conversation would be much easier via wave, do you
> have a wave account?
Nope. Are there any non-google wave servers offering free accounts? I
try to use as little google as possible right now.
> >I don't mind if friends occasionally borrow my car
> >with specific permission. But I sure don't want them to lend it to
> >friends of friends of friends of friends without me giving an ok.
>
> Just for the sake of argument, why not? How might you be negatively
> affected if your friend lent your car to someone else who lent it to
> someone else etc? again, let's go with the worst case scenario.
Well, for starters, they might wreck my car. Even if it is covered by
insurance, that's still a big hassle. They might smoke in it. They might
commit a crime in it, or get a bunch of parking tickets. They might moon
the president in it. They might drive to Mexico and back, putting a lot
of miles on it.
I have no idea how many of those translate from the physical world into
the digital realm, so maybe we have taken that analogy farther than it
deserves.
> >Maybe you could write up a dozen
> >case stories like your landlady example, to show the various key
> >features of the perfect system you are envisioning. If you could
> >identify one simple "killer feature"
>
> My problem is that to me, the whole thing is obvious, so I don't know
> which bits aren't filled in without feeback from you. It's faster to
> do it in this seemingly haphazard way than to try to write it out in
> full because at some point it'll hopefull all just go "click" and then
> I don't really need to say anything more.
Ok.
>
> The "killer feature" is probably the ability to "sue" anyone you are
> (indirectly) connected to, without the need for external authority or
> legal council.
Yikes. I'll have to think through how different this kind of suing is
from the regular kind, but my initial reaction is "no thanks". I think
there are WAY too many frivolous lawsuits already (at least in the US).
I think people have forgotten to take personal responsibility for their
own actions. They have forgotten that random stuff happens, and
sometimes things just go wrong through no fault of any person.
I'm probably way over on the other side of the spectrum from your
audience on that feature. The other features you described seemed more
potentially appealing to me.
Kevin
Adam Harper
in a private email in response to his earlier post of 10th December
(quoted at the bottom). I did not do so originally because it would
have made my post extremely long. I hope you can follow the sequence
(as these posts are now not in sequence). It would be easier if we
were using wave.
Kevin,
I WANT the ability to spam 5000 people who are connected to me. I want
a system that transfers to the sender, the hidden cost of reading a
message so that the sender can decide whether it is worth it.
I'm not going to discuss "actual benefits" because it's just too big
to get into right now. Perhaps another time. I mean what is the
"actual benefit" of Ripple? I wouldn't be able to pin that down, but
that is not to say I don't deeply feel that ripple is one of the most
brilliant creations and will be part of a profound transformation of
global proportions. The result of that transformation is hard to pin
down because it will be dynamic. It will create more freedom, and free
people are always going to do things you never could have thought of.
When the internet was invented, that made more freedom, more
possibilities, but the creaters could not have imagined what would be
done with that freedom.
The spam issue, to me, is easily solved. The real challenge is the
growth of what I might call "the network". That network must have
enough connections to make things like ripple viable.
The point of solving the spam issue is that it eliminates many
problems of privacy and you can just broadcast your email address to
anyone because it is worthless to anyone who doesn't have something to
say that you want to hear. Which means instead of "signing up for a
new account" at whatever website you want to use, all those websites
can have an account ready for you based on the "homepage" that is
associated with your email address. It also means that everything is
cented around email addresses rather than around accounts with
specific websites. Centred around individuals rather than companies.
Thank you for the links
All the current systems seem to depend on a fixed understanding of
what "spam" is. I'm suggesting something more flexible, so that if
someone I know quite well but don't like is sending me messages I
don't want and I say don't send me messages and he/she continues, I
can just remove them from my whitelist and they will not be able to
send further messages without paying my spam charge which might be set
at 50 pence (I'm british, not having any of this "cents" stuff lol).
The "email stamps" system is too restricted and standardised and who
would you buy the stamps from in the first instance? some authority
figure? that's crazy.
Again I'm sorry for implying reputation to be more fragile with the
system I propose. Actually reputation should be more robust, since any
failure to filter your own content just costs you money. When someone
pisses you off, you don't block them, you just revoke their "free
emails" setting, meaning that they have to pay to send you stuff and
if you don't like what they send then you don't give them their money
back. Also sorry for repeating myself.
Sorry, there's no "forwarding" decision necessary anymore. With the
latest (sorry to keep developing it, typing makes me think more) model
you can send an email to anyone, even someone who you are not
connected to. But if you do, you will certainly have to pay them
whatever their email charge is set at and if they are disreputable
then they may not give you that money back even if they found your
email extremely useful. The point of being connected, is the ability
to complain at different levels, first starting with them and if they
ignore your complaint (which you had to pay for) you complain to each
person through whom you connect to them, one at a time starting with
the one closest to them until you get resolution. At some point in
that process, the "resolving party" will refund you the cost of your
complaint. The worst case scenario is that it was all your fault for
having a useless friend, in which case YOU are the resolving party and
you have to pay for all of it. Usually this will not happen and the
net cost of emails to people you don't know will be zero.
On 10 Dec, 16:33, Kevin Smith <kevi...@qualitycode.com> wrote:
> Can you boil your actual end-goals down to one or two sentences? After
> some yet-to-be-invented system was in place, what are some actual
> benefits we would see from it?
>
> Have you actually looked at wave? I have spent maybe an hour researching
> it, and still only have a very loose understanding of it. As I said, it
> seems to provide some of the dynamic-friend-of-friend conversation
> features that I think you were talking about in your earlier messages.
> It is an open protocol.
>
> To my knowledge (mostly thinking LinkedIn), existing social networks
> give you the limited ability to communicate with people 2-3 layers out.
> You can send limited numbers of individual messages to someone in your
> distant circle, or you can post broadcast messages that can be seen by
> the wider circle, but only if the recipient actively looks for them. In
> other words, they probably don't support the ability to "spam" the 5000
> people in your friends-of-friends-of-friends circle.
>
> Your ideas in this latest message seem to address my concerns about
> spam, but if that is all you want, people have been proposing systems
> similar to yours for over a decade. This article outlines some of the
> challenges:http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040305/NEWS/403...
> ...
>
> read more »
Alex Rollin
Which means instead of "signing up for a
new account" at whatever website you want to use, all those websites
can have an account ready for you based on the "homepage" that is
associated with your email address.
Kevin Smith
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openid
Kevin
> --
>
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
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> To post to this group, send email to rippl...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rippleusers
Adam Harper
It looks like we are getting to the "agree to disagree point" which is
not so very far away from actual agreement/understanding.
>It wouldn't happen automatically [with google wave]. It would require each circle to invite
>their circle. Which fits my current way of thinking better (propagate
>only with permission, not automatically), but doesn't seem to meet your
>goal of having it be automatic.
Indeed.
>perhaps a
>free, non-commercial re-implementation of something like LinkedIn might
>approach what you want.
Yes. Although I don't know enough about LinkedIn to be sure.
>You would have some tricky issues related to what the limit was at what
>point in time. Maybe at the point you bought something my limit with him
>was $1 but by the time you wanted to sue it was $500, or vice versa. Not
>a showstopper...just an interesting corner case you'll have to define
>and solve.
Yes, I have thought about this. It may require a little bit of
invention. My current idea (this concept has not settled yet so it is
liable to change) is that by agreement, 2 parties can "reserve" money
(a part of their balance) for future "law suits". I guess it's like
freezing someone's account. Nobody can spend that money.
>Also, I might want to set different "loan" and "liability" limits
You shouldn't need that. If you think you would want different limits,
then I think you are missing the other limitation on liability. The
fact that if someone tries to sue you and you don't think it's fair,
you can simply say "no". Similarly if someone complains to you about
someone you connected them to, who they want to sue but who said no,
you can also just say "no". You only ever pay if YOU make a mistake.
If your brother makes a mistake, then he can damn well pay for it. And
if he can't pay for it, then it was your mistake because you thought
he could pay that much back.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "insurance request".
>they might wreck my car. Even if it is covered by
>insurance, that's still a big hassle. They might smoke in it. They might
>commit a crime in it, or get a bunch of parking tickets.
What would you do if your friend wrecked your car? or did any of those
other things? Moon the president, that's a good one.
How would your response to your friend wrecking your car, be any
different to your friend's friend wrecking your car?
>maybe we have taken that analogy farther than it deserves.
no, it's a perfect analogy.
>I'll have to think through how different this kind of suing is
>from the regular kind
Very different.
> my initial reaction is "no thanks".
I can quite understand this. The present suing culture is insane
because it relies on "independent" arbitration to determine the
outcome. The current system does not serve the people for whom it was
originally created. The system I propose, should serve that function,
while being completely useless to the kind of people who currently sue
people, since a person can only be sued successfully (value transfered
from their account to the account of the aggrieved party) with their
consent.
I imagine that the actual incidence of suing would be very rare, but
the possibility of it would greatly encourage trust. In the context of
the current meaning of the word "sue", this seems like a very strange
notion.
> might have FirstL...@example.com, Fir...@example.com, and
Kevin Smith
> Kevin
>
> It looks like we are getting to the "agree to disagree point" which is
> not so very far away from actual agreement/understanding.
Cool.
> >You would have some tricky issues related to what the limit was at what
> >point in time. Maybe at the point you bought something my limit with him
> >was $1 but by the time you wanted to sue it was $500, or vice versa. Not
> >a showstopper...just an interesting corner case you'll have to define
> >and solve.
>
> Yes, I have thought about this. It may require a little bit of
> invention. My current idea (this concept has not settled yet so it is
> liable to change) is that by agreement, 2 parties can "reserve" money
> (a part of their balance) for future "law suits". I guess it's like
> freezing someone's account. Nobody can spend that money.
>
(rearranged your reply)
> I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "insurance request".
Basically, if I were about to buy a car from someone, I could broadcast
a message about the transaction, and everyone in the circle of fofofof
would indicate how much of their own money they would be willing to put
up to back that transaction. If 20 friends would each commit $100, then
maybe I would feel confident buying the car. This might require
something like your "reserve" system to work effectively.
>
> >Also, I might want to set different "loan" and "liability" limits
>
> You shouldn't need that. If you think you would want different limits,
> then I think you are missing the other limitation on liability. The
> fact that if someone tries to sue you and you don't think it's fair,
> you can simply say "no". Similarly if someone complains to you about
> someone you connected them to, who they want to sue but who said no,
> you can also just say "no". You only ever pay if YOU make a mistake.
> If your brother makes a mistake, then he can damn well pay for it. And
> if he can't pay for it, then it was your mistake because you thought
> he could pay that much back.
You're right that I did miss that anyone could decide for themselves
whether or not to pay out. Your concept is that they would then be
morally judged by their peers. Which would require everyone to hear both
sides of the case. Not just people who would pay or not, but people who
would later judge the decision-making when they are deciding whether or
not to trust these people with some future transaction.
I would have to think more about whether there would still be cases
where I might want to set one higher than the other.
>
> >they might wreck my car. Even if it is covered by
> >insurance, that's still a big hassle. They might smoke in it. They might
> >commit a crime in it, or get a bunch of parking tickets.
>
> What would you do if your friend wrecked your car? or did any of those
> other things? Moon the president, that's a good one.
> How would your response to your friend wrecking your car, be any
> different to your friend's friend wrecking your car?
Firstly, I would have more confidence that my friend wouldn't cause
problems. Secondly, the fact that I have 10 friends but 100000 fofof
implies (mathematically) that the odds are much greater of having
problems if my permission ripples automatically. Third, if my friend had
an accident (meaning they weren't negligent but something bad just
happened), I would probably be more forgiving. Fourth, if my fofof
wouldn't stand up to pay the bill, I wouldn't have a lot of confidence
that my fof would, and I would feel bad if my friend (or I) had to take
all the pain.
Automatic permission propagation just seems problematic at some core
level to me. Maybe I could get over it.
> I can quite understand this. The present suing culture is insane
> because it relies on "independent" arbitration to determine the
> outcome. The current system does not serve the people for whom it was
> originally created. The system I propose, should serve that function,
> while being completely useless to the kind of people who currently sue
> people, since a person can only be sued successfully (value transfered
> from their account to the account of the aggrieved party) with their
> consent.
>
> I imagine that the actual incidence of suing would be very rare, but
> the possibility of it would greatly encourage trust. In the context of
> the current meaning of the word "sue", this seems like a very strange
> notion.
That's a clear, helpful summary of some of your thoughts. I don't yet
know to what degree I believe them. Interesting thought exercise,
though. For marketing purposes, you might want to find a different word
to describe it than "sue". Describing it as "an alternative to lawsuits"
would start to hint that it is quite different.
Kevin
Kevin Smith
> I WANT the ability to spam 5000 people who are connected to me. I want
> a system that transfers to the sender, the hidden cost of reading a
> message so that the sender can decide whether it is worth it.
Postage-for-spam is a concept that has been around a while in different
forms. Extending it to an fof world seems easier than getting it working
in the first place.
> The spam issue, to me, is easily solved. The real challenge is the
> growth of what I might call "the network". That network must have
> enough connections to make things like ripple viable.
We haven't even been able to solve the spam issue for direct
communication after 20 years of serious effort, so I don't see how it
would be "easily solved".
> All the current systems seem to depend on a fixed understanding of
> what "spam" is. I'm suggesting something more flexible, so that if
> someone I know quite well but don't like is sending me messages I
> don't want and I say don't send me messages and he/she continues, I
> can just remove them from my whitelist and they will not be able to
> send further messages without paying my spam charge which might be set
> at 50 pence (I'm british, not having any of this "cents" stuff lol).
> The "email stamps" system is too restricted and standardised and who
> would you buy the stamps from in the first instance? some authority
> figure? that's crazy.
