Ripple - A Better Bitcoin
Written by Alex Armstrong   
Friday, 12 April 2013

An open source, peer-to-peer payment network has been launched in beta and gives a way for people to send money to anyone, anywhere, using their currency of choice, including Bitcoins.

 

 

OpenCoin's Ripple network supports cross-currency transactions and it's fledgling website makes a point of providing information to bitcoiners, pointing out that it lets them spend and receive Bitcoins as easily as any other currency,

It heads its list of advantages with the fact that currency exchange is built into the Ripple network stating:

Our goal is to integrate virtual currencies with all the payment systems of the world. By making it easy for consumers to use virtual currencies, we believe this will help grow the entire virtual currency marketplace.

It also points to the advantage of having a decentralized network which has the twin benefits of not having to wait for confirmations and there being no central point of failure, which should provide stability.

Ripple contains its own virtual currency, "ripples" or XRP which provide an important security feature: every Ripple transactions destroys a miniscule fraction of an XRP, and while this amount will be unnoticeable by even high-volume users, it prevents anyone from overloading the network with abusive transactions.

 

This video explains how Ripple works.

 

According to Tim Simonite, writing on MIT Technology review, OpenCoin has attracted investments from Andreessen Horowitz, from Lightspeed Ventures and from the early-stage wing of the Founder’s Fund, a venture firm owned by PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel.

“OpenCoin’s Ripple protocol, which enables free instant global payments in any currency, including Bitcoin, supports many of the advantages of a math-based currency like Bitcoin while also addressing some of the drawbacks,”

says Jeremy Liew, managing director of Lightspeed Venture Partners. If math-backed currencies are made useful, as OpenCoin is trying to do, they will last, he says.

ripplebitcoin

More Information

OpenCoin Inc

Related Articles
Bitcoin Hits 10.5 Million - Mining Payment Halves

Bitcoin Idea Gets $500,000 funding

Bitcoin still standing - but panic takes over

Inside Bitcoin - virtual currency

Bitcoin gains an open source client

Digital currency lets GPU cycles print money

 

 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, install the I Programmer Toolbar, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Linkedin,  or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

 

raspberry pi books

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

 

Banner


Couchbase Adds Vector Search
07/03/2024

Couchbase is adding support for vector search across its entire product line including Capella, Enterprise Server, and Mobile. Support has also been added for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tech [ ... ]



Crazy Clocks
10/03/2024

It's that time again when the clocks change and  time is of the essence and I indulge my interest in crazy clocks. I am always surprised that there are still new ideas for how to display the time [ ... ]


More News

Last Updated ( Sunday, 02 June 2013 )