LAS VEGAS — Here's your problem: You have a pocketful of virtualcurrency Bitcoin, or maybe it's British pounds, and you need to paya taxi driver who accepts only Euros or maybe it's yen.

Ready to give up? Don't.

Meet Ripple, the first distributed payments protocol that iscurrency agnostic, transfers instantly, it's essentially free, andthere can be no chargebacks, according to Chris Larsen, CEO ofRipple Labs Inc. in San Francisco.

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The occasion was the first Ripple developers conference, held inLas Vegas as a footnote to the Money2020 payments confab this week.

Where Money2020 drew around 4,000, the Ripple meeting attractedmaybe 100, but they filled the room that had been allotted and theycame with questions about how to make this innovative approach tocurrency work.

Ripple is to money as SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is toemail, said Larsen., and what SMTP does is let email serverscommunicate with pretty much all other email servers over theInternet.

The Ripple tagline explains the mission: Send money to anyone,anywhere, in any currency.

Ripple is like Bitcoin, sort of. Part of the Ripple ecosystem is a virtualcurrency – called XRP – that, like Bitcoin, is mathematicallydefined and operates independently of nation states. A keydifference: the Ripple platform is built to allow exchanges fromone currency into another, with minimal friction and costs. Thatincludes nation state currencies such as dollars.

“We see remittances as a place where Ripple can make a bigdifference,” said Evan Schwartz, the company's software engineer.“Right now it is extraordinarily expensive (to send a remittancefrom, say, the U.S. to Mexico or India). With Ripple this would bemuch lower cost. It's an exciting possibility,” said Schwartz.

He added that for just about any merchant Ripple offers anadvantage: “You can get paid in any currency, but receive it inyour preferred currency,” said Schwartz.

The Ripple secret sauce is a platform that effects continuingexchanges among currency holders called “market makers.”

Put Canadian dollars into the system and it looks for a marketmaker seeking them – and an exchange is made. Exchanges keepoccurring until, ultimately, those Canadian dollars morph into thedesired destination currency – say, U.S. dollars or Indian rupeesor whatever.

The Internet, said Larsen, created an easy way to exchangeinformation across borders – and what Ripple is intended to do iscreate an exchange that allows value to be easily exchanged crossborder.

The Ripple exchange, he said, is peer to peer and it runs ontrust and a process called consensus that facilitates thecurrency-to-currency movement.

Know, too, that Ripple has backing from numerous venture capitalfunds including Google Ventures.

Buzz in at least some circles is that Ripple is the new darlingof the techno currency set and is winning support from onetimeBitcoin fans who have been deterred by recent badpublicity.