When you say "flexible", are you saying that if a given email came from
your friend it might not be spam but if it came from a stranger it would
be? I don't think I would agree with that.
The idea with email stamps is that someone needs to attach something
redeemable for something of value. Normally that would be actual money
(Euros or whatever), and in that case the email token would have to be
redeemable somewhere...and the most convenient somewhere would be a bank
or post office, in which case you would have to have made arrangements
with one of these authority figures.
Hashcash solves this via a kind of asymmetrical "money", where it
"costs" the sender computer time, so they have to "spend" something to
send the message. The recipient doesn't actually receive anything of
value. At least in theory, that would force all senders to feel pretty
strongly that their message has value. It doesn't compensate recipients
when the sender was wrong.
I'm trying to think of what other units of value you could transmit
electronically. Ripplepay IOU's come to mind. I'm not sure if that's
what you have been thinking all along or not. I would have to think
through more carefully how well that would work.
There are all kinds of technical problems with transmitting "money" via
email. It is generally easy to steal, and easy to replicate, so you have
to have some crypto solution to all of that.
>
> Again I'm sorry for implying reputation to be more fragile with the
> system I propose. Actually reputation should be more robust, since any
> failure to filter your own content just costs you money. When someone
> pisses you off, you don't block them, you just revoke their "free
> emails" setting, meaning that they have to pay to send you stuff and
> if you don't like what they send then you don't give them their money
> back. Also sorry for repeating myself.
As long as I wouldn't have to pay if a fofof sent spam to another fofof,
I think I'm ok with that. It all seems to hinge on a money-for-spam
system, which would be a SUPER invention even outside of the social
network context.
>
> Sorry, there's no "forwarding" decision necessary anymore. With the
> latest (sorry to keep developing it, typing makes me think more) model
> you can send an email to anyone, even someone who you are not
> connected to.
So we agree on that point. Except that if they email stamps are paid for
with (or simply "are") ripplepay IOU's, that would imply that it would
only work within your ripplepay network.
> At some point in that process, the "resolving party" will refund you
> the cost of your complaint.
For a small amount, that makes sense. For larger amounts (like your
suits above), the resolution costs could be shared between parties.
> The worst case scenario is that it was all your fault for
> having a useless friend, in which case YOU are the resolving party and
> you have to pay for all of it. Usually this will not happen and the
> net cost of emails to people you don't know will be zero.
Right.
Kevin
Adam Harper
>a message about the transaction, and everyone in the circle of fofofof
>would indicate how much of their own money they would be willing to put
>up to back that transaction.
Why would anyone put money up to buy your car? I think I must still
have misunderstood.
By the way, I don't like my "reservation" idea. There are a few
alternatives, but all with their problems. I still believe that the
ability to send "UOme"s (law suits) is a useful and necessary feature,
but haven't yet worked out the mechanics. I may have to resort to pen
and paper. The most likely answer currently is unlimited liability,
but that presents obvious problems/questions like what happens when
someone tries to take more from someone than they can pay? I think we
should probably postpone this part of the discussion until I myself am
clear.
>Your concept is that they would then be
>morally judged by their peers. Which would require everyone to hear both
>sides of the case.
I wouldn't call it a moral judgement. I associate morals with a sense
of "ultimate" good and bad. People simply place themselves on one side
or the other, depending on which they believe will be of greatest
benefit to them. In order to make that assessment, they would probably
want some evidence. Sylvain Poirier suggested that the wave protocol
would be an ideal form in which to discuss such disputes. The
discussion of disputes is of relatively minor concern to me since
there are already perfectly functional systems for that and they could
easily be incorporated.
>Not just people who would pay or not, but people who
>would later judge the decision-making when they are deciding whether or
>not to trust these people with some future transaction.
I think not actually. Once a dispute has been resolved, it should not
ordinarily be refered to again. All unresolved disputes should be
represented mathematically in terms of lawsuits. If you trust someone
directly because they are your friend and you know them well enough,
then you don't make that decision based on online information anyway.
And if you don't know them, then you are not even consciously involved
in your decsion to trust them. Your trust for them is calculated by
software, based on other people's trust on them which is affected by
their past transactions with them.
>> How would your response to your friend wrecking your car, be any
>> different to your friend's friend wrecking your car?
>If my friend had
>an accident (meaning they weren't negligent but something bad just
>happened), I would probably be more forgiving.
This is the problem. The whole ripple system depends upon the social
capital of your friendships. If you cannot make use of that capital
and demand payment, then said capital is useless. If someone borrows
something of mine, they know that it's their responsibility.
>Fourth, if my fofof
>wouldn't stand up to pay the bill, I wouldn't have a lot of confidence
>that my fof would, and I would feel bad if my friend (or I) had to take
>all the pain.
How would you feel if your friend's friend bought something with
ripple through you (so he owes your friend and your friend owes you
and you actually had to part with something real and tangible), and
then stopped using ripple and refused to settle up with your friend?
This is no different.
>Automatic permission propagation just seems problematic at some core
>level to me. Maybe I could get over it.
If you are using ripple at all, then you have already accepted
automatic permission propogation. That is, unless I have grossly
misunderstood how ripple works.
>For marketing purposes, you might want to find a different word
>to describe it than "sue". Describing it as "an alternative to lawsuits"
>would start to hint that it is quite different.
Well, the other term is "UOme". I also like your "distributed
lawsuits" label.
Adam Harper
>electronically. Ripplepay IOU's come to mind. I'm not sure if that's
>what you have been thinking all along or not. I would have to think
>through more carefully how well that would work.
Yes, this is what I am thinking about.
>There are all kinds of technical problems with transmitting "money" via
>email. It is generally easy to steal, and easy to replicate, so you have
>to have some crypto solution to all of that.
How does ripplepay solve this?
>As long as I wouldn't have to pay if a fofof sent spam to another fofof,
>I think I'm ok with that.
Of course not. Just as your net balance is not affected when you are
an intermediary between one user and another.
>if they email stamps are paid for
>with (or simply "are") ripplepay IOU's, that would imply that it would
>only work within your ripplepay network.
Yes. You can send emails to people outside of your ripple pay network
(by alternative means of payment) but as explained in the rest of the
paragraph you refered to, it would be a leap of blind faith and you
might not get your money back. Perhaps you don't mind paying to send
someone an email, in which case that's ok, but I think most people
would usually prefer to send emails for free but to be paid handsomely
for each spam message they receive.
>For a small amount, that makes sense. For larger amounts (like your
>suits above), the resolution costs could be shared between parties.
Why? Why not leave the responsibility for payment, with the person who
is responsible for incurring the cost? And who would you share it
with?
Also, you realise that this "complaint process" is just another term
for "UOme" or "lawsuit"?
Kevin Smith
On Sat, 2009-12-26 at 10:18 -0800, Adam Harper wrote:
> >Basically, if I were about to buy a car from someone, I could broadcast
> >a message about the transaction, and everyone in the circle of fofofof
> >would indicate how much of their own money they would be willing to put
> >up to back that transaction.
>
> Why would anyone put money up to buy your car? I think I must still
> have misunderstood.
If a good friend is buying a newer car from a reputable person that is
somewhere along my trust chain, I might put up $100 to help insure that
transaction if it went bad. If a fof is buying an ancient car from a
shady source, I probably wouldn't be willing to put up any insurance.
> I wouldn't call it a moral judgement. I associate morals with a sense
> of "ultimate" good and bad. People simply place themselves on one side
> or the other, depending on which they believe will be of greatest
> benefit to them.
Ok. I agree "morality" is a loaded word. I meant that if my friend
should pay for something they did wrong, and they did not, I would apply
social pressure on them to do the right thing. I would be making a
judgment that they are morally obligated to pay, given the specifics of
that case. Other people might choose a purely self-interested judgment
model, or any other model they choose. Regardless, peer pressure would
be a part of the system.
> I think not actually. Once a dispute has been resolved, it should not
> ordinarily be refered to again.
Generally I think reputation systems are very valuable, so discarding
(or hiding) this information seems counter-productive to me.
> >Fourth, if my fofof
> >wouldn't stand up to pay the bill, I wouldn't have a lot of confidence
> >that my fof would, and I would feel bad if my friend (or I) had to take
> >all the pain.
>
> How would you feel if your friend's friend bought something with
> ripple through you (so he owes your friend and your friend owes you
> and you actually had to part with something real and tangible), and
> then stopped using ripple and refused to settle up with your friend?
> This is no different.
It feels different to me.
In my mind, with ripple, I'm really not trusting fofof at all. I'm just
trusting my friend, and realizing that if my friend fails, I may take a
loss. Any connections that person has with other people really aren't
part of my awareness.
Authorizing the ability to borrow money (and realizing that I might end
up paying it myself) is different from vouching for someone and
potentially having to choose between paying something I shouldn't have
to vs. seeing someone go without reparations who deserves it.
I admit that I haven't used ripple a lot, and when I have it has pretty
much been just to track debts between me and someone else. I have not
yet taken advantage of the rippling, so my mind may change if/when I
ever have a chance to do so.
Kevin
Kevin Smith
> >There are all kinds of technical problems with transmitting "money" via
> >email. It is generally easy to steal, and easy to replicate, so you have
> >to have some crypto solution to all of that.
>
> How does ripplepay solve this?
The only ripplepay interface I have used is a web site, where you
specifically navigate to the site, sign in, and authorized the
transaction. That avoids all the problems with email.
> >As long as I wouldn't have to pay if a fofof sent spam to another fofof,
> >I think I'm ok with that.
>
> Of course not. Just as your net balance is not affected when you are
> an intermediary between one user and another.
Unless the complaint works its way back through the chain of trust and
lands on me. Based on the entirety of this conversation, I think that
would be unlikely with the system you are proposing.
> >For a small amount, that makes sense. For larger amounts (like your
> >suits above), the resolution costs could be shared between parties.
>
> Why? Why not leave the responsibility for payment, with the person who
> is responsible for incurring the cost? And who would you share it
> with?
Because if my friend Bob's friend Clarissa screws over Doug (who I also
know), and Clarissa is unwilling to take responsibility, and Bob is only
able or willing to cover half of the damages, it might make sense for me
to cover the other half.
>
> Also, you realise that this "complaint process" is just another term
> for "UOme" or "lawsuit"?
Lawsuit yes. UOMe, not so much. Plus, there is a difference between
rippling reputations (complaint) and rippling damages (lawsuit) or money
(UOme).
Kevin
Adam Harper
>somewhere along my trust chain, I might put up $100 to help insure that
>transaction if it went bad.
What's in it for you? You just potentially lost $100 dollars, what do
you get in return? And you still haven't told me what you mean by
"insure" or "back up". From what I do understand of what you are
saying it seems that you offer to pay $100 dollars to the buyer if the
thing that the buyer is buying turns out to be worthless. Is that what
you meant?
>Other people might choose a purely self-interested judgment model
The system is rather biased towards the self-interested judgement
model because if the accused does not pay, then the person who made
the connection is liable, hence they have a financial incentive to get
the accused to pay (unless they think that the complaint is
unreasonable, in which case they can just pass the buck up the chain).
>Regardless, peer pressure would be a part of the system.
You don't know how profound that statement is. I wonder if the
equasions for pressure in physics could be usefully applied to this
network system. Just a thought.
>Generally I think reputation systems are very valuable, so discarding
>(or hiding) this information seems counter-productive to me.
OK I'll try to put it another way. Negative reputation only encourages
someone to change alias. Positive reputation cannot be better than
"this person will never rip you off" therefore I suggest that
reputation be either a binary value (either they have a positive
reputation, or they don't have any reputation at all) or a scalar
value (how much someone is willing to pay you if they are incorrect
about the subject being honorable).
If you think more information is needed then please give me a possible
scenario in which mathematical information would be insufficient to
determine whether to trust them or not.
>It feels different to me.
OK, can't argue with that. If you want me to try to show you in your
terms how it is the same, then you will need to directly answer my
original question:
"How would you feel if your friend's friend bought something with
ripple through you (so he owes your friend and your friend owes you
and you actually had to part with something real and tangible), and
then stopped using ripple and refused to settle up with your friend?"
also, having deeply felt those feelings, what would you do?
Perhaps you haven't considered the possibility that your friend,
having discovered that his friend wrecked your car, goes out and buys
a new one exactly the same and makes it all like the old one and gives
it back to you and you never even know. How then would you feel about
your ofofof having trashed your car? I guess this is the difference
you are feeling. Money can be replaced very easily, stuff cannot. But
what if the value of stuff is measured. If before lending your car to
your friend, you have a clear agreement that if it is not returned in
exactly the same condition, he has to buy the car from you for a
particular pre-agreed amount of money. Then if he lends it to your
ofofof, do you care if it doesn't come back in one piece?
Adam Harper
>specifically navigate to the site, sign in, and authorized the
>transaction. That avoids all the problems with email.
Yes, so let's use that. My "email address" with the current system
would be harpereaves @ gmail.com @ ripplepay.com
>Unless the complaint works its way back through the chain of trust and
>lands on me.
With this system, if you are innocent and responsible you really do
have nothing to fear, with the possible exception of massive
conspiracy. If a complaint "lands" on you, and you consider that you
have indeed been irresponsible, then I don't think you would feel bad
about paying for your mistake. If you consider that you were perfectly
responsible and the complaint is invalid, then you pay nothing and
pass it up the chain to the next person. You only pay anything if you
think you should. Surely self-judgement is the ultimate justice
system.
>Because if my friend Bob's friend Clarissa screws over Doug (who I also
>know), and Clarissa is unwilling to take responsibility, and Bob is only
>able or willing to cover half of the damages, it might make sense for me
>to cover the other half.
