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Comment by ZachPruckowski | Hacker News Reader

Have they solved the "you need the whole blockchain" bit? Like do blockchain-based apps still require you to download the whole she-bang to participate? I know for bitcoin the blockchain is like 14GB or so, and that's for (only most of the) financial transactions for a small (on a global scale) community. If you want to do something with a bigger target audience or more complex data needs, are you going to wind up needing a separate hard drive to participate after a year or two?

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And how about the 7 transaction/second limit? If Bitcoin really does start to be used for everything, it's going to hit that wall really quick.

This is an arbitrary hardcoded limit.

>"Have they solved the 'you need the whole blockchain' bit?"

Yes.

Ripple servers only need the current state of the ledger (as opposed to requiring the entire history of transactions, as Bitcoin does). This eliminates the problem of needing to download GBs of history to run a server. You can optionally download the full ledger history if you want access to the data, but it is not required for your server to participate in transaction processing. It's a much lighter weight design in general.

It's a shame, then, that ripple is a complete scam created by people who created a currency and then gave themselves all the coins in it.

Ripple allows you to move USD, BTC, or any currency using distributed ledger system. You dont need to use "the coins" created by Ripple.

As a separate point -- by your logic, bitcoin is a complete scam created by Satoshi Nakamoto who created a currency then gave himself $400mm worth of it. [1]

And Google is a complete scam created by Larry and Sergei, who created equity and gave themselves all of it.

[1] http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto....

They also put billions of dollars of venture capital into it. Ripple wouldn't be worth what it is today without that.

Wow, I had no idea that billions of dollars were fed into ripple.

Do you have any links that delve into more details (such as who was behind the funding rounds)?

He meant to say billions of ripple coins, surely.

That makes even less sense; they invested billions of ripple in venture capital into making... ripple?

This investment of billions of ripple gave value to... ripple?

sarcasm on my part ;)

I was in error, I repeated this without confirming and looking at "market cap" pages led me to believe it was true.

I don't know anything about ripple, but that's true of everything ever made. He'll, I've made my own currency and have all the coins. Trading them for real stuff is kind of hard, though.

A lot of transactions can be pruned out of the Bitcoin blockchain (this isn't actually done today, but it is possible), so other blockchain-based systems would be wise to design their data formats to allow efficient pruning.

I guess if you are using the protocols for different things you can have different blockchains for every application - so that segments the effort.

This is a major problem though.

The blockchain can sit on a server. As long as you trust the server...

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