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Currently there are only 100 billion ripples (XRP), which are slowly being distributed, and a fraction of a ripple is destroyed with each transaction.
In the future if we run out of ripples, or if the developers decide that they need to have more ripples for some reason (to pay their bills?), then would it be possible to create more? If yes, what is the exact process of doing this? Does it require consensus? Or is it just an edit-compile-deploy?
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No. The amount of Ripples is fixed and, unlike with Bitcoin, available from the day it was created. The amount is fixed to 100 billion.
However, this amount is for the main "Ledger" which is currently used by everyone using Ripple. You can see a ledger as similar to a Bitcoin block chain. Everyone can, if he would like, create a new Ledger, just like everyone can start a new block chain. Currently, though, there is only one Ledger really used and that's the one the Ripple founders started together with Coinbase and consists of 100 billion Ripples.
These 100 billion Ripples or XRP are dividable into "drops", which are 1 millionth of a Ripple. This means that 100 million billion drops exist.
With the transaction fee for Ripple currently on 10 drops, this means that even with thousand transactions per second, they will only run out in 634,195 years.
(Disclosure: Since Ripple is fairly young, I'm also new to it. I did some reading and tried to understand it's foundations, taking the Ripple wiki as primary reference. It's very much possible that I misunderstood some aspects of the system or that the wiki is not fully correct.)
Two corrections: drops are a millionth, 100 billion total. – Nick ODell – 2013-04-24T23:41:47.330
Sorry, mistakes by typing too fast, I used both 200 and 100 and I used the right drop value for the calculation. Thanks for noticing! – Steven Roose – 2013-04-25T00:10:50.060
To answer your first question, AFAIK, that's not one of the rules that the ripple network votes on, just like bitcoin doesn't vote on transactions requiring signatures. – Nick ODell – 2013-04-24T22:07:41.670
@NickODell Not a duplicate, as I am asking specifically how to create more ripples (not whether we'll run out of them). – Manish – 2013-04-24T22:09:56.670
I'd argue that the answer still is a duplicate in that it explains that there is no likelihood of running out of Ripples. Plus I think it makes it clear that there is no provision in the protocol for more Ripples. Sure, just like bitcoin, you could create a hard fork to change that, but at that point the protocol is fundamentally changed. It wouldn't be ripple anymore, just some new ripple2 protocol that might be backwards compatible with Ripple. – David Ogren – 2013-04-25T02:43:35.693
@DavidOgren Something must be wrong with my computer, because I'm not seeing that the other question answers how to create more ripples. In Bitcoin more coins can be created if "everyone" agrees. I'm asking if this is also possible in Ripple, and how it is done (e.g. in Bitcoin you change the code of all the nodes, essentially changing the protocol). – Manish – 2013-04-25T14:40:51.933
1Can anybody point where exactly the protocol guarantees that no more than 100 billions of ripples can be in circulation? – Bitripple – 2013-04-26T01:18:08.573
@Bitripple See here: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10240/how-to-create-more-ripples
– Manish – 2013-04-27T22:47:51.323