Ah yes, this is the kind of thing I am thinking about now but it's
proving difficult to reconcile with the limit you impose on credit
when you make a ripple connection with someone - a feature that seems
well established.
>Lawsuit yes. UOMe, not so much. Plus, there is a difference between
>rippling reputations (complaint) and rippling damages (lawsuit) or money
>(UOme).
What's the difference?
Kevin Smith
> >The only ripplepay interface I have used is a web site, where you
> >specifically navigate to the site, sign in, and authorized the
> >transaction. That avoids all the problems with email.
>
> Yes, so let's use that. My "email address" with the current system
> would be harpereaves @ gmail.com @ ripplepay.com
The distinction is between sending an actual token of value (electronic
money) via email, which is hard, vs. sending a request or notification
that someone go to a web site to perform a transaction, which is easy.
If the potential-spam-email only contains a notification, then that
notification could be faked, and when you get to the ripplepay site you
might find that the 25 yen you expected to be there is not there.
I just raised the issue so you will realize it's something to be
understood and solved (or worked around). Since I don't yet understand
the specifics of your design, I can't really go farther right now.
>
> >Unless the complaint works its way back through the chain of trust and
> >lands on me.
>
> With this system, if you are innocent and responsible you really do
> have nothing to fear, with the possible exception of massive
> conspiracy. If a complaint "lands" on you, and you consider that you
> have indeed been irresponsible, then I don't think you would feel bad
> about paying for your mistake. If you consider that you were perfectly
> responsible and the complaint is invalid, then you pay nothing and
> pass it up the chain to the next person. You only pay anything if you
> think you should. Surely self-judgement is the ultimate justice
> system.
If I made some public statement that Joe is a responsible guy, and Joe
rips someone off, then I feel some moral (there's that word again) or
ethical obligation to help someone who was ripped off by Joe because
they relied on my opinion of him. If I know Joe but made no public
declarations about him, I would not feel obligated to put my own money
toward his victim, although I might choose to do so purely out of pity.
That goes back to my statement a while ago that in a system like this, I
might never vouch for anyone at all. And it is also related to my
"insurance request", where I might only vouch for Joe up to $100 but
might back Mary to the tune of $1000 because I know she is
ultra-responsible.
> >Lawsuit yes. UOMe, not so much. Plus, there is a difference between
> >rippling reputations (complaint) and rippling damages (lawsuit) or money
> >(UOme).
>
> What's the difference?
Hopefully I don't have to explain the difference between rippling
reputation (complaints) and money (lawsuit damages/UOme). As for the
difference between the second and third, for me, there is a moral
component of the second that is not present in the third.
It is possible that in practical terms, damages might be a special case
of loan, and therefore would merge into it. I haven't thought it
through, and for some reason am having trouble doing so.
Kevin
Kevin Smith
> >If a good friend is buying a newer car from a reputable person that is
> >somewhere along my trust chain, I might put up $100 to help insure that
> >transaction if it went bad.
>
> What's in it for you? You just potentially lost $100 dollars, what do
> you get in return? And you still haven't told me what you mean by
> "insure" or "back up". From what I do understand of what you are
> saying it seems that you offer to pay $100 dollars to the buyer if the
> thing that the buyer is buying turns out to be worthless. Is that what
> you meant?
Yes. Based on the people involved and the nature of the deal, I might
vouch for the seller to the tune of $1000 or $10 or nothing at all. By
declaring in advance how much protection I am willing to offer, the
buyer could make an informed decision.
>
> >Other people might choose a purely self-interested judgment model
>
> The system is rather biased towards the self-interested judgement
> model because if the accused does not pay, then the person who made
> the connection is liable, hence they have a financial incentive to get
> the accused to pay (unless they think that the complaint is
> unreasonable, in which case they can just pass the buck up the chain).
In a purely self-interested model, with no negative reputation effects,
would anyone ever pay? It seems to me that ethics (possibly pushed by
peer pressure) are the only reason anyone would ever pay. Ethics (or
morality) would be the reason that the person who made the connection
would feel obligated to pay if the accused did not.
> >Generally I think reputation systems are very valuable, so discarding
> >(or hiding) this information seems counter-productive to me.
>
> OK I'll try to put it another way. Negative reputation only encourages
> someone to change alias. Positive reputation cannot be better than
> "this person will never rip you off" therefore I suggest that
> reputation be either a binary value (either they have a positive
> reputation, or they don't have any reputation at all) or a scalar
> value (how much someone is willing to pay you if they are incorrect
> about the subject being honorable).
>
> If you think more information is needed then please give me a possible
> scenario in which mathematical information would be insufficient to
> determine whether to trust them or not.
In the real world, prospective tenants apply to rent an apartment. Their
credit score might be poor, indicating they would be a bad risk.
However, the whole story is that their spouse got sick and they got laid
off at the same time, so they lost their insurance and couldn't pay
their $100k medical bill, ruining their credit report.
When I buy something from ebay, rather than just looking at the number
of negative reports, I try to read all of the negative comments, to see
whether they were legitimate complaints or not. Or maybe all of the
complaints were about lateness which I don't care about for this
transaction. Or maybe there were only 2 complaints but they showed that
this person could not be trusted in any circumstance.
To make a reputation judgment, I prefer to have all the details.
>
> >It feels different to me.
>
> OK, can't argue with that. If you want me to try to show you in your
> terms how it is the same, then you will need to directly answer my
> original question:
>
> "How would you feel if your friend's friend bought something with
> ripple through you (so he owes your friend and your friend owes you
> and you actually had to part with something real and tangible), and
> then stopped using ripple and refused to settle up with your friend?"
>
> also, having deeply felt those feelings, what would you do?
I think the difference formed in my mind originally because I didn't
grasp that my liability limit was capped by my ripple limit. With that
rule in place, I am increasingly thinking that it does fold in as a
special case. I have trusted Bob with $100, and whether he spends it on
beer or invests it in a house or loses it in a lawsuit (whether his
fault or someone that he trusted), it still just becomes a $100 debt.
> Perhaps you haven't considered the possibility that your friend,
> having discovered that his friend wrecked your car, goes out and buys
> a new one exactly the same and makes it all like the old one and gives
> it back to you and you never even know. How then would you feel about
> your ofofof having trashed your car? I guess this is the difference
> you are feeling. Money can be replaced very easily, stuff cannot. But
> what if the value of stuff is measured. If before lending your car to
> your friend, you have a clear agreement that if it is not returned in
> exactly the same condition, he has to buy the car from you for a
> particular pre-agreed amount of money. Then if he lends it to your
> ofofof, do you care if it doesn't come back in one piece?
I think this is a bit too distant from the question at hand. The "in
advance" part sounds like my "insurance request". And it's not clear
whether the car is still an analogy or if we are now really talking
about using your system to "insure" a car borrowing. Plus there may be a
difference for me if it's my car vs. my friend's car that my other
friend's friend borrowed, without my explicit knowledge or approval,
based on some vague social network "He is my friend" setting.
I definitely don't like the boolean "friend or not friend" offered by
some sites. You seem to be proposing a monetary rating (he is a $10
friend but she is a $10000 friend). I seem to want the ability to
describe the friendship more fully, like: "This person is my friend in a
social setting, but I have concerns about how responsible they are. I
think they have the best intentions, but don't always live up to them. I
would trust them to borrow $50 from me, but I wouldn't recommend that
anyone else do so." Of course, I'm also pretty sure I wouldn't want to
make a statement like that publicly.
Kevin
Adam Harper
In the process of replying to your last two posts I realised that I
have made quite a large error. The complaint system would have to be
somewhat separate from the ripple style currency system. It would be
more appropriate to integrate such a system into a marketplace system
which utilizes ripple as a resource.
I also realised that our debate has gone way off topic and that nobody
else is part of it. The original purpose of this thread was to locate
and connect the brothers and sisters. This function has already been
fulfilled. The other members of the "ripple family" have not reached
anything like the stage of development that ripple protocol has (i.e.
there are no accessible prototypes).
This thread was not meant to hammer out the fine details of SPECIFIC
parallel projects. Therefore although many of your questions are
unanswered and this discussion is therefore incomplete, I strongly
suggest that we close it, thereby reserving this thread for future
participants to discuss their discoveries of parallel projects as
outlined by the first post.
If it is decided that any of these projects will be developed by the
ripple team, then this discussion should be re-opened in a new thread,
at which point I would of course respond thoroughly to your last two
posts.
Adam
matabele
relationships has worried me for some time.
A person forms separate social and commercial relationships,
exhibiting entirely different social behaviour for the two types of
relationship. Commercial relationships are based upon 'public trust'
or reputation - whereas social relationships are based upon personal
trust, faith and love.
Social relationships will not in general stand the stress of
foreclosure upon a debt. You either have a social relationship or you
don't - social relationships must be maintained at any cost.
It would, therefore, appear desirable that a payment routing protocol
be based upon public reputation (some kid of rating system), rather
than personal social relationships.
> > >http://www.petekrawczyk.com/lj_connect/doesnot seem to be quite at
> ...
>
> read more »
Jeffrey Cliff
And if the social relationship gets to the point where foreclosure is necessary i the first place, something has really gone wrong, just as in the case of a business forclosure.
The way that you're talking about it, It just means that you take that sort of thing very serious, and that kind of intent, that force of will can be explicitly acknowledged by the other party, unlike in the modern system, to a good degree of accuracy. I mean to say, it's harmful to social relationships but at the same time creates more wealth, by giving us a new way to use existing social trust in a globally efficient way.
It could make sense for you to have a ripple account for your professional and private life, or for you to ONLY use it for professional purposes. That's up to you. Personally, I'll accept some risk of being burned/burning friends for access to capital, because I trust myself to in the long run be productive, to make good on my bets & debt(and even if my friends *don't*, at least I gave them a hand). If there are problems in the meanwhile I can work it out with people.
jeff
> ...
>
> read more »
Ryan Fugger
can accept obligations from anyone or anything with whom you have any
kind of relationship and/or contract. For example, you could
re-create the existing financial system on top of Ripple.
The interesting thing for me, though, is how we seem to divide
ourselves into two entities, one social and one commercial, as you
say, how those two entities conflict with one another, and how they
might be more united in purpose for greater general harmony. But I
certainly wouldn't want to push this kind of unification on anyone who
didn't want those two spheres unified. Who's to say what will promote
greater harmony? It's just something to try I guess.
Ryan
Erik of Seattle
From a socioeconomic standpoint I think forming trading partners with
our immediate friends, family and community members is exactly what is
needed... that is, to re-localize trading and take complete
responsibility for each of our transactions.
The problem is that we are inundated with top-down flow of money from
the feds->big banks->corps->local offices->employee. It's always a
top-down hierarchy. That is why our economy is so choked when the big
banks cut back on their lending. Then we are forced to accept the big-
brother control of our currency and livelihoods. That is also why the
last in the list to receive is always ignored during financial
crises. When a link in the chain of money distribution becomes broken
the last link in the chain will always fall, no matter where the
break.
Who gives us the right to use their money vs. who gives us the right
to own and distribute our own personal money or IOUs that represents
shares in our own stock. We do. That should be our right just as the
1st and 2nd ammendment are our rights too. As soon as we give that
away then our financial and greater lives are in the hands of others.
Money started essentially as "trust" and "good faith" and has simply
become perverse. Over the last millennia western civilization has
lost touch with the real meaning of money and currency. first, It
started with barter, one good for another good. It represented trust
and mutual acceptance. Secondly, it became standardized barter. One
coin was worth the metal that was the coin was printed on and it was
inscribed with the seal that represented it's proper and certified
weight. The recipient didn't necessarily need or want the metal in
the coin but he/she knew that it could be traded back as a
standardized quantity against a larger, trusted, outside 3rd party.
Thirdly, the coin was no longer printed on valuable metal. Paper
could be used too because it represented the trust that there were
valuable real goods (gold or silver) that the bill represented. The
trust by the merchant of that 3rd party (issuer of the bill) was all
that was needed to make the transaction desirable. That slanted
things in favor of the merchants but restricted reciprocal trade since
they were selling an unknown good to the buyer but they were getting a
known quantity, the promise of gold. lastly, money became worth the
trust in it's potential for growth through the issuing of T-bills
instead of the promise of gold. that made the promise a "virtual"
promise that was based on mere speculation and that is still where we
have today. It's a perversion of trust that serves the top first each
and every time you put faith into the dollar, or some other
centralized top-down currency.
But we are currently near the ignition of a new economic
enlightenment. When Adam Smith, one of the first and most significant
economists wrote the "Wealth of Nations" in 1776, He caused a wave of
change that fueled the industrial revolution and brought relative
abundance to simple wage-earning workers for the first time in
history. Now that we have computers and wireless communication we,
for the first time, have the technology to implement individual
currency, by us, and for us. Just as our government is supposed to be
"for and of the people" so now can our currency system and economy.
Earlier it would have been too difficult for each individual to manage
their own currency like a treasury manager or a CFO balances the value
of their stock's shares. Now we can add, multiply and divide rapidly
enough to calculate the value per share and still have time to do
digital signature and verification checking with a tiny cell phone in
real-time that will be needed for this type of peer-to-peer
transaction. This will unleash a new post industrial renaissance. In
fact, that renaissance has already begun, as by the democracy of
information via the web and more specifically as in google, which
strangely enough, we are benefiting from as we read this right now.
