[triptychs]

Just to comment on this part:

>I like the idea of a currency which doesn't allow politicians to introduce inflation, but perhaps we should have one which has a finite set of tokens on setup, and doesn't attempt to also attract people as some sort of investment with mining etc.

I'm sure someone will correct me, but as I understand it this is how Ripple[0] works. From my recollection (I haven't checked in on how Ripple has been progressing over the past 6-8 months or so), Ripple's currency (XRP) are established with a finite supply and all XRP is in reserve, not requiring any "mining" or similar. Also, it looks like Ripple is kind of an exchange as well? It seems to be able to cross-process payments between USD, EUR, BTC, LTC, XRP, and more (I believe most international currencies are supported currently)[1]. It's interesting but, like I said earlier, I'm not sure if I fully understand it.

[0] https://ripple.com/ [1] https://ripple.com/guide-to-currency-trading-on-the-ripple-n...

[grey-area]

Thanks for the link, that looks interesting (as a currency). From their FAQ they look like a Bitcoin inspired currency which tries to define all the parts necessary for independent digital payments:

Payment Network (with protocol)

Exchange

Currency

All in one place. The advantage to that if you trust them of course is that you can expect the exchange/payment processor isn't a buggy webapp sitting on an insecure VPS with multiple ways to be hacked (I hope!). If you don't trust them it's even more scary than bitcoin though.

I wish alternatives to Bitcoin got half the attention Bitcoin has been getting on HN over the last few months - a currency is not a success because it constantly shoots up in value, quite the reverse.