Other than having a Ripple wallet, I have no affiliation with Ripple Labs. That being said, I'd like to respond to this article.

Nope, it's entirely correct. During the consensus process, each server only listens to servers that its operator has marked as trusted - there is no way for servers outside the trusted clique to affect in the consensus within the clique.

No, it's entirely incorrect; you have a misunderstanding of how the consensus process works[^1]. To reach consensus, all nodes have to agree on the set of changes to be applied to the ledger.

A server gets proposals for these changes from the servers on its Unique Node List[^2]. But in order for these transactions to be applied to the next ledger, enough of them have to match transactions coming from other servers on the network the aren't on the UNL. If a transaction from a server matches a transaction proposed by servers on the UNL, it gets a vote.

This process repeats until 80% of the transactions match from the UNL matches everyone else's, which is the threshold for mathematical certainty. And remember, every node on your UNL is doing this same process with the nodes on their UNLs, which makes it decentralized.

When you're running a server, you don't trust the nodes on the UNL; you just trust that more 50% of them won't collude against you.

Currently, there's a small clique of servers run by OpenCoin Inc and their partner businesses which only trust each other and which everyone uses.

Also incorrect. As of 2013.09.02, there were 30 public servers and 11 validators on the Ripple network[^3]; most likely, there are more now.

This Ripple wiki[^4] says "As long as there is some minimal degree of inter-connectivity between UNLs consensus will rapidly be reached. This is primarily because every honest node's primary goal is to achieve a consensus."

And since anyone can download and run the Ripple server software, anyone who does so is part of this so-called "small clique of servers everyone uses".

Of course there will be bad actors on the net running questionable servers and validators. But we're on this thing called the internet; we could share data on which servers to trust and stuff[^5]

The ledger closure process and transaction acceptance are effectively centrally controlled by that group; if your server closes the ledger itself rather than waiting for the official ledger from on high, it will be permanently stuck on its own fork of the network.

Not only is this incorrect, but it shows either you don't actually understand how this works or you have some agenda for making shit up…

There is no such thing as an "official" ledger and there's no "from on high" (the network topology is a graph; there's no hierarchy). By definition, a server can not close a ledger itself; a ledger can only close when there's agreement among the servers and validators using the consensus process.

And even in the the case of disaster where the network splits in half and there are conflicting transactions and ledgers, when the network is reconnected, everything get back into sync.[^6]

Because of the way the ledger closure process works, if you set up your server wrong and end up in a part of the trust network that's poorly connected to the official servers you will end up permanently stuck on your own fork of the transaction history. (In practice, since you can't disagree with the official OpenCoin servers and you can't influence their consensus, you should just set your trust list to the OpenCoin-approved list exactly and forget about peer-to-peer stuff.)

Even if you use the default UNL (which can be changed at anytime regardless), you're still participating in a peer-to-peer network and you're still part of the distributed consensus process. Nice try though. And remember, we don't trust everyone on the UNL; we just trust that most of them won't collude against us.

There's a mandatory transaction fee in a virtual currency, XRP, and unlike in Bitcoin the XRP used in that transaction fee is destroyed.

* the fee exists to protect the network from spam transactions and denial of service attacks, as it would cost a spammer a lot of XRP to pull this off; the more transactions they'd attempt to send, the more expensive each transaction becomes

* the transaction fees are ridiculously small; the base fee is 0.00001 XRP.

* I swapped (using the Ripple network's built-in distributed exchange[^7])$1.16 for 25 XRP last night for 0.000025 XRP. That's $0.00075 for those of you playing at home. ;-). This lovely animation shows the details: https://ripple.com/graph/#2EF43881B82AE8FBA31A2C3272E61CBC2E...

* It's true that the Bitcoin protocol doesn't destroy bitcoin to make transactions. However, from the user's point of view, paying a fee for Ripple transactions is no different than paying fees for Bitcoin transactions.

The fee is set as part of the ledger consensus process, which is controlled by OpenCoin Inc. They also control the supply of XRP. In effect, there's a central organisation with the power to charge arbitrarily large fees for the use of Ripple.

Ripple Labs (née OpenCoin) doesn't control the ledger consensus process; if they did, it wouldn't be consensus right? The Ripple protocol is open source (you know, like SMTP or TCP/IP); they don't own or operate the network, therefore they don't charge fees--large or otherwise.

I know this may come as a shock, but fees are set by consensus, not by Ripple Labs:

>A node can introduce a transaction to change the base fee. If a trust-weighted majority of nodes vote "yes" on the transaction, it will be incorporated into the ledger and the fee will be changed.[^8]

Yes, Ripple Labs created 100 billion XRP and has committed to gift 55 billion of them over time to "charitable organizations, users, and strategic partners".[^9]

I got XRP from the GitHub giveaway[^10]; everything appeared to be on the up and up. I expect there will be all kinds of giveaways for years to come.

[^1]: https://ripple.com/wiki/UNL

[^2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj1QVb1vlC0&feature=youtu.be

[^3]: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/13551/how-big-is-...

[^4]: https://ripple.com/wiki/Consensus#Technical_Description

[^5]: https://ripple.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3881&p=19414#p1...

[^6]: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/13330/what-is-the...

[^7]: https://ripple.com/distributed-fx/

[^8]: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7572/what-are-the...

[^9]: https://ripple.com/ripple_primer.pdf

[^10]: https://ripple.com/blog/git-in-the-game-2020-xrp-giveaway-fo...