This is a chart of the value of bitcoin yesterday, Wednesday. But then came the crash: Bitcoin is clearly not an effective store of wealth — just look at how quickly that wealth can be evaporated.
Neither is it a useful payments mechanism, given how fast its value can fluctuate. Currently, it can take an hour for a bitcoin transaction to clear, which means that the value of the transaction when it clears can be radically different from its value at inception. Bitcoin only works for payments if you can be reasonably sure that its value will remain reasonably steady for at least the next hour or so. As a result, right now it felix salmon bitcoin exchange rate a bit too much functionality with too little ease of use.
But that will come, with time — and in fact I would be happier if the felix salmon bitcoin exchange rate developing the easy-to-use front ends for Felix salmon bitcoin exchange rate were not OpenCoin. But the end result feels a bit like bitcoin in many ways. Users are anonymous or, technically, pseudonymousfor instance: OpenCoin has no privileged access to the way in which people pay each other.
The fees are de minimisjust enough to prevent DDoS attacks and the like. Instead, they can pay each other in pretty much any currency in the world: Ripples, yes, or dollars, or yen, or euros, or even bitcoins.
Here, for instance, is a screenshot of my Ripple wallet: If I want to send a payment in any one of those three currencies, I can do so pretty much cost-free; if I want to felix salmon bitcoin exchange rate a payment in some other currency, then the system will select for me the best exchange rate, based on various companies which are offering currency-conversion services on the Ripple platform.
Everybody using a Ripple account will have some Ripples in their account, just to get them on the system, and there will always be people making a market, converting Ripples to real currency and back again. The good news, however, is that Ripples are not fingers crossed going to become speculative investment vehicles, in the way that bitcoins are.
OpenCoin is going to be giving away billions of Ripples for free, to anybody opening an account, just to get the system seeded and get people transacting with each other. I hope it works, and I hope that the number of gateways into the system will soon expand from the current list of relatively obscure sites like Bitstamp. But at least — unlike bitcoin — it has a genuine hope of doing so.
The promise of Ripple By Felix Salmon. How the Penney dropped. A surplus of cuts.
Watch live updates on profits, losses and other trade data. Cryptocurrency exchange - Wikipedia Cryptocurrency exchanges such as conventional fiat money, digital currency exchanges ( DCE) are businesses that allow customers to trade cryptocurrencies, digital currencies for other assets different digital currencies.
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