But the coming digital economy will be unlike anything currently
anticipated by economists, business leaders or politicians. It will
be a movement from the bottom up. A web of trust that connects us all
as neighbor to neighbor to friend, to family member to dear
acquaintance. We will remember that trade and money represent the
pure and sacred value of trust and solidarity. Something you can
depend upon. Something that you can support and aid and be a part of
while mutually benefiting each other and simultaneously each other's
immediate web of trust and so on. It will no longer require the trust
and speculation of a single currency system that is balanced and
stacked so high and being pulled ever so slightly by minuscule
percentage points as to keep it balanced tottering upright and trying
to avoid toppling into chaos. It will be resistant to out-of-control
bust and boom cycles that afflict the bottom and reward the top. It
will be the era of the pro-sumer vs. the consumer where each
participant will be a producer that can work and even produce goods in
a supply chain and conduct trade to facilitate and maximize quality of
life as the individual sees fit... and can do so without government
instituted bank notes or cash or permissions or traditional but
demographically skewed credit checks. It will inherently provide
social and environmental self-regulation that gives local steakholders
the power to distribute and use their goods and resources and natural
environment in a way that best serves local needs, thereby leading to
a natural environmentally intelligent management through "enviro-
localism" that is completely alien to our current "local-is-last" and
"global is first" economy. It will usher in a new era of true
economic, environmental, and social responsibility.
But basically we need a trading system that is something other than
top-down and community currency is just another watered-down form of
"top-down". We need true "bottom-up".
An interesting article is Titled: "Everyone a Banker" published by
economic researchers at Yale:
I just don't know if Ripple can do this though.
Thomas Hartman
:)
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Erik of Seattle
>>Social relationships will not in general stand the stress of
>>foreclosure upon a debt. You either have a social relationship or you
>>don't - social relationships must be maintained at any cost.
Superficially, I agree with your sentiment but I think there are some
gross oversimplifications made by these assertions.
In a developed economic system foreclosure upon a debt, or credit
clearing can happen in any number of ways.
1. If the timing is inconvenient to the debtor then they can sell to
the next highest bidder in their network.
2. They can borrow to pay the costs or resell the debt to somebody
else in the network.
3. Using a reserve-based system the debt can be settled and the
reserve divided up... in a last-case scenario.
4. The debt-holder had the opportunity to weigh the risks in the first
place and had the chance to either gain, lose or break even. Like
life, It's only perfect in it's imperfection. You've played the game
and learned a lesson. It's only personal if you think the debtor was
reckless with your trust in them. Now you know better who to trust
and not to trust.
further, If the debtor or note-issuer dealt out too many units to a
single debtee then the debtor effectively mismanaged their own
currency and made a bad choice.
you said that:
> A person forms separate social and commercial relationships,
> exhibiting entirely different social behavior for the two types of
> relationship. Commercial relationships are based upon 'public trust'
> or reputation - whereas social relationships are based upon personal
> trust, faith and love.
For this system to properly work then the definition of "commercial"
will be radically changed. Instead of a cold and rationalistic
transaction of institutionalized and marketized commodities between
strangers who know little of each other "commercial" will come to be
known as trade between trusted partners of a reciprocal nature. The
purpose isn't to preserve the current system of "Commercial
Relationships" or "Public Reputation" associated with business as it
is today. No, the purpose is to pioneer a financial system that works
for everybody equally, can more intelligently adapt itself to the
needs of economic participants and our finite resources and that
provides a better mechanism to manage our natural, environmental, and,
social responsibility. If this system dissolves the superficial
"reputation" quality of commerce today then "reputation" will reappear
as a localized trust rather than a mass-media-driven frenzy or
dehumanization of these "reputed" avatars.
you said:
> > > Making money personal and informal is not part of my vision. I thought
> > > the entire POINT of money was that it wasn't personal. Money is about
> > > applying measurement to the value of something. The measurement is
> > > subjective but once made can be compared to someone elses measurement
> > > of the value of something else. That's the point of money. I
> > > personally would never use a system which tracks favors. If I owe
> > > something to someone, I want to know how much, and visa versa.
Yes, I agree, money is about applying subjective measurement to
something. It's only formalized through the mutually trusted 3rd
party (the US gov. in our case). But money doesn't need to be that
way. It can be an exchange that is shared between two mutually
trusted parties where the trust is actually based on real knowledge
and experience. That trust represents the context to the exchange
that is lacking in today's market economy. Bankers and insurers
attempt to do that through risk management but they can only calculate
how much they don't know, not how much they do know.
If your friend gave you his trust because he believed in you then
wouldn't you accept it? It doesn't matter whether the trust is in the
form of a word or a handshake or a credit or a share. Just that he
could help you by trusting you and you could help him in return.
That's a win-win! That's what economies are theoretically for, not
for making a select few filthy rich. The confusion happens when you
think that he's trusting you but you don't need to trust him in
return. He would be effectively buying shares in you while you gain
partial access (or trust) to the commodities that he has.
Joshua Zeidner
these ideas sounds great, but how do you explain the failure of a
multitude of national currencies while only a few are considered
valuable?
-jmz
Kevin Smith
On Mon, 2010-02-01 at 00:27 -0800, Erik of Seattle wrote:
> Money started essentially as "trust" and "good faith" and has simply
> become perverse. Over the last millennia western civilization has
> lost touch with the real meaning of money and currency. first, It
> started with barter, one good for another good. It represented trust
> and mutual acceptance. Secondly, it became standardized barter. One
> coin was worth the metal that was the coin was printed on and it was
> inscribed with the seal that represented it's proper and certified
> weight. The recipient didn't necessarily need or want the metal in
> the coin but he/she knew that it could be traded back as a
> standardized quantity against a larger, trusted, outside 3rd party.
First, there was a step between pure barter and government coins. People
would trade standardized goods as money. Whether beaver pelts, salt,
pieces of jade, or gold nuggets. Basically, the most widely desired
non-perishable good would tend to become money.
Then, precious-metal coins weren't as centralized as you imply here. It
wasn't just the mint that recognized the value of the metal. The
recipient knew that it could be traded back as a standardized quantity
to anyone who accepted the value of the metal (which was just about any
merchant). Coins were just recognizable and verifiable standard weights
of metal.
There are several cases of bottom-up (non-governmental) coin production,
and there were no hard geopolitical boundaries for the coins. Spanish
"pieces of eight" and German "thalers" *were* the money of the American
colonies, leading to the US dollar being defined as being the average
amount of silver in these foreign coins that were circulating at the
time.
I understand (and like) this "hard money" philosophy. And I understand
(and like) the "money as debt" philosophy. I still haven't figured out
how they interact, or which is more appropriate in what contexts and for
what purposes.
Kevin
John Paul Lewicke
helps facilitate even coercive transactions.
Nick Szabo has a very good discussion on how money could have been
introduced as an efficient technology for taxation at
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2009/04/money-and-efficiency-of-plunder.html
. Voluntary transactions, a non-coercive medium of exchange, and
distributed systemic control are important normative principles, but
they may not apply very well historically.
JP
Eric Brigham
Chris Wagner
On Mon, 2010-02-01 at 13:44 -0700, Eric Brigham wrote:
> Before Ripple can become mainstream, it needs to be disgustingly easy
> for ANYONE to use (internet connected or otherwise).
It depends on what you mean by "mainstream". You mention PayPal; I
would consider it mainstream, and it became popular around the time most
people were just discovering what email was.
> Does anyone have suggestions about how to properly bridge this
> technological/educational gap?
I've said this here more than once before, but I think the best thing we
could do is, start using ripple *now* -- amongst ourselves. Then we
will have more motivation and precedent for reaching out to the hoi
polloi.
All we need is a sort of virtual marketplace, and even the current
Ripple implementation at ripplepay.com could probably suffice for
routing the payments.
> Are any of you currently making your livelihood from ripple or other
> ripple-like projects/businesses?
I've been meaning to mention, on this list, a project of mine... It's
not directly Ripple-related, but the idea is to get people using "sound
money" today: http://www.murrayslist.org/ . I am not making money from
this project, and at this point I would just be happy if people use it.
(Please consider posting!)
One thing I've been considering is adding a Ripple-based payment
mechanism, advertising it as a payment option on this site. That way,
people could begin exchanging goods and services without having to risk
losing or bothering to acquire real, valuable bullion. And, we "out of
the box thinkers" could start using this system *now* (or, just as soon
as we get the technical side in place). We can begin by selling old
books, old computer parts, and generally things that wouldn't result in
much devastation if others were to not keep their obligations.
Chris W.
Eric Brigham
It depends on what you mean by "mainstream". You mention PayPal; I
would consider it mainstream, and it became popular around the time most
people were just discovering what email was.
I've been meaning to mention, on this list, a project of mine... It's
not directly Ripple-related, but the idea is to get people using "sound
money" today: http://www.murrayslist.org/ . I am not making money from
this project, and at this point I would just be happy if people use it.
(Please consider posting!)
Erik of Seattle
> I understand (and like) this "hard money" philosophy. And I understand
> (and like) the "money as debt" philosophy. I still haven't figured out
> how they interact, or which is more appropriate in what contexts and for
> what purposes.
>
> Kevin
If you are simply interested in maximizing your return then there is
no right answer. That is consistently what economics are misused
for. They should be used to create a higher quality of life, not
through the quantity of assets, but through employment of your unique
knowledge, of your unique persona, that your gifts and talents and
strengths can bring into the world. The goal isn't to gain material
wealth. The goal of economics is to unleash the near limitless
potential of abundance that already exists naturally all around us.
And our jobs are not to maximize our takings but to participate in an
evolutionary process where we are merely one unique part in the whole.
If you are worried that you don't have any useful application of your
wealth, that you don't possess the knowledge or self confidence or
opportunity to personally generate prosperity for yourself and others
using your existing resources then that is when people buy gold.
Because it buys them time to figure out what to do with it. At that
point you are playing a zero-sum game. But even that action would
provide useful because it would inadvertantly trigger a flag in the
price of gold that would help serve as an indicator of economic
instability (as the price of gold went up). If you can actively
manage your resources and apply your unique intelligence to it and
thereby your "added value" then you are creating wealth for yourself
and others.
Couldn't you simply view each transaction as a breath in a financial
lifetime? I mean whether you are buying gold or credits from your
friend you are choosing to participate in the management of your trust
network, put providing "added value" to your resources through the
application of knowledge against those resources.
An example: A friend of mine wants to leave construction management
and start a new career in IT. He's willing to pay thousands of
dollars to Pheonix university to get an IT degree. From knowing him
personally and knowing something about Information Technology, and
Pheonix U I can tell that degree and career in IT wouldn't be good for
him. I don't have the heart to tell him, buddy don't even try it.
But when he comes asking me for a loan to initiate his schooling I
will say no. The career isn't suited to him nor would he make good
money at it. But, I do know that he is a good salesman and enjoys
sweet talking people and is very good at putting on a professional
persona. If he asked me for a loan to start a real estate brokerage
or a car dealership I might pitch in. Not out of pity but out of
solidarity and because as he benefitted at it then I would make money
off him too. So I can put to use the knowledge gained from my
relationship with him and turn it into a mutually benefiting
exchange. A traditional school loan or loan servicing company would
never be able to do anything approaching that.
Erik of Seattle
out a usable system for independent p2p based currency treasury
management. The system would offer web-based graphical management and
likely api integration of financial transactions for web developers
and mobile developers. Then some kind of practical marketplace needs
to be established to demonstrate the system so I've got
peopleconomy.org. Nothing is anywhere near demonstration because I
really need to work with somebody else on this. As a part-time PHP/
mysql/joomla developer I can do alot myself but not everything. Plus
I'm still not sure if ripple pay could play a part in this.
But I kinda agree about the technological/educational gap. Just
trying to explain this idea to most of my friends is a real uphill
battle. Even if you go to people who know economics. It's almost
like.. the more they know about economics and business the less open
they are to the idea. It's just too radical for them. Even the
alternative money and community currency movement people have a hard
time grasping the idea that community currency is just another form of
top-down money, or middle-down money. Instead we need to turn the
whole thing upside down and make it bottom-up money. Plus, most of
these movements are created because somebody else wants to be at the
top and they think it should be themselves. But I think if somebody
can grasp the idea that they have the right to monetize their assets
and sell their own shares... effectively issuing their own currency
then we have a good starting point. Craigslist people might be able
to get that.
That is one reason why I've turned to this online forum. There are
still so few places in the world to share an idea like this.
On Feb 1, 12:44 pm, Eric Brigham <ebrig...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think that Erik of Seattle has painted a great picture, and I can't wait
> to make it a reality. I thoroughly enjoy discussing and hypothesizing about
> an ideal transactional system (something like Ripple), however I wanted to
> point out a couple things and ask a clarifying question or two:
>
> The fact that we are even talking about such advanced concepts as an ideal
> transactional system places us, I would guess, in the upper echelon of "out
> of the box thinkers." However, if we are to truly to create widespread
> change our solution would need to be adopted by the hoi polloi. This
> includes simpletons (no offense intended), current government workers,
> bankers, etc. I don't know about you guys, but I cannot picture any of my
> simple friends (ie: garbage men, waiters, etc) tracking their transactions
> in some web based platform (half of them aren't even on facebook or other
> social medium yet). Currently they operate in cash, or a credit/atm card
> (possibly paypal if they are very sophisticated). Before Ripple can become
> mainstream, it needs to be disgustingly easy for ANYONE to use (internet
> connected or otherwise). Does anyone have suggestions about how to properly
> bridge this technological/educational gap?
>
> Lastly, I'm ready to put my "money" where my mouth is. I'm fed up with the
> monopolistic money supply we all currently operate with and would like to
> start channeling my career efforts towards a more honest and fair
> transactional system. Are any of you currently making your livelihood from
> ripple or other ripple-like projects/businesses?
>
> --Eric
>
> On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 12:48 PM, John Paul Lewicke <jplewi...@gmail.com>wrote:> It's also important to keep in mind that lowering transaction costs
> > helps facilitate even coercive transactions.
