[danoprey]

There are lots of similarities but also some very key differences.

The main one being that there is no native currency like XRP, so there is no risk of a similar situation to the current fiasco arising.

hyperledger is designed to be far more light weight and flexible than Ripple, meaning that instead of just being a conduit to trade other assets, hyperledger allows organisations to also issue their own assets, which they have complete control over.

We also have a different notion of pools. Anyone can create their own consensus pool with its own membership requirement rules or features, such as private transaction.

We achieve consensus by a slight different method. More info on this to come, please check the FAQ: http://www.hyperledger.com/faqs.html#ripple

Currently we are a small team of two, myself on the business/marketing side (we will be building commercial products on top of the open project, just as any user could) and feichtinger who is the main technical side. A bit more info on the contact page. Happy to answer any specifics here.

[mrb]

"there is no risk of a similar situation to the current fiasco arising"

Actually there is. The Ripple fiasco arised because the creator (jed) owned a large amount of XRP, and decided to sell large quantities of it, hence crashing the market. In hyperledger, organisations can issue their own assets, therefore can own a large quantity, therefore can crash the market by selling a lot.

Hyperledger as a platform is technically independent of and will survive such market crashes, but this is kind of irrelevant since the currencies/assets it enables the creation of are exactly vulnerable to all the same flaws that XRP is vulnerable to. Ultimately the users of hyperledger don't care about the platform, but care about the value, fungibility, liquidity of the currencies/assets.

Furthermore, it seems to me hyperledger is not decentralized at all. IIUC the issuance of the currencies/assets is 100% controlled by the rules defined by the organisations that created these currencies/assets, so who would guarantee me for example that organisation X is not going to issue 100 billion more units of currency Y tomorrow?

[feichtinger]

Hi mrb,

That's a great point, but at this stage I do think there's a critical distinction between something that's inherent to the platform and something that sits on top of it. Right now we're really focusing only on building the platform and ensuring that it's eventually widely used and trusted.

We have some thoughts about systems for building trust in issuing parties, but that's a long way off!

There are some non-currency assets which can be recorded on hyperledger which don't necessarily have the same concerns. For example, stocks in a company, airline miles, or phone credit.