Ripple digital currency wants to rival bitcoin
It has similarities to the age-old hawala system. A gateway is any person or organization that enables users to put money into and take money out of Ripple's liquidity pool. Furthermore, gateways redeem ledger balances against the deposits they hold when currency is withdrawn. In practice, gateways are similar to banks, yet they share one global ledger known as the Ripple protocol. Depending on the type and degree of interaction a user has with a gateway, the gateway may have anti-money laundering AML or know your customer KYC policies requiring verification of identification, address, nationality, etc.
Furthermore, the user must put a quantitative limit on this trust and create a similar limit for each currency on deposit at that gateway. Though their total balance doesn't alter, users earn a small transit fee for providing inter-gateway liquidity. Similar to reasons during the Free Banking Era in the United States, the value of a currency can vary significantly depending on a gateway's creditworthiness.
A non-profit trade association , the International Ripple Business Association IRBA , provides unified procedures and disclosure standards for gateways. Ripple relies on a common shared ledger, which is a distributed database storing information about all Ripple accounts. The network is "managed by a network of independent validating servers that constantly compare their transaction records.
Ripple Labs is currently assisting banks in integrating with the Ripple network. A transaction is any proposed change to the ledger and can be introduced by any server to the network.
The consensus process is distributed, [92] and the goal of consensus is for each server to apply the same set of transactions to the current ledger.
Each round of consensus reduces disagreement, until the supermajority is reached. While users may assemble their own UNL nodes and have full control over which nodes they trust, Ripple Labs acknowledges that most people will use the default UNL supplied by their client. In early , [93] a rival company called the Stellar Foundation [94] experienced a network crash. Mazieres declared the Stellar system unlikely to be safe when operating with "more than one validating node," [95] arguing that when consensus is not reached, a ledger fork occurs with parts of the network disagreeing over accepted transactions.
Ripple allows users or businesses to conduct cross-currency transactions [98] in 3 to 5 seconds. Payments can only be authorized by the account holder and all payments are processed automatically without any third parties or intermediaries.
The bitcoin bridge is a link between the Ripple and bitcoin ecosystems. The bridge makes it possible to pay any bitcoin user straight from a Ripple account without ever needing to hold any of the digital currency.
Additionally, any merchant accepting bitcoins has the potential to accept any currency in the world. For example, a Ripple user may prefer to keep money in USD and not own bitcoins. A merchant, however, may desire payment in bitcoin.
The bitcoin bridge allows any Ripple user to send bitcoins without having to use a central exchange such as BTC-e to acquire them. While transaction information on the ledger is public, payment information is not. Any user on Ripple can act as a market maker by offering an arbitrage service such as providing market liquidity , intra-gateway currency conversion , rippling, etc. Market makers can also be hedge funds or currency trading desks. According to the Ripple website, "by holding balances in multiple currencies and connecting to multiple gateways, market makers facilitate payments between users where no direct trust exists, enabling exchanges across gateways.
Ripple can be used to trade or convert currencies, to send money in one currency and the recipient to receive it in another currency. One of the earliest extensions by third-party developers was a Ripple extension to e-commerce platform Magento , which enables Magento to read the Ripple public ledger and create an invoice.
There has been a Ripple Wallet payment option developed for retail situations as well [34]. XRP is a decentralized digital asset and settles payments in seconds which is considerably faster than Bitcoin.
XRP can handle 1, transactions per second, 24x7, and can scale to handle the same throughput as Visa which is 50, transactions per second, as of July 15, The current minimum transaction cost required by the network for a standard transaction is 0. XRP is the native currency of the Ripple network. XRP are currently divisible to 6 decimal places, and the smallest unit is called a drop with 1 million drops equaling 1 XRP.
The other currencies in the Ripple network are debt instruments i. The purpose for this requirement is discussed in the anti-spam section. Of the billion created, 20 billion XRP were retained by the creators, who were also the founders of Ripple Labs. The escrow will allow them to use up to 1 billion monthly and return whatever is unused at the end of each month to the back of the escrow queue in the form of an additional month-long contract, starting the process all over.
One of the specific functions of XRP is as a bridge currency, [] which can be necessary if no direct exchange is available between two currencies at a specific time, [] for example when transacting between two rarely traded currency pairs. The feature is also intended to expose more of the network to liquidity and better FX rates.
When a user conducts a financial transaction in a non-native currency, Ripple charges a transaction fee. The purpose of the fees is to protect against network flooding by making the attacks too expensive for hackers. If Ripple were completely free to access, adversaries could broadcast large amounts of "ledger spam" i. This transaction fee is not collected by anyone; the XRP is destroyed and ceases to exist. Since its debut the Ripple protocol has received a fair amount of attention in both the financial and mainstream press.
Though XRP is third in market capitalization to bitcoin as a digital currency, [] many members of the press have described Ripple as an up-and-coming rival to bitcoin. In late , Bloomberg called bitcoin a "failing" digital currency, after bitcoin's currency fell 54 percent in value in one year. Ripple was described as a significant competitor, in part because of its real-time international money transfers.
Ripple is the winner. The reaction to XRP is polarized in the crypto-currency community. However, Esquire countered in that "if that is devious, then so is every company that's ever gone public while retaining the great bulk of its shares.
Ripple has also been criticized for not being truly decentralized, or for using only a few core validation nodes for transaction consensus, compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum in the five digits. Bitcoin developer Peter Todd notes, ".. Ripple's technical documentation doesn't make any of these risks clear — nowhere do they describe in detail how nodes can fall out of consensus with one another if their UNLs Unique Node List don't match. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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Retrieved January 27, Retrieved 18 March Archived from the original on February 7, Stanford Graduate School of Business. Venkatesh October 8, The other currencies in the Ripple network are debt instruments i. The purpose for this requirement is discussed in the anti-spam section. Of the billion created, 20 billion XRP were retained by the creators, who were also the founders of Ripple Labs. The escrow will allow them to use up to 1 billion monthly and return whatever is unused at the end of each month to the back of the escrow queue in the form of an additional month-long contract, starting the process all over.
One of the specific functions of XRP is as a bridge currency, [] which can be necessary if no direct exchange is available between two currencies at a specific time, [] for example when transacting between two rarely traded currency pairs. The feature is also intended to expose more of the network to liquidity and better FX rates.
When a user conducts a financial transaction in a non-native currency, Ripple charges a transaction fee. The purpose of the fees is to protect against network flooding by making the attacks too expensive for hackers. If Ripple were completely free to access, adversaries could broadcast large amounts of "ledger spam" i. This transaction fee is not collected by anyone; the XRP is destroyed and ceases to exist. Since its debut the Ripple protocol has received a fair amount of attention in both the financial and mainstream press.
Though XRP is third in market capitalization to bitcoin as a digital currency, [] many members of the press have described Ripple as an up-and-coming rival to bitcoin. In late , Bloomberg called bitcoin a "failing" digital currency, after bitcoin's currency fell 54 percent in value in one year. Ripple was described as a significant competitor, in part because of its real-time international money transfers.
Ripple is the winner. The reaction to XRP is polarized in the crypto-currency community. However, Esquire countered in that "if that is devious, then so is every company that's ever gone public while retaining the great bulk of its shares.
Ripple has also been criticized for not being truly decentralized, or for using only a few core validation nodes for transaction consensus, compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum in the five digits. Bitcoin developer Peter Todd notes, ".. Ripple's technical documentation doesn't make any of these risks clear — nowhere do they describe in detail how nodes can fall out of consensus with one another if their UNLs Unique Node List don't match. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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