> > Nick Szabo has a very good discussion on how money could have been
> > introduced as an efficient technology for taxation at
>
> >http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2009/04/money-and-efficiency-of-plun...
> > . Voluntary transactions, a non-coercive medium of exchange, and
> > distributed systemic control are important normative principles, but
> > they may not apply very well historically.
>
> > JP
>
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> > "Ripple users" group.
> > To post to this group, send email to rippl...@googlegroups.com.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> > rippleusers...@googlegroups.com<rippleusers%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>
Annette Loudon
If ripple gets going people can start offering stuff / services on their local Craigslist with prices listed in a ripple-based currency and bait people to learn more. To get things rolling it might be best to focus efforts around a vibrant Craigslist where a handful of ripple folks are already based.
I'm going to start listing LETS offers on our local tradingpost site (gumtree.com.au) as bait to let people know we exist. I'll let you know how that goes over the next few months. Growing membership isn't our main focus right now (we're more interested in getting the exiting 600 members trading more), but it's easy enough to do, so I may as well get started.
- annette (from Sydney LETS http://www.auslets.org/sydney)
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rippleusers...@googlegroups.com.
Kevin Smith
> But I kinda agree about the technological/educational gap. Just
> trying to explain this idea to most of my friends is a real uphill
> battle. Even if you go to people who know economics. It's almost
> like.. the more they know about economics and business the less open
> they are to the idea. It's just too radical for them.
Try this:
"It's like running a bar tab."
Followed by:
"And sometimes the bartender will waive your tab if you do some work for
him."
And:
"And if you you owe the bar $20, and the bar owes Fred $20 because he
repaired their ceiling, and Fred owes you $20 that he borrowed last
week, the system can automatically cancel out the circle of debts."
In my mind, the first and second parts are the most valuable, and the
third (the actual rippling) is more of a bonus. Even the simplest folks
understand the concept of running a tab, or owing a friend some money.
It seems easier to grasp in a physical world setting. And I think it
would be easier to build a community of 50 active users in person than
via email or the web.
Kevin
Kevin Smith
> If you are worried that you don't have any useful application of your
> wealth, that you don't possess the knowledge or self confidence or
> opportunity to personally generate prosperity for yourself and others
> using your existing resources then that is when people buy gold.
My primary interest in gold is to accumulate wealth when things are
going well, in the hopes that I can call on that wealth later when
things aren't going well. Or when I'm old and tired. Gold seems like it
might hold value better than dollars (no guarantee!). IOU's would also
hold their value well, if denominated in something other than dollars.
Independent of that, I appreciate having a standard unit of measure of
value, to avoid needing to barter directly for everything (the "double
coincidence" problem). Dollars are ok, and gold/silver could work, but
if I live in an area where national currency and precious metals are in
short supply (which I hope to do later this year), it would be nice to
trade in "hours" or "widgets" or whatever instead.
Both purposes (wealth and transactions) can be served by sound money
like gold or silver, and both purposes can be served by IOU's. It's
interesting to me how these two forms of money which seem almost
opposite end up being so similar. Both seem superior to fiat currency
for both purposes.
That's more where I was headed.
Kevin
Erik of Seattle
>would be easier to build a community of 50 active users in person than
>via email or the web.
>Kevin
I agree. But you kinda need a computer/management system to keep
track of transactions, account balances, shares, value per share and
so on.
It could really backfire if you tried starting something like this
using a globalized marketing "ebay" kind of approach. A bunch of
people, not knowing what they are doing, spending too much,
mismanaging things, or extending trust to complete strangers or people
playing like it as a gamble to merely cash-out as soon as they get
$1000 worth of credit. It could very quickly degrade or wipe out and
destroy the integrity of the young system and it's emerging
reputation. We need a core of idealists who use the system for
practical purposes and understand what they are doing. From there it
can network out quite nicely through word-of-mouth or whatever.
One thought. Etsy sellers have handmade goods, understand business
relationships, and managing small craft inventory and so on... They
might be a good second wave of users.
Annette Loudon
Hours are pretty constant - 24 per day per person as far as I can tell.
I also like the way trading in hours demonstrates an idea I came across in "Your Money of Your Life" of asking yourself how many hours of your life you would pay for something. It's a great way to shift thinking about value.
Sydney LETS trade all services in 20 operas/hr (operas roughly equate to AU$ for trading of goods) so it's sort of timebank-ish in that regard. It's a pretty cool thing. Very hard to get your head around valuing everyone's time equally, but really lovely once you get there. It attracts a really interesting array of folks as well. Weeds out most greed-centric people from the start.
20ops/hr works pretty well internally, though I suspect there's a substantial degree of withholding services perceived as more valuable. The main concern is that when trade with other systems that use market-value pricing for services we are at risk of being a bit exploited. It hasn't become a problem yet, so we're rolling with it for now.
- a
Eric Brigham
>practical purposes and understand what they are doing. From there it
>can network out quite nicely through word-of-mouth or whatever.
Thomas Hartman
"What's in it for me?"
"Ripple is a good way to get new clients" (for freelancers)
"Ripple is a good way to barter your stuff" (flea market junkies)
"Ripple is a good way to meet people... get good deals"
Now, I am not actually certain if any of the above is true for a
future ripple, certainly not for the existing proof of concept. But
something like that better be true if we are going to try to sell
people on it.
> --
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>
>
--
Eric Brigham
Erik of Seattle
>that many of us idealists could do with one another. I think any good
>system needs to start with a diverse group of products/services (preferably
>ones of known and reputable value). Basically we need a doctor, farmer,
>lawyer, etc rather than just a bunch of idealists ;). Any thoughts about
>how we could go about recruiting a more well rounded core network?
>
It sounds like you are suggesting a replacement economic system. I
actually doubt that top-down will go away completely, although
possible. But that the new system (bottom-up) would be supplemental
and fill in the gaps thereby giving participants more options. It
will take time to grow and mature until it gets more mainstream.
>I think once you have to explain it this way, you lose a lot of people.
>"What's in it for me?"
>"Ripple is a good way to get new clients" (for freelancers)
>"Ripple is a good way to barter your stuff" (flea market junkies)
>"Ripple is a good way to meet people... get good deals"
>
>Thomas Hartman
Yes, services, marketplace, and socializing! That is it.
My solution is to foster a local marketplace that caters to a
specialized lifestyle of people. Just for example, think of: 20yr
old socially active vegetarians. They can eat and potluck together,
trade homegrown vegetables, trade massage services for yoga
instruction, carpool, trade goods like bicycles or whatever. Since
they already have similar lifestyles they are more likely to have
similar taste and the possessions of one are more likely desirable for
the others. So if you actively market and promote such a community
with an online trading component that encourages participation and
includes both real-world, face-to-face contact (like once a week
potluck meeting) along with the online accounting. Then the
participants can begin to think about their role in the marketplace
community as entrepreneurial and so the individual participant could
be encouraged to create a group of their own that is centered around,
say, gardening. Another goes out and starts a group centered around
cyclists, another around yoga and India and so on. If the "middle-
man" in the chain of social relationships can skim a tiny % of the
transaction cost then there is a natural incentive for promoting and
maximizing your social connections, thereby growing the system.
Then some people can specialize in marketing and promoting the groups
and getting them off the ground while effectively getting commission
off each transaction. Others might prefer to keep their day jobs and
just attend the meeting/marketplace potluck once a week to get cheap
goods.
So the participant and the organizer is one and the same. Goodbye
consumer! Hello pro-sumer world!
I think hours is a bad way to go. Who would bother to spend time and
money to specialize their skills if they all got paid the same? It's
better if each participant kept their own personal currency and had
the right to request any repayment they chose for their work. Mine
would be Erik-bucks yours might be Thomas-bucks or Annette-bucks or
EricB-bucks. Then if you ever needed to calculate for a transaction
you just figure the "sum of assets" over "sum of total credits"
calculation and evaluate in an agreed upon (or several agreed upon)
standards. You could, for the purpose of the transaction, standardize
"your-bucks" to dollars, or to ounces of gold, or even better,
calculate the worth of "your-bucks" in context to your shared social
network since you both have a shared trust in your existing network.
It sounds complicated at first but that is basically like quantifying
the resistance (impedence modelling) through an electronic network and
solved nicely with matrices or distributed computing techniques. That
would give you the ratio of shared value between the "buyer" and the
"seller" (or the investor and the investee, however you want to see
it) and each would know how much they'd gain or lose. The only catch
is the security, verification, and digital signing to do this on a
truly scalable, standardized network but individually they are all
developed technologies. I still don't know if ripple pay, as it is
evolving, could do this though.
This "impedence modeling" kind of thinking is what got me into
alternative currency in the first place. I started in artificial
intelligence 10 years ago. Looking back, "Currency" came from "Trust
networks" came from "social weighting" came from "context engines"
came from "semantic networks" came from "artificial intelligence and
suggestive profiling" came from "computer engineering".
The semantic web people are doing the same thing that we are doing but
they are coming at in from intelligent web searching perspective.
The data sharing people are doing this with darknets and torrents.
Amazon is doing this with product profiling
Netflix is doing this with movie preferences
And I'm sure the list goes on and grows each day.
On Feb 1, 6:18 pm, Eric Brigham <ebrig...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Agreed.
>
> On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 7:17 PM, Thomas Hartman <
>
> thomashartm...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> > I think once you have to explain it this way, you lose a lot of people.
>
> > "What's in it for me?"
>
> > "Ripple is a good way to get new clients" (for freelancers)
>
> > "Ripple is a good way to barter your stuff" (flea market junkies)
>
> > "Ripple is a good way to meet people... get good deals"
>
> > Now, I am not actually certain if any of the above is true for a
> > future ripple, certainly not for the existing proof of concept. But
> > something like that better be true if we are going to try to sell
> > people on it.
>
> > On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 5:00 PM, Kevin Smith <kevi...@qualitycode.com>
> > rippleusers...@googlegroups.com<rippleusers%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>
> > .
> > > For more options, visit this group at
> >http://groups.google.com/group/rippleusers?hl=en.
>
> > --
> > Need somewhere to put your code?http://patch-tag.com
> > Want to build a webapp?http://happstack.com
>
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> > "Ripple users" group.
> > To post to this group, send email to rippl...@googlegroups.com.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> > rippleusers...@googlegroups.com<rippleusers%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>
Sepp
core group. The problem seems to be that we're geographically
separated and thus many of our offerings are not realistically
transferrable to other core group members who live half way across the
world. For instance, I am sitting here in Rome, Italy, and sometimes
in the Azores islands which are Portuguese and located roughly half
way between Europe and America on the mid Atlantic ridge.
Perhaps the best way to start would be a website like
which works with a generic currency called "credits" and where what's
for sale is put up for auction. One could increase possibilities by
allowing both auction items and fixed-price stuff and services.
One thing on listia however, that I think would be very limiting, is
the list of "prohibited auction items" found at
We all have our moral codes but if we start cutting out a sizeable
swath of possible trades between individuals because we deem them
morally not to our taste, the system would be at a substantial
disadvantage vs. the cash economy where anonymity allows any kind of
exchange deemed desirable between buyer and seller.
A real "bottom up" economy should not have limitations of a moral
kind. What is acceptable should be only determined by those agreeing
to any particular exchange.
On Feb 2, 3:16 am, Eric Brigham <ebrig...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thomas Hartman
portland, or seattle, or berlin, or vancouver, or anywhere in sweden?
I just sent out an invitation link to this list to edit a google docs
spreadsheet of names and locations. I'm not sure if it's actually
publicly editable so it's a bit of an experiment as well :)
> --
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>
>
--
Need somewhere to put your code? http://patch-tag.com
Kevin Smith
your examples do.
At some point, you also need to answer the "What?" question. There are
too many open source project web sites that answer the why but don't say
anything about the what, or vice versa.
It's the classic marketing "features" vs. "benefits" distinction.
Kevin
Chris Wagner
> A real "bottom up" economy should not have limitations of a moral
> kind. What is acceptable should be only determined by those agreeing
> to any particular exchange.
Of course, but that doesn't mean the first Ripple-based marketplace
should allow things generally considered immoral. The beauty of Ripple
is that, if it were to reach its potential as a distributed system,
there could be porno-centric websites or what have you and they need not
be directly connected to other Ripple-based marketplaces/economies.
Erik of Seattle
This is important because if we can figure out how to explain this to
the average person then we can get our friends involved too and
actually start creating these trading networks where we are.
I actually managed to get one friend of mine to understand the idea
last week. Strangely enough his demographics are completely opposite
to what you'd expect. He's a musician and a black man in his early
60's who worked as a cook his entire life. It took about 25 minutes
to explain the idea, and I survived a barrage of doubtful questions,
each that I answered from him like... "how is one guy gonna trust the
other?" or... "why doesn't one guy just walk away with the goods and
never fulfill his end of the bargain?" But he did understand the
motivation for a system like this when I explained the hierarchy of
fiat money flow from top to bottom and how it's like a chain where any
link that breaks will always cause the last link to fall but that it
doesn't need to be that way. That each of us has the right to issue
our own money and when we start doing that the world will be turned
upside down and everything is gonna change.
I've been evolving the explanation of it in several steps like this:
1. Motivation for change- I explain how top-down is bad, the last link
in the chain always falls. Then I explain the current lending crisis
and recession and unemployment as an example. And briefly explain that
"bottom-up" would be better. That usually triggers a barrage of
questions, sometimes I can get through them and sometimes one question
turns into a hundred and we run out of time.
2. Alternative economy- Then I explain briefly the history of money
from barter to gold to what we have today. Then what we could be
doing from truly bottom-up. Along with that is that money is
essentially trust and solidarity and that each of us must have the
right to make our own money.
