Ripple is officially open-source

https://ripple.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3718&p=18013

by calder • 13 years ago

84 55 13 years ago

ghshephard2• 13 years ago

When GoLang was first announced, it began an never-ending amount of confusion for me (a Go board game player), as I started to see all these articles around Go on HN, just to be continually disappointed.

As a Mesh Networking Practitioner, I see I'm once again going to have to deal with namespace collision. (Ripple has been well used name in another domain: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/75/slides/roll-2/roll-2_file...)

Interesting - Ripple the routing protocol is primarily about Directed Acyclic Graphs, while Ripple, the payment network, works with merkle trees.

Combine the two concepts together, a directed acyclic graph of tags stored as a merkle tree, and you basically have git.

maaku10• 13 years ago

Ripple-the-payment-method is about routing through directed networks. Merkle trees are not really related to the payment mechanism at all.

ghshephard2• 13 years ago

From the article:

"Our consensus process uses peering ... instead of mining. The ledger is a data structure that describes the current state of the network as a merkle tree"

ics• 13 years ago

And all of the architects here have probably bemoaned the sudden shift in interest when "architecture" inevitably refers to software and nothing about buildings. (Though excitement for both is certainly not mutually exclusive!)

Sometimes it's just a funny way of getting introduced to something that's really cool.

lnanek2• 13 years ago

As a mobile developer, these Ripple articles always trick me because to us Ripple is the fastest emulator for testing PhoneGap apps (HTML5 that runs on multiple mobiles wrapped inside a native app). An emulator for PhoneGap that runs in Chrome as a plugin basically.

From a mobile dev perspective this other Ripple is some worthless alternative payment method no one uses because PayPal has all the accounts so is easier for the user, or iTunes or Google or amazon or Samsung Fusion payments are built into their stores and protected by TOS as being the only payment processor you can use.

So an article on another payment method is pretty worthless and the name collision is pretty annoying because I have to sometimes follow the link before I see it for what it is.

Toenex• 13 years ago

When GoLang was first announced, it began an never-ending amount of confusion for me (a Go board game player)

I know what you mean, I love Ripple chocolate bars. ;)

dublinben• 13 years ago

I'm honestly surprised that they ever considered launching a project like this without making it free software.

Diamons• 13 years ago

Open Source !== Free

maaku10• 13 years ago

Well they rather cheaply added on a currency that made no sense, which they issued to themselves and force people to use (or at least hold) to participate in the protocol. If it was open source from day one, the very first thing anyone would do would be to remove XRP.

So am I surprised? No.

alwillis6• 13 years ago

XRP exists to help protect the Ripple network by making it costly to mount an attack against the network.

The drama that took place earlier this year when there were several denial of service attacks against Mt. Gox, causing the price of BTC to drop so that it could be bought cheaper by the attackers and their friends is way less likely to happen to Ripple.

Unlike transfering BTC, sending XRP from one Ripple user to another is free and confirmation is instant—no need for miners to confirm the transaction.

sown• 13 years ago

So I'm just curious...but how does the ledger work? It's supposed to be eventually consistent, so nodes on the network eventually get a copy. How do they determine that everyone gets one?

wmf2• 13 years ago

Distributing information through a gossip protocol is well known. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol The hard part is deciding on the contents of the ledger.

kylebrown8• 13 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj1QVb1vlC0 - How Ripple Works - The Consensus Process (ADVANCED)

sktrdie• 13 years ago

I'm very interested in this project as it essentially can be used as a currency the same way that Bitcoin is, without any mining required. It uses the concept of trust from a variety of different nodes. If a node acts dishonestly it loses trust and therefore loses reputation which in this system accounts for your actual currency: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7550/how-does-rip...

The idea that I'm interested in is that it seems to solve the double-spending issue that Bitcoin so eloquently solved, but without all the electricity wasting issue, and the 51% issue, that currencies with proof-of-work (POW aka mining) have. Currencies that use the POW system are designed to work well only if half of the computational power of the network is used by honest nodes. If by any means more than 50% of the network is in control of dishonest nodes, they could do all kinds of things and perhaps even kill the entire currency.

Replacing the proof-of-work system with something based on reputation seems very interesting in my opinion: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=10193.0

jaekwon2• 13 years ago

Double spending isn't really about trust. It's about transactional atomicity.

After reading a bit, I've concluded that Ripple doesn't actually solve the consensus problem. Whether it works or not depends on the shape of the graph of the core validating nodes. If the graph is too centralized (as it is now, and probably will always be), it can be controlled by fiat.

kylebrown8• 13 years ago

Transactional atomicity is exactly the reason why ripple needs a native currency - the native currency is what provides byzantine fault tolerance[1], just as in bitcoin.

