Answer: What about Allvor on XRP Ledger

[Guest]

This is one about Alvor.  Haven’t seen it raised in here yet so bringing it in...

Bob it’s  probably worth following the link back to the original thread to get a sense of what was being asked about Alvor.

1 hour ago, jag216 said:

How is what allvor has done any different than what Bob Way suggested in that video clip regarding why it is unnecessary to fork Ripple in order to create your own currency? It doesn't seem strange to me that they want to do this, assuming they can justify the value added service that underlies it.

I haven't checked to see if Bob's book group has raised this question yet, but it seems like one he'd be interested in expanding on.

 

Edited March 19, 2019 by Guest
Added a bit more clarity

[BobWay]

So I looked at their white paper briefly and I see that they understand very well how the XRP Ledger was intended to work. I applaud them for that and for thinking of a clever way to use the features.

What they’be done is create their own currency entirely within XRPL. Then they integrated that currency with there gateway software. This lets them send external payment to merchants not directly connected to the XRP. Which is a funny thing to say because in effect their gateway connects those merchants to the XRPL without requiring them to do the technical heavy lifting.

So I’m not endorsing the project, I really haven’t read that deeply about WHY they think their new “token” is necessary. However, I encourage everyone to analyze their white paper and watch their transactions on the XRPL until you understand exactly how and what they are doing. That is what open transparent ledgers are for.

I actually created the first non-XRP “counterparty-less” currency on the XRPL. It was called GDW and was a tipping currency that everyone could use as a learning example. It was implemented as a “local exchange trading system” LETS which is usecase that XRP is actually unsuitable for. So it needed its own currency. Actually I could have used USD or any other existing currency. But that would have overly confused people at the time (and now).  It turns out that people were willing to trade GDW for USD and XRP on their own accord. It didn’t need any other “utility” beyond the example problem for people to find it valuable.

I don’t claim the Allvor usecase and token is a good one. But it might be. I just haven’t looked that deeply. But I encourage everyone else to, if only as an exercise to see if it jogs any clever ideas within yourself.

[goldstar111]

3 hours ago, BobWay said:

So I looked at their white paper briefly and I see that they understand very well how the XRP Ledger was intended to work. I applaud them for that and for thinking of a clever way to use the features.

What they’be done is create their own currency entirely within XRPL. Then they integrated that currency with there gateway software. This lets them send external payment to merchants not directly connected to the XRP. Which is a funny thing to say because in effect their gateway connects those merchants to the XRPL without requiring them to do the technical heavy lifting.

So I’m not endorsing the project, I really haven’t read that deeply about WHY they think their new “token” is necessary. However, I encourage everyone to analyze their white paper and watch their transactions on the XRPL until you understand exactly how and what they are doing. That is what open transparent ledgers are for.

I actually created the first non-XRP “counterparty-less” currency on the XRPL. It was called GDW and was a tipping currency that everyone could use as a learning example. It was implemented as a “local exchange trading system” LETS which is usecase that XRP is actually unsuitable for. So it needed its own currency. Actually I could have used USD or any other existing currency. But that would have overly confused people at the time (and now).  It turns out that people were willing to trade GDW for USD and XRP on their own accord. It didn’t need any other “utility” beyond the example problem for people to find it valuable.

I don’t claim the Allvor usecase and token is a good one. But it might be. I just haven’t looked that deeply. But I encourage everyone else to, if only as an exercise to see if it jogs any clever ideas within yourself.

Hi @BobWay I am sorry I don't get why it needed a currency GDW for tipping? why not just use XRP? Sorry If I am being a bit slow. Also you said the GDW was "counterparty-less" how did you do that ? I thought all IOUS ( issued currencies) on XRPL bore counterparty risk as they exist as debits and credits and not natively? am I missing something here?

[Coolio]

Disable the master key of the issuing address und set the regular key to a black hole address. So nobody can change the amount of the issued currency or freeze the token. That means the issued currency is without counterparty risk.

 

[RossMacFirdeen]

5 hours ago, Coolio said:

Disable the master key of the issuing address und set the regular key to a black hole address. So nobody can change the amount of the issued currency or freeze the token. That means the issued currency is without counterparty risk.

 

I am not very familiar with the regularkey mechanism despite reading several documents on the Ripple website ... Who could explain with simple words the purpose of this approach?

I discovered a few months ago this "blackhole" ... but I do not understand what it serves: -s

Thank you for your help / explanations

[BobWay]

11 hours ago, goldstar111 said:

Hi @BobWay I am sorry I don't get why it needed a currency GDW for tipping? why not just use XRP? Sorry If I am being a bit slow. Also you said the GDW was "counterparty-less" how did you do that ? I thought all IOUS ( issued currencies) on XRPL bore counterparty risk as they exist as debits and credits and not natively? am I missing something here?

