A Big Update!

[tomb]

@nikb Can you attempt to answer the question above so they don't kill me for wasting an answer on my stupid question?

[tulo]

It seems Ripple is pushing more for ILP than for RCL. It's a good choice since I think it is what banks need and want...privacy and their private ledgers.

[jn_r]

7 hours ago, tomb said:

@nikb Can you attempt to answer the question above so they don't kill me for wasting an answer on my stupid question?

At times I picture them watching our conversation, big smile on their face, enjoying our confusion and struggles to understand what they (partly) reveal. It's torture (but also fun)

Edited September 14, 2016 by jn_r

[Hodor]

3 hours ago, tulo said:

It seems Ripple is pushing more for ILP than for RCL. It's a good choice since I think it is what banks need and want...privacy and their private ledgers.

Agreed.  No only am I not worried, this new collateral is just what was needed to supercharge adoption of the new protocol - very exciting!

[Hodor]

9 hours ago, nikb said:

ILP - the Interledger Protocol - defines the language that a ledger can use to connect and interact with other ILP-enabled ledgers.

The Eagle has landed!  

[cmbartley]

Anyone else notice that Earthport is not listed as a partner?

[Guest]

46 minutes ago, cmbartley said:

Anyone else notice that Earthport is not listed as a partner?

They're still a partner. They're just not an FI.

https://ripple.com/network/system-integrators/

[JoelKatz]

ILP is a protocol for transactions across ledgers. It's built on two very simple primitives, escrow and release. The magic happens when the release condition for one ledger is a payment on another.

ILP requires at least two ledgers to accomplish anything useful. These ledgers can be RCL, Bitcoin, any existing proprietary ledger that supports ILP, or custom-built ILP "side" ledgers built just to facilitate ILP transactions.

Ripple connect is a piece of proprietary software that allows banks to make payments using ILP and/or RCL. It handles both the transaction and the necessary setup and coordination to meet FI requirements for things like auditability and compliance.

ILP's universal mode does not require any notaries or validators, but it does have some settlement risk. This can be priced into low-value transactions. But for high-value transactions, you really want atomic mode which requires notaries to reduce points of failure. You can think of notaries as analogous to RCL validators except that they only agree on a single transaction and can operate in private.

I explained it in a bit more detail here: https://forum.ripple.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=15723

Any ILP transaction will have no significant technical obstacles to being bridged by XRP. The only obstacles will be regulatory/compliance and cost. The challenge for Ripple will be to promote ILP, get XRP spreads down, and then help FIs handle the regulatory/compliance issues.

[cmbartley]

11 minutes ago, tomxcs said:

They're still a partner. They're just not an FI.

https://ripple.com/network/system-integrators/

I was commenting on the Ripple Brochure where they list the software companies and the banks...

[rippleric]

3 hours ago, JoelKatz said:

The challenge for Ripple will be to promote ILP, get XRP spreads down, and then help FIs handle the regulatory/compliance issues.

get XRP spreads down would mean bring on the market makers and liquidity, which i see happening in the near future, derivatives at the end of this month should help too  

This is how I understand it, ILP will be used more locally as in the same jurisdiction and compliance wise for the shortest and cheapest path, but will opt for ripple and XRP for cross-border and more complex / longer paths where RCL is the cheapest and makes the most sense for trust and escrow between ledgers and connectors. 

Doesn't ripple and XRP make the most sense for ILP universal mode where the funds are escrowed in a counterpartyless asset and consensus ledger that is not a single point of failure?

What are the pros and cons of using an ILP enabled ledger like ripple with either atomic mode or universal? I figured atomic transactions will most likely not flow through RCL because they will be mostly private and have more specified escrow / notaries, but i guess could also opt for RCL when going cross-border?

I guess what I'm trying to get at is, when is it most efficient to use RCL with ILP, atomic or universal?

Edited September 15, 2016 by rippleric

[Mercury]

The most efficient may not be technical but regulation based. If privacy and legality of none fiat based currencies are in question a path that is fully controlled and known might be the best route. Banks after all do not always follow the easiest or simplest routes.