3. It gets more complicated here trying to explain how to build your
currency from the bottom-up by building your own treasury and the data
system needed to manage it and deal out credits/shares...
4. It gets more complicated again when trying to explain how to
conduct transactions and do exchanges between currencies. That is
actually a new and ripe topic of discussion currently in another topic
in this group.
5. Describing natural reward and punishment
6. How to get the system to grow in large enough size and number of
users to become practical for daily use. Creating incentive for
promotion through "middle-man" siphon reward.
7. Then all the technical issues like:
a. How to deal with security issues, connectivity issues, dropouts.
b. How to standardize and manage and load balance the network
c. What technology to implement the system in ex: smartphones,
websites, telephone systems...
d. security, digital signatures, verification, error checking,
encryption
And I'm sure the list goes on.
>Of course, but that doesn't mean the first Ripple-based marketplace
>should allow things generally considered immoral. The beauty of Ripple
>is that, if it were to reach its potential as a distributed system,
>there could be porno-centric websites or what have you and they need not
>be directly connected to other Ripple-based marketplaces/economies.
>
> Chris Wagner
Well, immoral is difficult to universally define. What might be
immoral in one culture or subculture might be perfectly moral in
another one. I think we all know this but just an example or two:
In papua new guinea its considered loving for a parent to stroke the
genitals of their baby or young child. Here it's petaphelia and
immoral.
What about Female mutilation? Parts of rural Africa, good, western
world, bad.
The system shouldn't impose any code of morality upon the users. It's
up to the users of the system to develop their own morality and be
naturally rewarded or punished through the evolution of the system and
their own network. That is one of the beauties of the system. It can
actually reward individualism and uniqueness instead of forcing
standards and conformity, be it, ethical, or lifestyle or religious or
whatever... upon it's users the way our hierarchic economy currently
does.
But, if the system were "seeded" by people of a particular morality,
then it might, especially early on, have a slight bias in that
direction. It certainly would for the network "neighbors", giving way
to network "neighborhoods". In that context the system should be
morally and ethically egalitarian but still be able to reward and
punish users based on their "moral" behavior.
The network neighborhoods allow one user to "connect" to another's
network. Then, maybe, there'd be some kind of user-defined value of
"taste" or "trust" or "confidence" or "morality" or "reputation" or
something like that associated with each connection. Or the
connection to that other individual could be automatically calculated
as a weight by a "conductance" function of the existing network. But
that would require that user-a and user-b already had networks and
they had mutual members in their extended network. You could also use
the conductance function of the "sum of total previous transactions"
as a way to naturally weight the connections. That would keep the
system from dispersing too thinly and therefore the neighborhoods
would grow kinda like bubbles, more cohesive and less dispersive,
thereby keeping the trustability higher. I think there's a
"distributed" method for that calculation already in electrical
engineering. It would have to be distributed computation because you
don't know the size of the network and therefore you don't know the
complexity of the conductance computation either.
Does this make sense to anybody?
Is "network neighborhoods" or "virtual neighborhoods" good terms to
explain the types of economic communities that would be developed?
Is the "weighted-trust" principle sufficient to explain how the
virtual neighborhoods would be cohesive enough, and hold together like
a bubble?
On Feb 2, 10:32 am, Chris Wagner <christopher.t.wag...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Miles Thompson
miles
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http://blog.tradeify.org
http://google.com/profiles/utunga
otak...@gmail.com
I'm fine and the 'what' and the 'why'
it's the 'When' and 'How' I want to know about. :-)
Alex
Erik of Seattle
What happens when the drunk never comes back to the same bar?
He just goes from bar to bar racking up tabs and leaving. Imagine
lots of people doing that. Then the bars will start doing credit
checks before extending the tab.
What if he changes identity? Or uses different names? Or just keeps
trying to create new accounts? or defaults and wants another chance?
People will lose faith in the system if they are constantly asked to
extend trust instead of receiving positive goods. that will give
participants a disadvantage for converting their real goods to ripple
units.
Please correct me if I'm wrong but so far it sounds like a debt
network.
I envisioned the bottom-up economy differently:
Each member would have a treasury of real-value goods that they could
issue their own currency units on.
Then the units they issued would be positive value units and could be
bought and sold as partial ownership (or similar value) of those
goods. The member would manage their treasury by adding more goods
(or assets) to the treasury as they dealt out more credits to keep the
cost-per-share ratio and therefore the traded value of their currency
stable. That would encourage trust and build the system around
positive and repayable values rather than debts or promises that can't
necessarily be fulfilled. Then, over time, as the system reaps fruit
for the users they can grow their treasury and therefore the economy.
What I'm talking about isn't a bar tab. I'm talking about managing
independent treasuries and issuing positive-value personal digital
currency as credits.
Funny though you use the "bar tab" explanation since I used that as an
example to explain it to my friend last week when we were sitting in a
bar. The only difference is that I explained the treasury part first
and that helped him understand why the bartender would have an
incentive to accept the credit in the first place.
My hunch is that the system dynamics of a debt system are very
different from a positive credit system.
But maybe a system like that could work. I just think it would be
tough to get it started since nobody wants to accept some credits in a
non-established authority-less credit network.
Otherwise, how do you create the first credits? How many? What
value?
Jeffrey Cliff
jeff
David Watson
idea of what Ripple is or should become, but also of the different
directions people are coming from.
Ripple in its current form is mostly a decentralized payment
resolution protocol. As Chris Cook said, and Ryan has said before,
it's agnostic to currency type or value. It doesn't care what the
specific rules are for each currency, whether it's debt-based, asset-
based, or based on some percent ownership of some legal entity. When
someone 'extends credit' to another person, it can also be envisioned
as if lender and borrower now are participants of a unique currency
where borrower 'owns' 100% of the loan amount. But from Ripple's
standpoint, whether this new currency is actually backed by a promise,
or whether the currency is backed by gold it doesn't care. As Ryan
alluded to earlier in the thread, this is something that would be
handled or built 'on top' of Ripple.
For instance if you wanted an asset-backed currency in Ripple, you
just need someone to act as 'agent' of the new currency, and then
everyone extends credit up to 100% of the entire reserve value. The
agent node would presumably hold 100% of the value at first, and would
make Ripple 'payments' whenever another Ripple user bought a chunk of
this currency ('buying in' might happen inside or outside the Ripple
network).
To me that's what Ripple is. But I don't think this really meets the
spirit of this thread title, "How to explain it?". Partly because
Ripple as a system is unfinished, but mostly-in my opinion- because no
one knows what an actual finished product is going to do, let alone
look like.
I think where I part from many people's philosophy is I make a clear
separation from design aspects related to a monetary system, and
design aspects related to an investment/allocation system. How we
represent money electronically; how we transact with unknown parties;
how we settle/route payments; how we minimize negative impact on price
stability... these are things related to the 'monetary system'. What
we actually 'do' with the money once represented is an investment/
allocation concern. Whether you loan it, or form self-taxing/
demurrage groups, etc., I think these two types of concerns can be
separated. I also think that having a stable monetary system is both
necessary for the other to work properly, and - in my opinion - is the
only really essential function.
Most people just want their money to hold its value and be accepted
everywhere. Prevalent national currencies only seem to hold their
values because participants are all being ripped off in a manner that
doesn't dramatically effect the relative purchasing power of those
they immediately trade with.
So the questions in my mind, are what steps need to be taken to make
something like Ripple into a viable replacement of the current global
monetary system which is currently hubbed by BIS (Bank for
International Settlements). They are basically in the business of
stabilizing inter-currency conversion rates, and (supposedly)
protecting us from profit-seeking related manipulation of those rates
by member countries central banks. This functionality needs to be
replaced by an unbiased scientific algorithm in my opinion. It
shouldn't be influenced by global politics, or some global governments
idea of which country they want to sheep-shear.
Anyway, main point is not only is everyone coming from different
directions, and having different ideas about how they see the "end
product", I think there's still broad disagreement over exactly what
problem we're trying to solve. Until there's some consensus in that
sphere it will be very difficult to get consensus on whether design
proposals are even relevant. Compound this with the fact that the
field of economics is one of the most widely misinterpreted and
misunderstood fields of study.
My feeling is that most people have come to this "alternative to the
corrupt economic system" meme, because they are trying to solve the
'general economic problem'. Trying to answer things like, "what
should we put our money into?", "whats the best way to allocate these
fixed resources?", "what tools would help people make better economic
decisions?", etc. My feeling is, that while these considerations are
definitely important and admirable, I think the 'general economic
problem' will always be out of reach as far as generating a consensus
on what the solution is. However, I think that we can reach a global
consensus on a global monetary system and how it should work. These
subsystems that people use to try to coordinate/etc to solve the
general problem would then be built on top of the basic monetary
system. A monetary system that isn't creating huge gyrations in the
flow of paper money rendering local 'real' capital flows irrelevant in
comparison.
That's all for now. Just wanted to put some of my thoughts out there
after reading this thread.
-David
On Dec 8 2009, 4:28 pm, Adam Harper <harperea...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I apologise in advance if this has already been discussed.
>
> As far as I can tell, ripple protocol is indeed the money system of
> the future. I have been looking for it and it's brothers and sisters
> for quite some time.
>
> I would like to try to describe what I see as the "family" of
> solutions of which ripple is (or will be) a part. I am doing this in
> an attempt to either locate and therefore connect) or create the other
> family members.
>
> This is not something easy for my mind to label so if anyone knows
> what I'm talking about, please put it in better words.
>
> I will loosely describe the common characteristics of this family of
> solutions:
>
> 1. Open Protocol
> 2. Absence of any central regulating authority
> 3. Addresses a problem of monopoly
> 4. Addresses the problem of information overload due to infinite
> choice leading to arbitrary/confused decisions
> 5. Transference of some form of trust without a single leap of faith
> as all transfers are peer to peer.
>
> Maybe I should elaborate on number 4. If you want to keep your money
> safe or invest it, there are very many banking services begging you to
> use them. How can one possibly make an informed decision? Ripple
> addresses this problem, since any service using the ripple protocol
> will basically offer the same service, then it is only a matter of
> choosing (if necessary) between the people you know and trust.
>
> The purpose of ripple (as I see it) is to transfer value via
> decentralised (anarchist) principles.
> The only other "family members" I have been able to identify
> conceptually (although I have not been able to locate as healthy a
> project as this one) so far are for the transfer of information, and
> for the transfer of force.
>
> The closest description of the "information" equivalent of ripple I
> have found ishttp://www.cbloom.com/NoT.htmlalthough I disagree with
> the author on quite a few points.
>
> Just as ripple only allows transfers between (indirectly) connected
> and trusting users, so would Charles Bloom's Network of Trust, filter
> out all content that was not indirectly trusted. When you do a search
> and it comes up with a site that is so completely useless that you
> don't even want it to be connected to YOUR internet, you flag it, and
> everyone in your network blocks the creator of that website or
> content. The guy can't just make a new email address because the
> people who blocked him would have been either his friends or their
> friends. Imagine a clean and tidy personal internet...
>
> Anyone able to actually make that project happen, or know where it is
> already happening?
>
> The other sibling, for the transfer of force is to address the current
> monopoly our governments have over the use of violence. Basically,
> this sibling seeks to demonopolise what we might call "Government".
> Not by asking the government to take on a new model, but simply by
> starting to use the new model until it simply out-competes the current
> model.
>
> I see information as the oldest member of the family (I hope you have
> been able to follow the family analogy). Communication came before
> trade and politics (I'm guessing) so the reason why ripple is in
> "chicken and egg" is because it's parents haven't been born yet.
>
> If we had a functioning communication web that filtered information
> depending on who connected you to it, then telling everyone "ripple is
> better than banks, lets all use it now" would actually have an
> immediate effect.
matabele
people must first change the way they think about money.
Explaining things will be harder than I thought!
I believe the way forward is to first introduce complementary
currencies - once people actually have experience of such systems,
they will have the confidence to exchange units via Ripple.
To promote trust, such currency systems should be as open and public
as possible. There are a couple of cc systems which function by simply
publishing an obligation on the www, as a pair of matching entries in
private registers. These systems rely more upon public trust than
private social relationships.
> > have found ishttp://www.cbloom.com/NoT.htmlalthoughI disagree with
Kevin Smith
lines.
My angle was that it is hard to agree about how to explain "it", when we
don't agree what "it" is. As you say, ripple is really the transaction
system, which can sit on top of whatever people agree to call "money".
It can be dollars, or gold, or LETS hours, or imaginary latinum bars.
Ripple just allows transactions (IOU's) it to be tracked, transmitted,
and rippled.
>From that standpoint, I think the bar tab explanation works pretty well.
Ripple allows you to track your bar tab electronically, and pass debts
around.
While you (David) seem to want to solve the global monetary system
problem, I'm more interested in solving the neighborhood monetary system
problem. That is, where I plan to live, nobody has gold or silver, and
few people have more than a few dollars (or their own national
currency). There is plenty of wealth around in the form of labor and raw
materials, but very little "money".
Increasingly I think I am mostly interested in some LETS-like system,
and am now trying to figure out whether ripple would be a necessary or
helpful or pointless addition to such a system. From this perspective,
the idea of money being a non-asset-backed peer-to-peer trust-based IOU
makes a lot of sense and is quite appealing. I believe the Ripplepay
background papers were the first writings that helped me understand that
vision of money.
Kevin
Kevin Smith
system and a trust-based system. My earlier post described how both can
work, and both can serve very similar purposes, even though they are
almost opposites at some core level. My interest in ripple is almost
entirely on the trust-based side.
To answer your questions, in the trust-based monetary world...
If the drunk never comes back, then the bartender loses money. If lots
of people do that, the system falls apart.
