Drop the concept of rippling in favor of long lived offers about stellar-protocol

[irisli]

This sounds great as it can unify bridges between currencies in a simple manner. Rippling is no longer needed since Stellar will be used more for centralized gateways than a p2p system.

Perhaps we can make a new offer type called a parity offer in which other offers can take it but other parity offers can not take and only allows for 1:1 trades. Also, a parity offer would have these special properties. A parity offer would be essentially the same as a flag on an offer but it would be more explicit (not just a mumble of offers that may be confusing) and semantic (an important feature like this should be more supported natively instead of like a hack imo).

[sunny-g]

But if you accepted n currencies, wouldn't you need to set up (n^2 -n) offers to simulate full rippling (though my math might be wrong if I'm misunderstanding something)?

Rippling is no longer needed since Stellar will be used more for centralized gateways than a p2p system.

I thought the point of Stellar was to be more p2p than Ripple...

[xekoukou]

Not really, offers are 'sticky'. You would only need 2n for n trust lines.

I like Jed's idea. I don't understand what irsli is saying. I also want full p2p.

[irisli]

Sorry, p2p is a term used in many different contexts. By p2p, I meant that I am not going to issue a irisliUSD and have it ripple through xekoukouUSD to sunny-gUSD. Instead, I would be using bigcompanyUSD and sending it to you through anothercompanyUSD (which I consider more "centralized"). In the case of bigger gateways (and not a gateway per person), rippling is not very necessary.

[sunny-g]

rippling is not very necessary.

Well if they can be adapted to do the same thing (offers and rippling), then only one is necessary. But one application I've been working on is social credit which necessarily has each user operate as a pseudo-gateway so naturally I don't want changes made that might remove that application entirely.

[irisli]

You'll still be able to accomplish the same things as rippling through market making with offers. Offers are more explicit and more easily controlled since it happens on the gateway's end (individual issuers as opposed to consumers of those credits). I do see what you mean by the (n^2-n) offers necessary to "ripple" this way through offers.

[xekoukou]

It seems to me that offers are a binary relation that is transitive.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_relation
So only 2n.

This is not a removal of rippling. The opposite, it is an enhancement.
What can be removed is the dead code that treated both as separate while they are the same.

I really want to create xekoukouUSD.

[sunny-g]

I really want to create xekoukouUSD.

@xekoukou why can't you do that now though with rippling?

It seems to me then that in the end, this would just provide a greater degree of granularity rather than making full rippling among anything that qualifies as USD the default, which if so, is actually much better.

[xekoukou]

@sunny-g I can.

Granularity: exactly!

[sunny-g]

One thing that only just recently came to mind:

Rippling with trust lines sets limits such that if two types if IOUs were being traded against each other, there would be a limit to how much one can trade one for the other. How would this be maintained if one were establishing a market offer between their own IOU and someone else's?

[jedmccaleb]

this is done now

[sunny-g]

@jedmccaleb so offers have replaced trust lines? If so, two questions:

• Is information on how to use offers documented anywhere?
• Can you (the issuer, not consumer) still specify how many of a certain issuer's credit you're willing to hold as a result of accepting it in offers (essentially, can you still specify something that operates as a trust limit)?

[jedmccaleb]

Trust lines still exist: https://www.stellar.org/developers/learn/concepts/assets.html
"rippling" was replaced by just placing offers.

[sunny-g]

@jedmccaleb thank you for the clarification! With regards to offers, is documentation like this still valid: https://github.com/stellar/docs/blob/master/learn/concepts/list-of-operations.md#manage-offer ?

[jedmccaleb]

yep