Artistic license. Try not to take everything so literally. One beef I have with Ripple is that they are very well funded and very secretive. In fact, they gave early adopters a sweet deal. But that sets off all kinds of trust alarms. It's hard to verify anything they claim. As far as trading goes, I don't do large amounts anymore because the exchanges are much less predictable and there is more stability. If I will accept colored coin vouchers, it will be from someone I have independent verification of trustworthiness that only comes from face-to-face. Reputation systems are better than nothing, but are subject to the long con.

Here's where I am coming from. I have learned a lot about small business over the many decades of my existence. I have seen the changes in America and around the world. Some things about human interaction don't change. Technology only makes them more efficient. I would prefer we take the best parts and build something better. I am not against credit itself, it is a necessary evil, but colored coins should be more than ample and efficient to deal with it. If at some point a government or other large asset holder decides to exchange colored coins for their own RippleRapple or whatever color and make it profitable, then the cycle of power abuse will continue. But at least the blockchain will have records and there will be consequences for bad agents.

If I didn't trust my wife, I would be dead. That doesn't mean I trust your wife. If you don't see the difference, then this is a lost point to argue. Liquidity is not universally recognized. I can say the same thing: "The difference between your IOU's and mine, is that mine are liquid and yours aren't."


May the best coin win.

An exchange is centralized by definition. A decentralized exchange is a misnomer, they are distributed exchanges, but they still require trust and are centralized to a lesser degree. Like mining pools, there is much debate about how they should operate. Liquidity is a function of the the risk. Exchanges are all high risk. My liquidity and your liquidity are apples and oranges. If you are on Bitstamp in the USA and I am on BTCChina in Beijing, then arbitrage is very difficult. I don't think Ripple transactions from BTCChina will be any more accepted by Bitstamp than their vouchers.

Or nothing. You could say Bitstamp has more liquidity, but to me in China, you'd be lying. It's a matter of perspective. Unless your exchange is insured against failure or Ripple is somehow able to create trust between enemy economies, then I see little chance of surviving unless by force. Bitcoin has little chance of failure except by force. I guess it comes down to whose side you're on.

Not true. Ripple isn't a working system yet. Ripple is competing with colored coin, mastercoin, and all the altcoins. Ripple is an untested idea at this point. I am open minded, but can't I wait until there is published sourcecode for the clients and gateways before getting behind it? Let's see some gold trading advertised for Ripple.

I'm curious about where you looked up that funky definition. Source?

How about the OTC market?
How about the black market?
How about the food chain (is god doing the arbitrage between supply and demand)?
How about Ripple? Ah, yeah, we've already mentionned that one...

Ripple's built in distributed exchange doesn't require any trust at all and is decentralized.
What requires trust in Ripple is the redemption of IOUs, but that has nothing to do with the exchange in itself.
You could start a day-trading business with the XRPs you get from a giveaway, and grow your stash by trading currency pairs on the distributed exchange without *ever* going through a gateway. Everything  you would do would then be perfectly decentralized and trustless given the fact you just don't care about being able to redeem your IOUs.

Again, that's a very exotic definition of liquidity, but I guess you must have an equally exotic definition of risk that makes it fit all together. Source?

Liquidity isn't a subjective quantity. It is an objective quantity based on the quantifiable availability of supply and demand for a given asset, that would allow you to open or close a position.
What Coinseeker is telling you is that, if you hold the debt of an exchange (be it Bitstamp or BTCChina) as a balance at that exchange, and the exchange decides to suspend withdrawal, you have no way to sell back that debt and get back your funds since the exchange who is the only possible counterpart isn't buying back the balance (aka. not allowing you to redeem it to real assets). In other words, you are screwed. But if you hold debt of an exchange as Ripple IOUs, even if the exchange decides to suspend withdrawals, you will still be able to sell your IOUs on the Ripple internal market to third party participants. You will suffer a mark down due to the situation, but you'll still be able to close your position.

So to make a long story short,
If you are using Ripple to hold your exchange balances:
- when there is no problem at the exchange, the liquidity of your assets = liquidity at the exchange + liquidity in Ripple.
- when withdrawal are suspended at the exchange, the liquidity of your assets = liquidity in Ripple.
If you are holding your balance directly at the exchange:
- when there is no problem at the exchange, the liquidity of your assets = liquidity at the exchange
- when withdrawal are suspended at the exchange, the liquidity of your assets = no liquidity at all

You can see that no matter how you look at it, balances held as Ripple IOUs are more liquid than balances held at the issuer exhange. It's not even a matter to debate, it's just a hard fact.

They don't ship gold like Bitcoin accepting stores. You buy vouchers and hope they don't abscond with all your bitcoins. I will look at the source code if it can be used for trading colored coins. I am in the Philippines where there is a real need for exchanges for fiat to Bitcoin and B^2 coins. There really isn't much use here for Ripple yet. Filipinos like tangibles, and it's difficult enough to explain Bitcoin let alone Bitcoin IOUs.


I still don't see a working system. Why is it taking so long to gain traction?


We'll have to agree to disagree on liquidity. Tell China and Russia they have nothing to worry about with American bonds. They are AAA rated by America.

Give them a break, Ripple is live since less than two years, don't expect every possible options to be available right away.
But if you step back and look at the big picture, what you will see is that Ripple can natively allow to trade virtually anything for anything else, instantly and at no cost, and allow deposit and withdrawals globally. It will take some time before it becomes obvious, but a few years down the line chances are high that Ripple is going to be something huge.

You don't even need to look at the source code: just start using Ripple and read the official forum, and it will become pretty obvious to you that you can trade anything on Ripple including colored coins. Actually, there is no one at the moment acting as colored-coins gateway in Ripple, so it could be an opportunity.

All that is needed to convert Peso to Bitcoins and the other way round is a Peso Ripple gateway.
Once that milestone is passed, you just need to advertize it locally, and the liquidity will build up.

There are many opportunities for a Rippler based in Philippine:
- creating a Peso gateway
- doing Peso/XRP and Peso/BTC market making
- integrating Ripple in a money transmitting business alongside other options like Western Union.

Then maybe there is a need for a middle man to handle the conversions.

Sometimes it's really difficult to decide if you are trolling or just really behind on your research.
Ripple is live with the full features set since almost 2 years, and trading actively since it launched, with growing volumes and a growing userbase, and gateways on every continents and all major economies. So much for the "untested" idea... Meanwhile Colored coins, Mastercoin and should I add NXT and Ethereum are yet to produce working code to handle distributed exchange.

All the source code of both the official client, the rippled server and a handful of utilities like graph pages, CMS plugins, and APIs are open-source.

Once an account has been created in the ledger (which happens once you have deposited the reserve amount), it cannot be deleted. Ever. So I'm sure there is some good explanations to what happened to you. I don't think this thread is the right place to help you with creating an account, but if you share your experience in the New Users section of Ripple forum, we can help you get started and activate your account.

Again, I think that discussion would be more on-topic on the Ripple forum.