JoelKatz

This kind of "pseudo-centralized" is decentralized. When the "central authority" gets all of its power from individual participants who choose to follow it, and those participants are free to change the authorities at any time, that's a decentralized model. Bitcoin isn't centralized just because everyone has to agree on which transactions are valid.

I'd be interested in a post mortem on the fork as well. During the split, either one side has a supermajority or neither side does. If one side has a supermajority, that side will win on rejoin, so no problem. If neither side has a supermajority, then one side or the other will win on rejoin, but nobody's been relying on either side. In every case, there should be no problem.

There are people who want to promote it that way, but that doesn't include the people who designed and built it. Check out http://ripple.com/

It is positioned to compete with other payment systems. As for scalability, it uses data structures specifically designed for rapid synchronization. But you're absolutely right that scaling it to thousands of transactions per second will be a challenge.

It's not cheap to make sibyls because you have to get people to trust you and there's no easy way to do that.

There are simple ways to gather lists of likely independent servers. For example, agencies you trust could publish such lists. You could pick three such lists and only trust organizations that appear on two of them.

And if you betray that trust, it will nearly always be easily detectable in an automated way. At that point, everyone will stop trusting you and you'll be back at zero. By contrast, if you accumulate 51% of the mining power, there's no easy way for people to take that away from you and make you start over.

Those are about Ryan Fugger's Ripple, not the new Ripple. The new Ripple does include the peer-to-peer credit of the original Ripple. But there are major differences. For example, the new Ripple is positioned initially as a payment system competing with things like PayPal and checks.

You're looking at Ripple as if it were a currency rather than as what it is, a payment system.

There will be giveaways of tens of billions of ripples. By the time the giveaways end, there should be a plentiful supply.