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Good morning all! Have you recently heard about Ripple? Are you deciding if you should invest some of your hard-earned money in XRP? Or have you been around for many years, holding and enjoying the recent price rises? Whoever you are and where ever you're from, it is important to keep up-to-date and know exactly what you're investing in so you can make sound decisions, and not be swept away in the feverish torrents of hype that do so often engulf the crypto space. So I will be posting a few videos and links here from around this wonderful forum, Youtube, and various other places around the interweb so good folk like to can refresh your knowledge on all things Ripple. At the end, there will be an exam, and if you fail that exam @karlos will ban you from the internet, there may even be a few fun little quiz questions you can ask your soon-to-be-estranged friends around the dinner table at Christmas, or yourself at 4 o'clock in the morning as you sit rocking in front of your screen watching charts. Because who ever said crypto wasn't a healthy social experience!? So without further ado, pull up your socks, pour an alcopop and put down your fidget spinner, because I have just the video for you -- "Ripple Tech Talk: Understanding Consensus (Mar 2015)" by in-house genius @JoelKatz (Length: ~60 mins; Difficulty: 3/5; Importance: High)

Am I the only one surprised that this never really enters the conversation when cons of certain blockchain systems are mentioned? Even Brad always mentions CPT or TIME as major con. when using bitcoin. Seriously In my opinion most drastic con of bitcoin / litecoin and alike is ENOURMOUS WASTE OF ENERGY WHEN WE DEAL WITH CLIMATE CRISIS ! We need to shine more light on this issue. Its totally ignored. Its making me mad to the bone. I dont give a f* about argument of how much banking and their inefficient energy use (Empty skyscrapers/transfer of money in sec vans etc.) is currently costing us and that BTC or other POW systems cost us maybe less (who knows at this point). You dont strive to replace one inefficient tech with another less inefficient tech when you have efficient SOLUTIONS AT HAND!!!!!!! Seriously, Never seen this mentioned in corporate or bussiness discussions !!! What is your take on it and how would you begin to change this?

