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Eugine_Nier comments on Less Wrong used to like Bitcoin before it was cool. Time for a revisit? - Less Wrong
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Well, for start the single centralized server is a huge liability, previous digital currency schemes have collapsed when the government sued/arrested/raided the central server for enabling money laundering.
Also, unlike bitcoins, IOUs aren't fungible; thus, there is a need to haggle over each transaction.
The IOUs are transferable, if not entirely fungible. The idea is that the per-transaction haggling is handled by the server (automated route-finding), some fungibility is achieved automatically (circular debts are canceled automatically), and people will act to balance income vs expense by settling large outstanding debts for cash (incentice provided by credit limits).
The single server problem is a huge liability, but distributed route finding and cryptographic chains to provide distributed record keeping seem to me a remarkably easy problem.
I don't know much about RipplePay, are the IOUs denominated in some standard unit?
In the current implementation, they can be denominated in any of several typical currencies. I've never played with the exchange rate side of things, so I don't know off hand how that works in practice. (I've only used ripplepay a tiny bit in total, for tracking a couple small debts between friends.)