So it's trivial to say, just buy some XRP and use that to tip people. You are actually right. That works great.

But back when I was learning and teaching people about "the Ripple ledger" (as we called XRPL back then) I wanted to get people thinking beyond XRP. To me, personally, XRP is the most boring part of "the Ripple ledger". So to me, (no offense intended) lots of the discussion in the XRP Community is a bit tedious. It's a lot like spending day after day waxing poetic about superglue. What's important about superglue isn't the glue itself. It's that superglue helped you fix something else that is way move valuable than the glue itself.

So what can you use XRP and/or the XRPL to fix?  Well, generalized money problems. Really any problems that involve multiple parties (people or businesses) and their relationship to "who owns what things". This includes the related case of "who owes who, what things". I specifically say, "thing" because the XRP ledger is not limited to tracking "money". It can track anything that is important to you. XRP, USD, EUR, XAU, XAG are just specific examples of things that the XRPL can track. But it can also track imaginary things and new financial constructions as well.

The crazy thing is, XRP, BTC, ETH, etc, are all examples of imaginary things tracked on "ledgers". They simply do not exist. We all just agree to pretend that they exist, and we find that useful.

But there are other ways to account for things that don't exist that long predate bitcoin and cryptocurrency. For me, what blew my mind was learning about the LETS construct. I see that the MOST IMPORTANT concept in the space to learn. Because it absolutely changes your understand about what money actually is.

So I built one on the XRP Ledger. It took about 10 minutes and we had fun with it for years. It is still up and running.  I copied the original announcement and explanation here.

So imagine a way back world, when XRP was hard to buy. There were no exchanges. Most people didn't have an abundance of XRP to use for tipping. So what do you do in that situation?  Well you construct a new form of "liquidity" for everyone to use. Once that doesn't even need money to work. But curiously, the new liquidity quickly became tradable for more conventional money. I may have even bought USD or XRP using goodwill at one point. Kind of mind blowing.

[BobWay]

9 hours ago, Coolio said:

Disable the master key of the issuing address und set the regular key to a black hole address. So nobody can change the amount of the issued currency or freeze the token. That means the issued currency is without counterparty risk.

 

4 hours ago, RossMacFirdeen said:

I am not very familiar with the regularkey mechanism despite reading several documents on the Ripple website ... Who could explain with simple words the purpose of this approach?

I discovered a few months ago this "blackhole" ... but I do not understand what it serves: -s

Coolio is describing what I was telling people about in the Bitcoin Texas video posted on YouTube way back when. It is a simple way to issue a fixed quantity of a new "alt-coin" directly on the XRPL. Once issued, it becomes a counterparty-free, riskless asset. Since the "issuer/creator" no longer has any power over the token. It isn't redeemable for anything, so it can't be called an IOU (I owe you).

"a blackhole" is an https://developers.ripple.com/accounts.htmladdress to which no secret exists. There are several common ones used. 

[goldstar111]

21 minutes ago, BobWay said:

So it's trivial to say, just buy some XRP and use that to tip people. You are actually right. That works great.

But back when I was learning and teaching people about "the Ripple ledger" (as we called XRPL back then) I wanted to get people thinking beyond XRP. To me, personally, XRP is the most boring part of "the Ripple ledger". So to me, (no offense intended) lots of the discussion in the XRP Community is a bit tedious. It's a lot like spending day after day waxing poetic about superglue. What's important about superglue isn't the glue itself. It's that superglue helped you fix something else that is way move valuable than the glue itself.

So what can you use XRP and/or the XRPL to fix?  Well, generalized money problems. Really any problems that involve multiple parties (people or businesses) and their relationship to "who owns what things". This includes the related case of "who owes who, what things". I specifically say, "thing" because the XRP ledger is not limited to tracking "money". It can track anything that is important to you. XRP, USD, EUR, XAU, XAG are just specific examples of things that the XRPL can track. But it can also track imaginary things and new financial constructions as well.

The crazy thing is, XRP, BTC, ETH, etc, are all examples of imaginary things tracked on "ledgers". They simply do not exist. We all just agree to pretend that they exist, and we find that useful.

But there are other ways to account for things that don't exist that long predate bitcoin and cryptocurrency. For me, what blew my mind was learning about the LETS construct. I see that the MOST IMPORTANT concept in the space to learn. Because it absolutely changes your understand about what money actually is.