=========================================== =========================================== Welcome to Swap, where anything you can do, we can do better and for free. These words were part of the birth of Free Haven Protocol [XFH], the trolling joke coin created to poke at the integrity of the devs of Haven Protocol. However, what started out as simply something for lulz has been transformed into a community project to build and bring a fair, efficient and stable blockchain to the crypto ecosystem. We feel that most projects out in the space today cannot successfully meet all three criteria above and it is our goal to do something about it, for free. Fair. What does fair mean? If you were to define it as an adjective, it would be defined as “in accordance with the rules of standards; legitimate”. Defined as an adverb it is “without cheating or trying to achieve unjust advantage”. Both definitions play very much into what we are attempting to achieve with Swap. Almost all coins in existence are commanded and their fates set by a select few who have the means and access to dictate the coin’s direction. This could include the developers themselves, exchanges, large farms and even eccentric personalities with the finances to support their view points. You see them leverage their unique positions by changing the codebase of their projects to suit their needs. Instead of allowing free market principles to reign along with the consensus mechanism built into the collection of software that makes up a coin’s environment, they checkpoint and write mechanisms to prevent democratic decision making in the blockchain’s development. That is to be blunt, literally rewriting the rules. What happens to rules of standards and legitimacy? It’s gone Jack, totally out the window. When it comes to looking at the definition as an adverb, we also want to level this playing field. Everyone knows that (or should know!) ultimately, profitability as a miner depends on one simple ratio which is cost per hash. Now there are several ways to improve your cost per hash but not all of us have access to all these paths. The simplest way to improve your cost per hash is by paying less for your electricity. Large farms locate to areas of cheap power for exactly this reason. The average Joe doesn’t necessarily have the ability to do this. Hardware is typically the next easiest way to improve your cost per hash. You don’t really have to have any brains for this department, you just need money, lots of it. If you have the money to burn, you WILL find ways to purchase equipment that far exceeds the capability of what the average Joe has access to. There IS private hardware out there. Not only do manufacturers of mining equipment sell you their used no longer latest and greatest, but there are private companies out there who build their own equipment and write their own software who are vastly more efficient than the average Joe. The last major piece for optimizing your cost per hash is in the mining software itself. Do you notice how each release of mining software yields greater and greater returns? There is always at least a single digit percent increase in mining speed over the last version. Do you think maybe it’s possible there are other mining programs out there who have unlocked the Gordian Knot’s of the increasingly complex algorithms used by coins today? Those knots are supposed to protect the average GPU from the FPGAs and ASICs right? Maybe what they are really protecting are developer advantages which lead to personal profits! So, what happens when you have a coin ecosystem that is fair? An ecosystem where the decision and implementation of the algorithm creates fairness without the ability to have secret advantages? What happens when there is no premine to be taken advantage of and no governance fee giving a select few a steady income for doing no work which ends up devaluing itself? What happens when the codebase is open for all to inspect and add upon, letting the ecosystem itself decide what features should be implemented or abandoned? What happens when no device is favored, and everyone can have access to the same cost per hash excluding what your local energy cost is? (Somethings are simply outside of a developer’s control, right?) Do these characteristics build a “fair” ecosystem that would attract miners of all kinds? We think so. All this talk of fairness sounds great, but nothing can be fair if you haven’t taken the steps to protect the underlying technology that allows your ecosystem to exist in the first place. If you look around the coin world today, you will see that most of the coins today are broken. What do we mean by this? That almost all coins are vulnerable to attack from a variety of vectors and that more importantly, their dev’s either don’t care or do not have the knowledge and skill to fix their coin. We find this to be an extremely sad state of affairs, and the fact that the general crypto populace doesn’t even consider these factors to be highly disturbing. If you are an investor in blockchain technology, how can you accept investing into a project that cannot protect the foundation of everything it builds upon? An old book talks about castles being built on sand. I think that’s quite an appropriate description for the majority of current blockchain projects. We have touched on the three major core values that we have which are fairness, efficiency, and stability. Now we would like to discuss how we are going to achieve these objectives and what we have already accomplished to date. Free Haven Protocol was a fork of Haven Protocol which is ultimately just a fork of Monero. However, we started with a genesis block and changed several key parameters to how the blockchain functioned in effort to begin with some basic network security. This included a custom 15s block time and a custom version of the CryptoNight algorithm that we ended up calling CN Superfast because it is CN Heavy with a 2MB scratchpad and one quarter the iterations. The faster block time creates many blocks a day which allows even small pools to win blocks rather frequently. This helps with miner distribution as being on the biggest pool to get frequent payouts no longer matters as there are EIGHT times more block per day but at one eighth the reward for the same emission. Transaction fees were also increased which gives incentives to mine more than just empty blocks but overall, the transaction fee is expected to drop for the end-user due to a much smaller transaction size. At max block size, miner reward is expected to increase which makes up for the extra resources necessary to process the bulletproof transaction. Meanwhile the custom algorithm change prevented us from being Nicehashable. Once community support started to build behind the XFH project, we quickly realized this was taking on life above and beyond our initial gag. While we had already created something interesting that beat Haven on several key points for existing technology (custom algorithm, no premine or fees, network distribution diversity and transparency), we