Sent from my LG-K210 using Tapatalk

[mDuo13]

@rippleric: I think we'll have to see in real life if RCL is more useful in atomic or universal mode transactions, but I think universal makes sense.

To use Atomic Mode, everyone involved in the atomic-mode transaction has to agree on a set of ILP Notaries (also called ILP Validators, since they serve a kind of similar role to rippled validators) to approve and coordinate the transactions. The notaries can be picked differently for each transaction, if desired, so you don't have to continue to agree on the same notaries in the long term, but you do need to agree for the one transaction.

In Universal Mode, payments can fail, but the system has incentives designed so that the connectors are the ones who take the loss, and generally only if one of the ledgers they're using fails. Connectors can price the risk of failure into their rates across ledgers, so everyone still ends up ahead in the long run. (At least, that's how it's supposed to work. Doubtless someone will make a mistake somewhere and end up losing lots of money at some point. That's pretty much inevitable with any new financial system. We're pretty confident there are no exploits in the protocol itself.)

There's also Optimistic Mode, which just assumes that payments will succeed. It's, uh, actually useful in some special cases?

Since the RCL is already decentralized, redundant, and has long-term validators, it provides very reliable operation. In Universal Mode, that's a valuable quality for a ledger to have (and fast settlement time is another nice bonus). So I think RCL will be a pretty good intermediary in Universal-mode transactions, especially in ones connecting to obscure corridors or sources of value.

It might be worth breaking down this diagram a little more:

You all have heard of Ripple Connect before, but this is the new version of Ripple Connect that uses the Interledger Protocol (in Atomic Mode) directly. The "ILP Ledger" in this case is an ILP-enabled sub-ledger we package with the Ripple Solution. Each bank runs their own ILP (sub-)Ledger to hold funds that can be transferred to other banks atomically through the Interledger Protocol. Ripple Connect handles the messaging and coordinates the transfers from the bank's core ledger to the ILP-enabled sub-ledger. Then the ILP payment from one bank's sub-ledger to the other bank's sub-ledger happens automatically (and atomically!), using one or more ILP-enabled liquidity providers (aka Connectors) and the other bank's Ripple Connect takes it from there to go from the ILP sub-ledger to the beneficiary bank's core ledger. The ILP Validator (also known as an ILP Notary) can be a single Notary run by either bank or a third party, or it can be an ad-hoc consensus group of Notaries. (So far, we're only using one validator per transaction.)

For the first version of this whole system, we're having the Liquidity Provider also be run by one of the banks, which is what big banks usually do anyway. Eventually the liquidity provider could be chosen from an approved set of liquidity providers based on the best rate available. I think it should be a pretty painless upgrade to using a network of them, or to switch one liquidity provider for another.

At no point in this process do the banks need to use the RCL, but it's entirely possible that the liquidity provider can use XRP behind the scenes to reduce exchange rates. I can't promise when we'll have more to say about that, but I'm pretty sure we'll have more to say at some point.

[karlos]

@mDuo13 

Wow it now makes total sense, thanks for clearing up my misconceptions about ILP "ledgers" and ILP validators.

Stop explaining things so well! 

[mDuo13]

Just now, karlos said:

@mDuo13 

Wow it now makes total sense, thanks for clearing up my misconceptions about ILP "ledgers" and ILP validators.

Stop explaining things so well! 

it's literally my job

[thinlyspread]

1 hour ago, mDuo13 said:

To use Atomic Mode, everyone involved in the atomic-mode transaction has to agree on a set of ILP Notaries (also called ILP Validators, since they serve a kind of similar role to rippled validators) to approve and coordinate the transactions. The notaries can be picked differently for each transaction, if desired, so you don't have to continue to agree on the same notaries in the long term, but you do need to agree for the one transaction.

How are those notaries picked? I mean, obviously the parties must agree on one/them, but how does it occur; is it somewhat automated? I'm just wondering how seamless the whole thing is from a user perspective. As you say it's an optional setup/tinkering per transaction. But if you're doing hundreds of transactions with one or two known parties, presumably you'd just use the same notary(ies) for the foreseeable. Does the set up require knowledge of command line etc, or is it all part of a nice UX design?

Edited September 15, 2016 by rippledigital