 So I built one on the XRP Ledger. It took about 10 minutes and we had fun with it for years. It is still up and running.  I copied the original announcement and explanation here.

So imagine a way back world, when XRP was hard to buy. There were no exchanges. Most people didn't have an abundance of XRP to use for tipping. So what do you do in that situation?  Well you construct a new form of "liquidity" for everyone to use. Once that doesn't even need money to work. But curiously, the new liquidity quickly became tradable for more conventional money. I may have even bought USD or XRP using goodwill at one point. Kind of mind blowing.

It is all clear now  how it can be more valuable to bootstrap a tipping system with some imaginary token which you can just distribute to whole community and they can all use it without any monetary considerations at least right at the onset. Thanks a lot. I still do not understand why this would not be just an IOU on the XRPL and "counterparty risk free".  

[dr_ed]

I'm trying to get my head around it....gonna read the links. Keep waiting....the epiphany is coming. I feel it. I'm a retard sometimes.

 

[dr_ed]

Question. Is this the same basic idea as what David S. was referring to on the Hi Bob thread last week?  (I'm looking for the post now and I'll post a link when I find it, but maybe you remember.)

I see that the original post says this is a system for a group that has members in different countries. I am trying to think of a killer use case. Help me out here? 

[Guest]

16 hours ago, BobWay said:

I really haven’t read that deeply about WHY they think their new “token” is necessary

i can't figure that out either, or why xrp wouldnt b equally or more useful in such instances

[BobWay]

That is why I came back to the forums. To discuss how different types of "money" work and what the benefits of each are.

A LETS system absolutely does not just issues tokens to every member of a new community. It forms the community, but issues nothing at all. As community members tip other members, your balance goes up or down as necessary. So everyone start with a ZERO balance, but Alice can still send Bob 5 GDW when appropriate, because her balance is allowed to go negative. So after that first transaction, Alice is -5 GDW and Bob is +5 GDW. This did not create any new currency, because over all the system still nets to ZERO GDW.

[BobWay]

It is not an IOU because there is nothing for the OWED to collect from the bookkeeper. The owed party is owed-to by the community collectively. The owing party owes to the community collectively. Like I said in the GDW post. It's hippie money.

Where as XRP is libertarian money.

@dr_ed I think the phrase you are looking for is "social credit"

Edited March 20, 2019 by BobWay

[dr_ed]

Okay, I'm starting to get it, I think. My brain is libertarian-side dominant. Sorry. 

[Allvor]

On 3/19/2019 at 8:03 PM, BobWay said:

So I looked at their white paper briefly and I see that they understand very well how the XRP Ledger was intended to work. I applaud them for that and for thinking of a clever way to use the features.

What they’be done is create their own currency entirely within XRPL. Then they integrated that currency with there gateway software. This lets them send external payment to merchants not directly connected to the XRP. Which is a funny thing to say because in effect their gateway connects those merchants to the XRPL without requiring them to do the technical heavy lifting.

So I’m not endorsing the project, I really haven’t read that deeply about WHY they think their new “token” is necessary. However, I encourage everyone to analyze their white paper and watch their transactions on the XRPL until you understand exactly how and what they are doing. That is what open transparent ledgers are for.

I actually created the first non-XRP “counterparty-less” currency on the XRPL. It was called GDW and was a tipping currency that everyone could use as a learning example. It was implemented as a “local exchange trading system” LETS which is usecase that XRP is actually unsuitable for. So it needed its own currency. Actually I could have used USD or any other existing currency. But that would have overly confused people at the time (and now).  It turns out that people were willing to trade GDW for USD and XRP on their own accord. It didn’t need any other “utility” beyond the example problem for people to find it valuable.

I don’t claim the Allvor usecase and token is a good one. But it might be. I just haven’t looked that deeply. But I encourage everyone else to, if only as an exercise to see if it jogs any clever ideas within yourself.

Hello Bob,
Your feedback is important and we would like to thank you for spending a little of your time looking at our White Paper.
We love XRP, but in a way Allvor draws inspiration from the fundamentals of "The Ripple Ledger," as they used to say. The texts published by Ryan were very important to Allvor's conception, and are cited in the White Paper.

Any issue in XRP Ledger is much better than an ERC20 token for basically any purpose. Our competition is not with XRP, and it is clear that there is a space for several tokens with good technologies.

We believe that there will be an ecosystem around the XRP Ledger, and this is due to the fundamentals of Ripple ledger. The XRP as the main token, coexisting with several others, most of them with some "specialty". And the specialty is controlled by the tools that integrate the ledger with the outside world. In our case it is a payment solution. But we believe they will surigr several tokens and several other solutions.
Thank you!