realized we would need to step it up if we were to really make a statement as to how much **** exists in the current crypto ecosystem. This included the need for a rebranding and some rethinking of the fundamentals of our foundation. We have decided upon the name Swap for several reasons. First, fundamentally, Swap is one of the most basic functions of an asset. Assets are held to eventually Swap for another asset. If you want to become more philosophical, you could say that Swap was chosen because people need to Swap their way of thinking about crypto. They need to realize that the fundamental principles that created the first major digital currencies have been Swapped to something that no longer fulfills a vision of fairness and consensus, real democratic principles. It’s time to Swap the greed and unfair playing fields back to what they were intended to be. We envision this project as a guide of what crypto “should” be. Unlike the vast majority of crypto projects, the core team associated with this project is mostly not anonymous. While none of us are actively promoting who we are, we aren’t exactly hiding it either. We are quite transparent and all decision making processes in the birth of this coin to now is readily viewable on our Discord. We believe this is a testament to the fact that we simply want you to base your opinions not on who we are, but on the technology this project brings to the crypto ecosystem. We also put forth a call for any developers who would like to help build an ecosystem based on principles of fairness and openness to join us. This is a community project after all! Our ultimate goal is to create a stable blockchain that developers can build their products on top of without fear of some random agent bending the blockchain to their will, upsetting the desired stability necessary to take crypto to the next level of global acceptance and use. Also, differently from most of the crypto projects, Swap has ZERO premine, ZERO dev fees, and ZERO founders rewards. It's a community project after all, and that will never change. We started with RingCT at block 0. We have version 2 transactions from block 0 along with dynamic fees. The reward tax will not change, only other taxes. Our chain is more consistent than Monero’s as we started with the majority of improvements that Monero implemented over time. At block 150k, we completed our rebase to the Monero codebase 0.13.04 and we activated our bulletproof implementation. Also, from block 150k, we can now merge their patches easily in the future yet still go our own path. Speaking of going our own path, we are convinced that the CryptoNight algorithm (and all its variants) is garbage for anything but Monero. The algorithm promotes through its virtues of obfuscation, inequalities that cannot be compensated for. This required us to abandon CryptoNight in search of an algorithm or algorithms that more serve our needs for fairness and openness. To summarize in brief, we explored primarily Cuckaroo (same used by Grin) algorithm variants for our proof of work. The simpler the algorithm, the less advantage those with the means shall have. A simple algorithm that is open source is the first step in securing the block chain as it helps to level the playing field. Swap has forked at block 555,555 to a new and unique variant of Cuckaroo which we have labeled "Cuckaroo29s". We have in essence smashed together CryptoNight with Cuckaroo so that we can retain the desirable features of CryptoNote but also improve our network security with a better pow than any CryptoNight variant which has been proven to be easily FPGA'd or ASIC'd. There are a tremendous amount of improvements with the changes that have been made. Cuckaroo demands also far less CPU power to validate the blocks and sync with the network than CryptoNight and its variants. Join our Discord to learn more. Our whole history is carved there from the beginning. =========================================== Specifications - Coin symbol: XWP - Total supply: 18,400,000 coins before tail emission. - Tail emission: ~157,680 coins each year (starting at year 8) - Decimal places: 12 - PoW hash algorithm: Cuckaroo29s (variation of Grin's Cuckaroo29) - Block time: 15 seconds - Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm: Monero DAA - Genesis block: 2018-11-16 (November 16, 2018) at 09:06:03 (UTC) - Premine: No - Founders reward: No - Developer fee: No - ICO: No Website https://swap.fyi/ Project's GitHub https://github.com/swap-dev/swap Project's GitLab https://gitlab.com/swapproject Wiki https://github.com/swap-dev/swap/wiki GUI/CLI Wallet https://github.com/swap-dev/swap/releases/ Ledger app https://github.com/swap-dev/ledger-app-swap/releases Paper Wallet https://swap.fyi/paperwallet-alternative.html Mining your XWP Coins Everything you need to know can be found on the Github (https://github.com/swap-dev) repository and in the main page (https://swap.fyi/#miners). Miners More info about the mining softwares: https://swap.fyi/#miners https://github.com/swap-dev/SwapReferenceMiner/releases https://github.com/develsoftware/GMinerRelease/releases https://github.com/RainbowMiner/RainbowMiner/releases https://github.com/mozkomor/GrinProMiner/releases https://github.com/NebuTech/NBMiner/releases Community Pools https://miningpoolstats.stream/swap (Pool list and status) https://swap.fyi/#pools (Main page list) Micro pool Solo mining pool with Windows GUI - 1-click Installer: https://github.com/swap-dev/micropool-gui/releases Mining Rental Service https://www.miningrigrentals.com/rigs/cuckoocycle29swap Remote Nodes node.swap.fyi:19950 58.185.155.109:19950 (Special thanks to Reeyon, Asia node) Node.bitkitten.xyz:18850 (Special thanks to Rixxter, EU node) node.pocketwhale.info:19950 (Special thanks to Leafy, high performance North American node) Default ports - Mainnet P2P port: 19949 - Mainnet RPC port: 19950 - Testnet P2P port: 29949 - Stagenet P2P port: 39949 Note: Default ports can be changed by the user if necessary. Check the command-line flags of the CLI tools for more info. Block Explorer https://swap.coinscope.cc/ https://swap.coinscope.cc/api/emission (Current emission details) Social Media/Discussion Group Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SwapProject/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/_realSwap Discord: https://discord.gg/egc4md9 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/swapproject/ QQ: 690114865 (Chinese) Blockchain.raw No longer necessary since syncing from zero in the daemon is just as fast as downloading the blockchain.raw file and importing! Exchanges TradeOgre (BTC pair): https://tradeogre.com HotDEX (BTC pair): https://wallet.hotdex.eu Citex (BTC/ETC pairs): https://www.citex.co.kr Graviex (BTC/ETH pairs): https://graviex.net/ Bittrader (BTC/ETH/LTC/TRD/USDC pairs): https://bittrader.io/ Donation Address for Bounty, Airdrop, and Development fh2jc6PbQYd4a5PY3ooPMZiPVniMy4MGcjSRBnoBVc1xLmdCHJ6hc98Ess2hpN2mDgPnCAXtDUUbmjWYutRvdoSr2Nps2o5wc Private View key: 84a6ac951dccea8aa5c23127f9e69bd71222d64c0b560bbec49a6e6c01df1205

