Bitcoin's lightning is in many ways the spiritual successor to the original Ripple idea-- a pathfinding network between pairwise relationships, but instead of IOUs, the parties use smart contracts to twiddle funds around in bitcoin payment channels without having to take the updates to the public network.
This fixes the big security weakness of Ripple while preserving the positive scalability properties. Unfortunately it also requires more complexity and limits flexibility somewhat.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=144471.msg1547843#ms...
Bitcoin's lightning is in many ways the spiritual successor to the original Ripple idea-- a pathfinding network between pairwise relationships, but instead of IOUs, the parties use smart contracts to twiddle funds around in bitcoin payment channels without having to take the updates to the public network.
This fixes the big security weakness of Ripple while preserving the positive scalability properties. Unfortunately it also requires more complexity and limits flexibility somewhat.