But if Bartender Adam only extended Drunk Bill credit because Bill is a
friend of the family, then Adam can exert social pressure on Bill. Or,
Adam would already know that Bill was not trustworthy, and would not
have extended credit in the first place.
In this world, it's impossible to change your name or identity or
account, because everybody knows you as Bill. It's personal. You are
correct. It is a debt network.
It seems that your "independent treasuries" system also has trust
problems. You might claim to have 100 oz of gold under your mattress,
against which you are issuing debt. How can I be sure you really do? Any
system where paper or electronic tokens circulate, and they supposedly
represent hard assets seems like an easy target for fraud.
If you are a trusted friend or neighbor, then either system works fine.
If you are a distant anonymous stranger, neither system works. If we
have a trusted chain of friends between us, then I think either system
works again.
Kevin
Sepp
currencies, as I understand it, and make them compatible in the sense
that on system's members could trade with another system's members on
the other side of the world, with exchanges mediated through the
Ripple protocol.
Given the characteristics of local currencies, such a connection seems
of limited use, as you probably can't find a lot of useful goods and
services in an Australian local exchange system if you're sitting in
the U.S., for instance.
What would be useful, in my view, would be a currency that
1) can be transferred world wide with little cost and little added
time,
2) is based on simple credit/debt accounting
3) builds trust through trade activity (no need for the local angle
and no need for evidence of assets)
4) is resilient against the freeloader phenomenon
5) potentially can link up producers of real goods with distant buyers
as well as
6) can link up producers of digitally transferrable services with
those willing to pay for them.
Such a currency could be an adjunct to the Ripple transfer protocol,
usable by anyone desiring to do so by simply adhering through a
website.
Did I forget any important points in the outline of characteristics?
I might add that I do not have more than a vague idea yet of how to
organize this, but let's first try and get some agreement on the
desirable characteristics.
Erik of Seattle
participation.
A debt network gives a negative incentive for participation.
The "bar tab" explanation implies that the "decentralized payment
resolution protocol" be implemented for the purpose of a debt network.
So if you intend to use ripple for a debt network then that
explanation will work well for you.
Otherwise it won't.
> > > have found ishttp://www.cbloom.com/NoT.htmlalthoughI disagree with
> > > the author on quite a few points.
>
> > > Just as ripple only allows transfers between (indirectly) connected
> > > and trusting users, so would Charles Bloom's Network of Trust, filter
> > > out all content that was not indirectly trusted. When you do a search
> > > and it comes up with a site that is so completely useless that you
> > > don't even want it to be connected to YOUR internet, you flag it, and
> > > everyone in your network blocks the creator of that website or
> > > content. The guy can't just make a new email address because the
> > > people who blocked him would have been either his friends or their
> > > friends. Imagine a clean and tidy personal internet...
>
> > > Anyone able to actually make that project happen, or know where it is
> > > already happening?
>
> > > The other sibling, for the transfer of force is to address the current
> > > monopoly our governments have over the use of violence. Basically,
> > > this sibling seeks to demonopolise what we might call "Government".
> > > Not by asking the government to take on a new model, but simply by
> > > starting to use the new model until it simply out-competes the current
> > > model.
>
> > > I see information as the oldest member of the family (I hope you have
> > > been able to follow the family analogy). Communication came before
>
> ...
>
> read more »
Kevin Smith
asking, which was "How do you explain to people that it is possible for
ripplepay to create money out of thin air? How can an IOU be considered
to be money." Those are the questions that seem the most interesting to
me, but clearly those are not the questions you were asking.
I mostly agree that the bar tab explanation wouldn't work for an
asset-based system.
However, under an asset-based system, it seems like it actually would be
the same, except that the IOU represented by the bar tab has some
collateral behind it. After all, it is still just an IOU.
I didn't read your email closely enough to know how the bartender would
actually know that you actually had the funds and hadn't already
promised them out to multiple people. It seems like at some point the
bartender has to trust *someone*, whether it is Bill, or someone who
audited Bill's assets and debts within the last 5 minutes, or the
entity that backs this monetary system.
Kevin
Adam Harper
I perhaps should not have used the word "formal" in the way I did. I
imagine that in the future, the distinction between formal and
informal will disappear altogether as we simply will not trade with
people who we are not socially connected (indirectly) with, and we
will see all our friends as potential people to do business with. I
also imagine this will require some mental adjustment for most people.
Everyone (please understand I mean the following in the friendliest of
ways):
It seems to me that you are all (some more than others) somehow just
missing the big picture/getting sidetracked/thinking inside the box,
just a different or bigger box. Either that, or I am. As you are
people who think outside of the box (relatively speaking) you will no
doubt understand the frustration of trying to communicate an out-of-
the-box concept to people who have a blind spot just in the place
where your concept is.
I have tried, really I have. I feel that harsh (insulting) criticism
would be unwelcome and therefore unproductive at this point.
If I am the one thinking inside the box, then I will say this - I
apologise for my limitations.
David Watson:
>I make a clear separation from design aspects related to a monetary system, and
>design aspects related to an investment/allocation system. How we
>represent money electronically; how we transact with unknown parties;
>how we settle/route payments;
This was actually what I hinted at in my last post - the realisation
that we (it was probably all my fault) have been lumping these two
completely separate issues into one. To be honest, the currency/
routing issue (HOW you pay) solved by ripple protocol is of relatively
minor concern to me. The issue of how we transact with unknown parties
(WHO you pay) seems to be of much greater significance. Since my last
post I believe I have solved it. The model is very simple really, but
apparently I'm not very good at illustrating it. I'm trying to get it
made, but my programming friend appears to have gone walkabout.
I enjoyed reading your post. I have observed the same phenomenon:
everyone congregating here on this forum (and now apparently all on
the same thread) regardless of how different our conceptions are.
oh, I might also add to the HOW and WHO topic classifications: WHAT -
what unit of measurement we use, gold, silver, dollars lets etc. so
let's recap:
Code word: Example system:
HOW ripple protocol, BIS
WHO distributed lawsuits (see earlier in this thread),
reputation
WHAT LETS, dollars
WHY asset-backed, trust-based
feel free to add to this list, it might make it easier for us to be
clear about which issue we are concerned about.
Erik of Seattle
I see a larger distinction between an asset based system and a debt
based system. I agree that you could use a similar "decentralized
payment protocol" with either one and apparently that is the aim here
with ripple.
The bar-tab explanation works well for the debt-based system.
Similarly, the BYOB (be your own bank) explanation works better for
asset-based system.
They've been doing that already with life insurance equity, just not
on a decentralized payment network.
http://www.nuwireinvestor.com/articles/be-your-own-bank-51057.aspx
Regarding your question about how the bartender would know the credits
haven't been dealt out already:
1.create your treasury by uploading photos, documentation,
explanations of the asset/s to your account on a central server
2.prompt "neighbors" to bid or make offers towards shares on your
assets
3.calculate the value per share (total assets/total shares dealt)
4.begin trading. Each trade would be an even swap and therefore no
net change in total assets to either treasury.
This does put some burden on the investors when bidding on your assets
as they'd probably better verify the value and validity through some
kind of initial audit. It's easier if they are your neighbors though.
> ...
>
> read more »
David Watson
> >I make a clear separation from design aspects related to a monetary system, and
> >design aspects related to an investment/allocation system. How we
> >represent money electronically; how we transact with unknown parties;
> >how we settle/route payments;
>
> This was actually what I hinted at in my last post - the realisation
> that we (it was probably all my fault) have been lumping these two
> completely separate issues into one. To be honest, the currency/
> routing issue (HOW you pay) solved by ripple protocol is of relatively
> minor concern to me. The issue of how we transact with unknown parties
> (WHO you pay) seems to be of much greater significance. Since my last
> post I believe I have solved it. The model is very simple really, but
> apparently I'm not very good at illustrating it. I'm trying to get it
> made, but my programming friend appears to have gone walkabout.
I'm not sure I follow. Transacting with "unknown parties" is
'precisely' what the Ripple protocol solves. I might have a mixture
of different currencies totally separate from some merchant I purchase
food from who uses a whole different set of currencies on the Ripple
network. The Ripple protocol then provides a mechanism to resolve the
payment. I guess I'm not clear on the distinction you're trying to
make with the "how we transact with unknown parties seems to be of
much greater significance" comment you make.
-David
Adam Harper
Yes, sorry that was not very clear.
Instead of talking about "unknown" parties, let's use some well known
counterparts. ebay and paypal. Ripple is the paypal counterpart. Like
paypal, ripple does not help you to find people to transact with, nor
does it help you to know who is reputable. Ripple is a payment system,
nothing more. My vision is to ebay, what ripple is to paypal. Does
that make more sense?
Erik of Seattle
motivations of contributors.
It would be great if we could do something like that for design
decisions and communication on the ripple project that could include
diagrams
I'd really love to be talking about Ripple on the Security-level.
Because if all you need to do is create a base secure payment system
"distributed routing protocol" that other "service providers" can
build upon then security is what's really most essentially important.
Shouldn't we be talking in terms of digital signatures and multiple
key encryption and packets and things?
Do you have any diagrams yet for the existing or proposed system?
That would really help me.
I'd like to understand how:
1a. The sender can know their credit isn't copied and used many times
in the sending of it.
1b. The receiver can know their credit isn't copied and invalidated by
someone else.
2a. Sender's credit doesn't get lost and later be expected to send
another one.
2b. Receiver's credit isn't intercepted and stolen by someone else.
3a. Sender and receivers credit is routed through destination within a
finite and reasonable time
4a. Sender and Receiver can both know the transaction is virtually
risk-free
So like a real gold coin it must be able to:
not be copied (IE you can't create gold)
not suddenly cease to exist (has durability and redundancy that
ensures the lifetime of the credit is statistically nearly infinite in
duration
be relatively safe in the passing of it from hand to hand (ie a
blackbird won't swoop down and pick it out during the handing over) or
a hacker won't be able to steal it.
Do you guys have any diagrams or descriptions that cover these issues?
Perhaps we could use a real-time collaborative diagramming and chat
service to facilitate our thoughts and communication to one-another,
like iscribble or something.
Any suggestions for that?
Otherwise, if all you wanted to do was just create a protocol for
transferring of credits from one person to another. You could just..
1. give each user a public/private key
2. give each transaction they issue a different very long random
number appended with the number of credits being issued and encrypt it
with the issuer's private key
3. Publish the protocol and advertise it.
4. wait for other opensource or 3rd party groups to pick it up and
provide the next level of functionality:
a. verification that the credit was received
b. guarantee it won't be lost, or can easily be regenerated
c. takes a finite and reasonable time to transfer
d. is free to transfer
e. can not be read by others outside
f. is redundant and durable and doesn't self-destruct
g....
Other key security functions.
and then
wait for more 3rd party developers to:
1. create treasury tools and issue personal currency as shares
(securities)
2. create middlemen tools that will get an incentive for promoting the
growth of the system
3. create investment/speculation tools that will allow one network
neighbor to manage their investments in other network neighbors
4. create agent tools that allow for cash-in or cash-out of the system
into fiat currencies
5. escrow services
6. guarantee services
7. insurance services
8. hardware and devices such as smart-cards or smart-phone apps
and the list goes on.
As mentioned almost 3 years ago by Ryan F and Kerinin, David Chaum's
work seems to provide a good starting point for security
implementation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum
where's Ryan F?
Jaro Larnos
I recently offered a credit limit to in...@ripplepay.com and got a
reply from Ryan stating he's not used ripple anymore, and that some
people not connected to him are. He also wished me luck finding those
people and getting my friends into Ripple and propagating it to
theirs. I guess he's still reading this group though. :)
Kevin Smith
> I'd really love to be talking about Ripple on the Security-level.
> Because if all you need to do is create a base secure payment system
> "distributed routing protocol" that other "service providers" can
> build upon then security is what's really most essentially important.
> Shouldn't we be talking in terms of digital signatures and multiple
> key encryption and packets and things?
This is a huge topic, but I'll try to be brief in sharing my own ideas.
If you come up with a perfectly secure protocol, you have solved perhaps
20% of the entire problem. Because the "system" involves far more than
just the protocol. There is the implementation of the low-level
libraries, of course, which could be buggy. There are the "applications"
on each end, which also must be designed with security in mind, and then
implemented correctly.
But on top of all that, you have human interactions, and that's where
the difficulty really begins. The classic pattern of passwords fails as
soon as someone chooses "abc123" as their password. When you prevent
simple passwords, people are forced to write their passwords down, so
many people will write them on post-its on their monitor.
One group did an experiment where they stood on a busy train platform
and told random people that they were giving away free pens to anyone
who would tell them their passwords. Many did. There is no way to know
how many told the truth, but do you really think your great-uncle Ed
thought to lie so he could still get that shiny new pen?
Now layer on insecure operating systems. Viruses, spyware, trojan
horses. All of them are risks to be considered. For motivated attackers,
there are tiny hardware devices you can attach to a computer that will
provide you will all the passwords that were typed in. Or maybe you just
have to watch over someone's shoulder. Just by recording and analyzing
the sound of the clicking of keys, you can often guess a password.
Attackers can be so sneaky. You'll have people who claim their money was
stolen by hackers....when really it wasn't. All of the existing
real-world scams apply in this world too.
You might have attackers take aim at the software itself, whether by
distributing unauthorized "upgrades", by attempting to attack the build
machine or source code repository, or as open source programmers whose
contributions look good but which actually contain back doors. There
have even been cases where compilers have been hacked to produce
binaries containing back doors that do not reflect what was in the
source code.
Honestly, all of that is just a taste. The tip of the iceberg. With as
much as I have thought about it, and participated in discussions about
it, I figure I know maybe 10% or 20% of the tricks attackers might use.