Blog URL: https://xrpcommunity.blog/proof-of-work-cryptos-will-be-left-behind/ In today's blog I describe the reasons why proof-of-work crypto is headed for a museum, and discuss news affecting XRP! 𝐑𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬: Ripple announces twelve new customers, including five new xRapid partners; The Paris Fintech Forum is promoting a panel discussion on January 30th with both Brad Garlinghouse and the former CEO of SWIFT; and SendFriend's CEO, David Lighton, provides insight into their plans for xRapid. 𝐗𝐑𝐏 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬: WietseWind announces the formation of a new company with three founders, including himself, and calls it XRPL Labs; XRPL Labs adds an option to the XRP Tip Bot to enable recurring daily, weekly, or monthly tips; Bithomp publishes a new API to capture and share rich XRP Wallet information for organization wallets; and GB Exchange (GBX) decides to list XRP; I hope you enjoy the read: Please feel free to share my blog with a friend or share it on any other platform - and thanks for doing so! My blog announcement links on other platforms: Twitter Reddit r/Ripple Reddit r/CryptoCurrency Reddit r/CryptoMarkets Reddit r/xrp Reddit r/RippleTalk Reddit r/alternativecoin Bitcointalk - alt coin sub forum Bitcointalk - XRP speculation thread

Hi Can someone explain exactly the "Two Generals Problem" and how it was solved, its implication for the Ripple consensus and also then explain Proof of Work, so that XRPs superiority becomes clear? Thanks

This is a question many new investors must ask as they wade into the heavy topics around crypto-currency. I analyze the differences that impact personal financial risk between Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP. As hedge funds and other institutional investors enter crypto, it's a question that larger organizations will be asking as well. Hope you enjoy the read, and please leave any feedback below. Feel free to share my blog with anybody else or on any other medium & thank you for doing so! My blog announcements on other media: Twitter Reddit r/Ripple Reddit r/xrp Reddit r/CryptoCurrency Reddit r/CryptoMarkets Bitcointalk - alt coin sub forum Bitcointalk - XRP speculation thread

Proof of Work consensus algorithms require the usage of massive amounts of electricity, for CPUs to mine for bitcoins and other alt coins. For bitcoin, it's coal-fueled mining facilities in China have become a subject of much attention and debate, as the miner's interests are only about generating bitcoins as a mining reward. They do not focus on other metrics, such as uptime and network stability, as Ripple does. Here are some pictures of one such mining operation: In contrast, other types of consensus algorithms do not require this energy, because consensus can be achieved in other ways. When it comes to blockchains, the most common alternative is a hybrid of a consensus approach known as "Proof of Stake," where the consensus is achieved by nodes that have the most "stake" or amount of coins. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake ) This approach is still considered a bit of a novelty, and requires a hybrid approach to start off the blockchain at its beginning stages - essentially hard-coding in a starting distribution of the stake to initiate the protocol. The other consensus algorithm is one that has been proven stable over many years of use; the XRP consensus, which uses a byzantine consensus algorithm. It's not considered a proof of work or a proof of state, but instead is centered around a "voting" mechanism among trusted nodes on a network. This means that no "mining" is necessary on the RCL, and it is by far the most energy-efficient method of achieving transaction confirmations, even more so than a hybrid Proof of Stake. The enery consumption of those networks (such as ETH or BTC) is no small matter. Bitcoin currently is estimated to generate 2,000,000 metric tons of CO2 every year. I have seen no such estimate yet of Ethereum, but because it's a POW blockchain, it will require or imply electrical consumption to fuel its consensus algorithm, and to keep it's network secure (source: reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3mchof/question_why_switch_to_pos/ ) The general public has shown a tendency to opt for "green energy" solutions in almost every industry where they know about the choice, or it's clearly labeled. In the case of crypto-currency, Ripple has chosen not to trumpet the "green-ness" of their solution, instead focusing on its incredible efficiency, but for me, it's good to know that the environment is benefiting from my choice of investment as well! Stay Green! Buy XRP!

Tweet and corresponding reddit post from Viad Zamfir on proof of work that I thought you all might enjoy. If bitcoin can't resolve its scaling issue, how will it ever resolve it's consensus problems. Both ETH and BTC have a long road ahead.