An unmentioned limitation is that the system doesn't really suit the 'consumer economy', unless salaries by producers are also paid out in the currency. It does work well for transactions between peers, i.e. friends spending / borrowing – in this system it's essentially the same thing – from each other.
Meanwhile, people were downloading Bitcoin and clicking a button to "Generate Coins." Great, so you've got coins. Now what? Maybe you offer 10,000 of them to anyone on the internet who will call in a pizza order in your area. Somebody does it and your pizza gets delivered. You send them 10,000 of your whacko coins in return. Boom! A working cryptocurrency is born.
You just couldn't achieve that with the early Ripple.
The later Ripple which wasn't written by Ryan Fugger added a cryptocurrency called XRP to this scheme, and apparently spent most of its time arguing that its new cryptocurrency wasn't a cryptocurrency but just spam protection. A sizable portion of this spam protection was divided up among the original investors/author. It was fun to read the comments on that one.
> User onboarding for the Mint API is left to the discretion of the mint implementor or administrator...
If I am registered with a mint, and use Settle to offer to pay someone registered at another mint, who ensures I have those funds? (If it turns out I didn't have sufficient funds, I will presumably become dis-"trust"-ed, but how long will it take for that distrust to propagate? And how would newly-arrived members of any mint know that I'm not trustworthy?)
On a more mundane level, how is it envisioned that real-world a$$et$ will enter and exit the settle system? If someone has promised me assets, how do I cash them out of the mint and into (say) my PayPal account?
I can imagine in a future scenario, existing banks (or PayPal!) could inexpensively and conveniently act as Settle mints, guaranteeing their depositors up to their banked assets. E.G. my bank, Stanford federal credit union, could easily act as a mint and I would be on the network through it as fernly@sfcu.org. SFCU would "know" that I'm good up to my current balance (or some fraction of it chosen by me).
But short of that future day, is it not the case that a person setting up amateur mint must really taking on the responsibility of a banker, holding funds and paying them out on demand?
Edited: One question: it seems to me that settle service is nothing but a group of rest API end point(include register?), it'll be really useful if i could interactive with it directly with curl/bash without installing any client.
Given a string can you programatically determine whether it is bitcoin? (Starting from a string called 'genesis block', asking assumingly malicious nodes for more strings, doing some math you can reach the string in question.) (Note: You cannot do so with ERC tokens, an alarming thing to ponder[0])
Can you determine with high probability the "amount of work done" in producing the set over which you previously did math? (This amount acts as the amount of trust we lay behind it, which we determine on our own. We always await anyone who can provide more cumulative work done.)
Thus there is no trust graph with bitcoin atleast. (Apart from mining centralization, and users prone to upgrading, bitcoin is pretty close to decentralised and looks to improve in future with physical limits being reached with mining chips and people increasingly opting for immutable code alongwith the immutable chain it calculates on (once all aspects of fungibility like anonymity is solved, users might stop upgrading at all).)
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settle.network is just git.
All of private blockchains, federated sidechains, colored coins, so-called-smart-contracts-on-eth, premined coins, proof-of-stake coins, etc etc are just PKIs.
[0] https://www.google.co.in/search?q=how+to+check+if+a+token+is...
Not the case with physical currencies such as precious metals...
I don't think that's really true. Most precious metals are valuable because people think they're valuable - they're propped up by a collective myth, by the collective belief that there will always be someone else willing to pay. Sure, there are industrial applications, but those are not the primary drivers of value, especially not historically.
For argument sake, imagine the most sketchy character you can conjure in your mind and let's say he ask you to change a 50 in 10s. Would you trade him 5 of your 10s for one of his 50?
ERC20 token should be indistinguishable from each other because it's a standard devised precisely to encourage and facilitate trading.
You can also refer to the source code[0] but that requires a bit more effort.
To interact with m.settle.network you would have to signup first using the command line (that's the easiest, to get your key, though doable over curl as well as you rightfully point out)
These are only pointers, but happy to answer any question async over email at stan@stripe.com as well!
[0] https://github.com/spolu/settle/tree/master/mint/endpoint
This is one example: https://github.com/bokkypoobah/TokenTrader/blob/master/contr...
Originally asked here: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/12757/detect-or...
You can also check with MyEtherWallet: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/21082/use-mew-f...
The short answer is that you need the contract code and ABI to check if it is a ERC20 compliant token or not but you can use http://testnet.etherscan.io/ (or the live version) to get this information.
To reach the ethereum genesis block programatically, starting from an erc20 token I give you, you need that "need the contract code" part which is centralised.
The contract that holds the ERC20 is hosted in every single node of the blockchain so it is not centralised at all.
If gold-plated contacts cost more than they're worth, nobody would make any as it would have a negative ROI.
I agree that the market cap of gold is higher than it would be if industrial applications were the only source of demand. But given that gold is used for industrial applications, it must not cost more than it is worth for those applications. Hope that makes sense.
That it sells for X proves that it adds at least X amount of value.