Too many technical folks think that if you just use the right crypto
algorithm, the system will be safe. That's the easy part.
To end on a slightly positive note, the best tool I have seen to analyze
the situation to try to come up with solutions is a "Threat Tree" or
"Attack Tree":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_tree
Kevin
Ryan Fugger
> I'd like to understand how:
> 1a. The sender can know their credit isn't copied and used many times
> in the sending of it.
> 1b. The receiver can know their credit isn't copied and invalidated by
> someone else.
> 2a. Sender's credit doesn't get lost and later be expected to send
> another one.
> 2b. Receiver's credit isn't intercepted and stolen by someone else.
There is quite a bit of loosely-organized stuff on the old development wiki:
As well as at the protocol mailing list:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=ripple-protocol
The basic security model is that the payer doesn't just send out
credits hoping they will be routed successfully to the recipient.
Instead, the system finds a path first, and reserves credit along that
path. Then the payment is executed by having the recipient commit the
transaction starting at the last hop, propagating backwards to the
payer. The token that commits the transaction is signed by the payer
and must validate against a public key provided to all intermediaries
during the credit reservation phase.
> 3a. Sender and receivers credit is routed through destination within a
> finite and reasonable time
> 4a. Sender and Receiver can both know the transaction is virtually
> risk-free
>
It is impossible to guarantee this in any distributed system due to
potential communication outages. The main risk is that an
intermediary buys a payment receipt from someone ahead of them in the
payment path, but then can't sell it back towards the payer because of
a server/network outage or malicious dealing. (The promises to buy
the receipt would probably have to expire eventually, although it's
interesting to think about what happens if they don't.) In other
words, the payment transaction is not guaranteed to be atomic.
The main thing that would prevent malicious refusal to honor a promise
to buy a receipt would be the strain on the underlying social trust
relationships that would ensue. To deal with honest outages, Ripple
providers could have insurance to cover their users and their trust
connections against losses. Ripple providers could agree to
third-party arbiters who would determine who had a receipt when, and
who was responsible for the outage.
It's all a bit complicated, and it's a good argument for the first
real Ripple server implementation (such as John's idea for an
OpenTransact-based implementation) to ignore the distributed aspects
and just restrict the network to the users on a single server until
there's enough reason to sort it all out. The other alternative is to
go for a radically distributed, but not completely reliable network,
where you just have to trust that you can work out any potential
issues with the other servers you're connected to. That has a certain
appeal to me as well.
> where's Ryan F?
>
I'm busy with contract work. After having thought through the
technical considerations of Ripple for years, I'm more interested now
in figuring out how to get people to actually use it *first*, and then
let the technical considerations follow from that. To that end, I'm
still thinking about a facebook/social network-based app where people
list their requests and can see other's prioritized requests based on
transaction history (which would be a Ripple-type accounting system).
Ryan
Erik of Seattle
>potential communication outages. The main risk is that an
>intermediary buys a payment receipt from someone ahead of them in the
>payment path, but then can't sell it back towards the payer because of
>a server/network outage or malicious dealing. (The promises to buy
>the receipt would probably have to expire eventually, although it's
>interesting to think about what happens if they don't.) In other
>words, the payment transaction is not guaranteed to be atomic.
Why not start with a simpler more atomic model. For example:
where a transaction may be completed by each sender/receiver giving
the other party a code that verifies they've completed their end of
the transaction. Then the code would be transferred in-person, over
the phone or bluethooth device or just leave it up to them? Since you
are dealing with network neighbors anyway this would encourage more
local exchange. Craigslist or ebay kinda works like in that respect.
You can agree to buy or sell stuff but they leave the actual
transaction more up to paypal or the end users.
>I'm busy with contract work. After having thought through the
>technical considerations of Ripple for years, I'm more interested now
>in figuring out how to get people to actually use it *first*, and then
>let the technical considerations follow from that. To that end, I'm
>still thinking about a facebook/social network-based app where people
>list their requests and can see other's prioritized requests based on
>transaction history (which would be a Ripple-type accounting system).
>Ryan
I've thought about that part too. The way I see it is that if ripple
becomes practical then it can spread organically. That is part of the
reason why I argue it should be asset or asset-share based. If a user
can upload descriptions and get people to verify and back their assets
then they can have positive-value credit to start dealing out. 1.
It's a bonus for the person backing the asset because they may be able
to obtain the asset below market value. 2. its a bonus for the owner
of the asset because they can still use their asset but now buy other
goods and services with the credit. Now the credit issuer and
receiver both have incentive to use the system. In a cash-poor economy
it will spread quickly.
There's another advantage to the asset-share idea you guys probably
didn't think about. There's a way to organically grow ripple from the
software realm out into the practical everyday use realm. If you
develop some ripple code then you can put the copyright in your
treasury as an asset. Then accept backers. When somebody (like
ripple developers) choose to put thier money where their mouths are
and actually back the software as an asset (either with fiat money or
with offered services..) then they will gain partial rights to that
code and there will be an added incentive to continue developing. It
just takes is a slight deviation from traditional opensource models
that can get worked out upon licensing. At that point the ripple
economy can continue to grow naturally out from it's initial seeders.
I'm looking at it from an evolutionary standpoint. Do we have the
framework and incentive for growth at each step along the way?
Also, the simplest and most unbreakable encryption system is one that
exchanges keys outside the digital realm. If we build a simple system
that asks to enter transaction completion key from both sender and
receiver and we assume they exchange the keys manually in-person or
over the phone then at least we have something to start from.
On Feb 15, 8:43 am, Ryan Fugger <rfug...@gmail.com> wrote:
Erik of Seattle
> paypal, ripple does not help you to find people to transact with, nor
> does it help you to know who is reputable. Ripple is a payment system,
> that make more sense?
>
>Adam,
that is a nice analogy but let me pose the "chicken or the egg"
question. Which came first?
It seems that ebay preceeded paypal by about 5 years. And that is the
thinking behind and just one more reason I propose starting with a
marketplace and a centralized atomic payment transaction system
(similar to ripplepay currently) rather than a full p2p software
solution. I'd like to work on that with some partners on a php mysql
apache joomla based system. But I don't see people actually accepting
payment with their credits-shares until they have real and positive
value as I propose through the discussed asset-share model. Actually,
designing an atomic structured site that allows users to add assets to
their treasury and issue currency and do the marketplace would be
relatively straight forward when starting from an opensource
marketplace template. Then later we could add in the p2p
functionality of the ripple software.
I guess my point is that we don't need the ripple software available
now to create the demand for the ripple system later on.
Adam Harper
am focusing on it's counterpart. This is not a chicken and egg
situation. ebay would grow with or without paypal, but paypal cannot
grow without online marketplaces.
My question to you is why not just use paypal for the time being? it
works. And with my model of a marketplace, everyone is connected
already so throwing the current ripple system over the top of that
would be relatively easy and would probably utilize the same network
of interpersonal connections. I'm just saying, the progress of ripple
software is not what is holding everything up at the moment. so we
should completely abandon it and focus on the marketplace system.
I agree though that the current ripplepay system (or similar) is fine
for now. once the marketplace is going, I'm sure there will be plenty
of eyeballs to sort out the full p2p version. We are in the prototypes
stage. What we are lacking is the marketplace prototype.
I have to say I either disagree or don't understand what you are
saying about the need for an asset based system. Perhaps I disagree
because my vision of a market place already depends on trust
connections and therefore ripple connections would be fairly
automatic. People would accept payment because they know the assets of
their friends and know that if push comes to shove, their friends will
pay up. That's all they ever need to know. If they really have a
problem with that then there is no money system that they won't have a
problem with. Everything already depends on trust. There's no way
around it.
Kim Cosmos
no
this is still the same problem LETS has always faced
hippies and massages
where are the core [not luxury] services???
the services that will save money on necessities?
the car mechanics and other tradies
they don't join because they already have too much work and the last thing they need is potluck with hippies.
A group that services each other and can also service the general public might work - a trade network of specialists.
I.T.??? Often no travel time too. They can also meet online to market ripple. I suggest advertising within your professional communities - many will love the chance to convert favours into something more trackable and tax free to boot - all in the name of idealism. "If you want my help buddy join ripple first so that we we can keep track of the debt" - even if it is a cash debt.
And for part cash part ripple debt, ripple can offer alternate rates for payment in cash. Can it??? Those with cash flow issues will then try to get more ripple pay - cool huh.
>What I am afraid of is that there are a very limited transactions>Eric Brigham
>that many of us idealists could do with one another. I think any good
>system needs to start with a diverse group of products/services (preferably
>ones of known and reputable value). Basically we need a doctor, farmer,
>lawyer, etc rather than just a bunch of idealists ;). Any thoughts about
>how we could go about recruiting a more well rounded core network?
>
It sounds like you are suggesting a replacement economic system. I
actually doubt that top-down will go away completely, although
possible. But that the new system (bottom-up) would be supplemental
and fill in the gaps thereby giving participants more options. It
will take time to grow and mature until it gets more mainstream.
>I think once you have to explain it this way, you lose a lot of people.
>"What's in it for me?"
>"Ripple is a good way to get new clients" (for freelancers)
>"Ripple is a good way to barter your stuff" (flea market junkies)
>"Ripple is a good way to meet people... get good deals"
>
>Thomas Hartman
Yes, services, marketplace, and socializing! That is it.
My solution is to foster a local marketplace that caters to a
specialized lifestyle of people. Just for example, think of: 20yr
old socially active vegetarians. They can eat and potluck together,
trade homegrown vegetables, trade massage services for yoga
instruction, carpool, trade goods like bicycles or whatever. Since
they already have similar lifestyles they are more likely to have
similar taste and the possessions of one are more likely desirable for
the others. So if you actively market and promote such a community
with an online trading component that encourages participation and
includes both real-world, face-to-face contact (like once a week
potluck meeting) along with the online accounting. Then the
participants can begin to think about their role in the marketplace
community as entrepreneurial and so the individual participant could
be encouraged to create a group of their own that is centered around,
say, gardening. Another goes out and starts a group centered around
cyclists, another around yoga and India and so on. If the "middle-
man" in the chain of social relationships can skim a tiny % of the
transaction cost then there is a natural incentive for promoting and
maximizing your social connections, thereby growing the system.
Then some people can specialize in marketing and promoting the groups
and getting them off the ground while effectively getting commission
off each transaction. Others might prefer to keep their day jobs and
just attend the meeting/marketplace potluck once a week to get cheap
goods.
So the participant and the organizer is one and the same. Goodbye
consumer! Hello pro-sumer world!
I think hours is a bad way to go. Who would bother to spend time and
money to specialize their skills if they all got paid the same? It's
better if each participant kept their own personal currency and had
the right to request any repayment they chose for their work. Mine
would be Erik-bucks yours might be Thomas-bucks or Annette-bucks or
EricB-bucks. Then if you ever needed to calculate for a transaction
you just figure the "sum of assets" over "sum of total credits"
calculation and evaluate in an agreed upon (or several agreed upon)
standards. You could, for the purpose of the transaction, standardize
"your-bucks" to dollars, or to ounces of gold, or even better,
calculate the worth of "your-bucks" in context to your shared social
network since you both have a shared trust in your existing network.
It sounds complicated at first but that is basically like quantifying
the resistance (impedence modelling) through an electronic network and
solved nicely with matrices or distributed computing techniques. That
would give you the ratio of shared value between the "buyer" and the
"seller" (or the investor and the investee, however you want to see
it) and each would know how much they'd gain or lose. The only catch
is the security, verification, and digital signing to do this on a
truly scalable, standardized network but individually they are all
developed technologies. I still don't know if ripple pay, as it is
evolving, could do this though.
This "impedence modeling" kind of thinking is what got me into
alternative currency in the first place. I started in artificial
intelligence 10 years ago. Looking back, "Currency" came from "Trust
networks" came from "social weighting" came from "context engines"
came from "semantic networks" came from "artificial intelligence and
suggestive profiling" came from "computer engineering".
The semantic web people are doing the same thing that we are doing but
they are coming at in from intelligent web searching perspective.
The data sharing people are doing this with darknets and torrents.
Amazon is doing this with product profiling
Netflix is doing this with movie preferences
And I'm sure the list goes on and grows each day.
On Feb 1, 6:18 pm, Eric Brigham <ebrig...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Agreed.
>
> On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 7:17 PM, Thomas Hartman <
>
> thomashartm...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> > I think once you have to explain it this way, you lose a lot of people.
>
> > "What's in it for me?"
>
> > "Ripple is a good way to get new clients" (for freelancers)
>
> > "Ripple is a good way to barter your stuff" (flea market junkies)
>
> > "Ripple is a good way to meet people... get good deals"
>
> > Now, I am not actually certain if any of the above is true for a
> > future ripple, certainly not for the existing proof of concept. But
> > something like that better be true if we are going to try to sell
> > people on it.
>
> > On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 5:00 PM, Kevin Smith <kevi...@qualitycode.com>
> > .
> > > For more options, visit this group at
> >http://groups.google.com/group/rippleusers?hl=en.
>
> > --
> > Need somewhere to put your code?http://patch-tag.com
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> > "Ripple users" group.
> > To post to this group, send email to rippl...@googlegroups.com.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
Kim Cosmos
with an option for part or wholly ripple pay at a different rate
Using openID is a good idea for those who want it. I think the law has caught up enough to makes these contracts enforceable.
Kim Cosmos
The problem with cash or ripple equivalence on a contract is deemed taxable value. Especially once a cash clearinghouse is setup. Though those in the know will know about the terrible exchange rates which reduce tax. I suggest hiding the ripple pay alternative so the auditors don't find it. Just another unpaid reciept, a loss for tax collectors everywhere. ie a side contract of dubious legality.