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Submission + - Will Ripple eclipse Bitcoin?

groggy.android writes: This year's biggest news about Bitcoin may well turn out not to be the repeat of its surge in value last year against the dollar and other state currencies but its impending eclipse by another independent but corporate-backed digital currency. Popularly known as Ripple, XRP shot up in value last year along with other cryptocurrencies that took advantage of the hype around Bitcoin. However, among the top cryptocurrencies listed in Coinmarketcap.com, a site that monitors trading across different cryptocurrency exchanges, Ripple is the only one that not only regained its value after the collapse in the price of Bitcoin but has more than doubled from its peak last year. In September it displaced Litecoin to become the second most valuable cryptocurrency. Even more surpising, a Ripple fork, Stellar, is one of the two other cryptocurrencies in the Coinmarketcap top ten that have risen sharply in value during the last few weeks.

What makes Ripple different from Bitcoin? Strictly speaking, Ripple isn't the name of the digital currency but of the decentralized payment network and protocol created and maintained by the eponymous Ripple Labs. Users of the Ripple system are able to transact in both cryptocurrency and regular fiat currency like the dollar without passing through a central exchange. XRP is the name of the native unit of exchange used in the Ripple network to facilitate conversion between different currency types.

Comment Re:Google needs to share (Score 1) 183

For what you are saying to be correct they could have used robots.txt. They did not do that. The other facet that contradicts your comment is that the payment was mandatory. A news publication, blog or anyone cannot choose not to mandate the payment. So forward thinking next generation news sites cannot decide their own model. If these sites are so concerned about remaining profitable by the money Google was preventing them from gathering they could put up a pay wall as well. Oh wait no one is going to pay these cronied sites for their news, because it isn't valuable.

Comment Re:Honest question ... (Score 1) 148

You and your premonitions are worth doodelysquat... There are congressional members who are given info to over see the NSA and they are quite vocally denouncing the excesses of the NSA. You might also realize at some point that other members of the NSA are leaking the abuses..If you and your premonitions know more than CIA leaders/NSA leaders and congressional over site members then we are doomed. Luckily your premonitions are worthwhile to anyone but with a brain little enough to think you might have something useful to add.

Comment Re:Standard M.O. (Score 3, Insightful) 148

There are plenty of people who can take authority. They can defund the NSA. They can disband the NSA. They can add new layers of oversight to the NSA> Just because they haven't doesn't mean there is no one who can./ Remember they did defund the TIA in early 2000's... Then they allowed it to side step and rename itself and begin operating anew. I think legally at this point, if defunded to resume operation under a new name would be seen as the complete refusal to operate within the charters it was held to.

Comment Re:Standard M.O. (Score 4, Insightful) 148

Surprised? No... Concerned that US Citizens are being illegally monitored in their communications by the NSA? Yes... This is illegal monitoring of people who pose no threat to the US or their citizens. Monitoring them without a valid warrant with a description of what the threat they pose is is illegal.

Comment Re:Why is encryption not standard? (Score 1) 90

There is an encrypted Whats App. Secondly it hasn't been common practice to encrypt all data on closed fiber systems thinking this sort of thing wasn't occurring. Seeing that the fiber interconnects are tapped complete encryption of all data is something that some companies are working on implementing.

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