What is Ripple?

It is a distributed, open-source payments system that’s still in beta. The goal of the ripple system, according to its website, is to enable people to break free of the “walled gardens” of financial networks – ie, credit cards, banks, PayPal and other institutions that restrict access with fees, charges for currency exchanges and processing delays.

What does Ripple do?

According to is OpenCoin, the company behind ripple, the currency addresses the need to keep money flowing freely. A company blog post titled “Ripple and the Purpose of Money” gives a brief history of money and its transportability, and points to the frustration of having banks and other institutions impede the transfer of funds with transaction fees and processing delays. The goal of Ripple, it says, is to build on the decentralized digital currency approach set by bitcoin and do “for money what the internet did for all other forms of information.”

How would Ripple function like the internet?

Ripple’s chief cryptographer, David Schwartz, explains it like this:

“Payment systems today are where email was in the early ‘80s. Every provider built their own system for their customers and if people used different systems they couldn’t easily interact with each other. Ripple is designed to connect different payment systems together.”

Schwartz also anticipates the possibility of seeing “big companies lose their control over the flow of other people’s money just as they’ve lost control over the flow of information.”

Is Ripple like Bitcoin?
In many ways, yes. Like Bitcoin, Ripple’s XRP unit is a digital form of currency based on mathematical formulae and has a limited number of units that can ultimately be mined. Both forms of currency can be transferred from account to account (peer-to-peer, or P2P) without the need for any intervening third party. And both provide digital security to guard against the possibility of counterfeit coins.