Supposedly, ripple reaches consensus under diverse graphs of validator node networks. But its a research topic still undergoing study (Ripple Labs say they have whitehats closely examining the protocol).

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_failure#Practical_Byz...

tlrobinson• 13 years ago

Now it gets interesting. For a long time the lack of an open-source server and the associated centralization was a big point of criticism against Ripple.

Personally I don't think we'll see much grassroots adoption of any cryptocurrency technology that can be categorized as "pre-mined" or anything less than full decentralization, and that includes both Ripple and Mastercoin.

Now if they're able to get the existing banking system on board they could have some chance. It sounds like they're handing out large chunks of XRP (the Ripple cryptocurrency) to companies that implement Ripple integration as an incentive.

wmf2• 13 years ago

Ripple is still semi-centralized. If Alice and Bob trust different nodes they may end up with different ledgers and thus they may be unable to transact. The only way to keep Ripple unified is for everyone to trust the same nodes, which is the definition of centralization.

jaekwon2• 13 years ago

Yup. And this is why it won't gain the kind of adoption that Bitcoin is getting. I don't trust it any more than I trust a human.

kylebrown8• 13 years ago

Everyone doesn't have to trust the same nodes, the network will actually come to consensus with minimal overlap of trusted validators in the UNLs (and more importantly it will detect and halt when the network isn't coming to consensus, instead of forking like the bitcoin blockchain).

Besides, the definition of centralization is that there's a central authority with arbitrary power, such as changing balances or freezing accounts.

alwillis6• 13 years ago

This is incorrect. All Ripple servers go through a consensus process to validate transactions; after which the Last Closed Ledger (LCL) is generated and sent to every server.

Every server has a copy of the LCL, so there can't be a case of ledgers being different anyway.

Anyone on Ripple can send XRP to anyone else regardless of who they trust; in order for Alice and Bob to transact in a currency other than XRP, the Ripple network will find a path between them to allow the transaction.

There a video from Ripple Labs that explains how consensus works: http://ripplefederation.org/videos/how-ripple-works-gateways....

alwillis6• 13 years ago

Nope, that's not how it works; perhaps you should do some research then get back to us? https://ripple.com/wiki/Consensus is a good place to start; there's also http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/13330/what-is-the....

rdl• 13 years ago

The true test will be when someone forks a version and removes XRP. XRP seems like a pretty artificial add-on to the whole system.

I'd still prefer something like Open Transactions which supports blinded instruments, though.

philrapo• 13 years ago

XRP is essential as the native currency of the protocol.

All other currencies exist on Ripple in the form of balances. (Similar to how I store my money at Citibank in the form of USD balances. This is how our traditional financial system works).

The protocol needs a native currency (XRP) in order to pay the anti-DDOS fee. Every payment or trade requires the user to pay a 0.0001XRP fee which the protocol destroys.

It's purpose is to create a cost to sending "transaction SPAM" and make it extremely expensive to DDOS Ripple servers for any sustained period of time. This transaction fee is dynamic and scales higher in terms of heavy server load.

It's important that this type of fee be paid in a currency that is native to the protocol. This allows the protocol to remain neutral and global.

alcari• 13 years ago

But why do we need special Ripple servers at all? Couldn't the system have been designed with a larger collection of nodes in mind and simply done without XRP?

maaku10• 13 years ago

The protocol needs a native currency (XRP) in order to pay the anti-DDOS fee.

No, it doesn't. Have you seen the various pre-OpenCoin ripple protocols, or the currently competing colored coin proposals? None of them necessarily needed or would have benefited from a scarce-money fee currency. Ripple is a protocol for generating ad-hoc user-issued assets and arranging trade networks for exchanging these currencies. There's no reason fees can't be collected in whatever currency is being transacted, and then atomically converted into whatever currency the collecting node desires. That's what ripple is designed to do.

simlevesque• 13 years ago

If you want to understand Ripple, the best way is to read the white paper which was released 2 days ago : https://ripple.com/ripple_primer.pdf

aabalkan• 13 years ago

Note that this news is a month old.

glassdoor• 13 years ago

How exactly is ripple different than any other payment system?

rainmaking• 13 years ago

Okay so ripple achieves consensus through network effects: biggest room wins. So far so good.

Now Mallory deploys ripple clients, which behave like ordinary ripple clients, but are under her control. After a while, 51% of the biggest consensus room are straw men for Mallory. She "flips the switch" introduces a transaction that places the entire network's balances into her accounts.

How does ripple prevent this?

Ripple is officially open-source

Related Stories