Is there any other way to acquire them at this stage? ALSO, what happens to them as they get spent in transactions (1 XRP per transaction iirc?), do they simply vanish entirely?
From what I understand, XRP are given out in the millions to Ripple developers and people connected to OpenCoin. There are other public giveaways planned as well, but no one knows with certainty where and when.
100 billion XRP are in hands of OpenCoin right now, and they control the protocol for their creation and destruction. So, its hard to say how it will all play out in the end.
It's all a bit too closed for my liking. The founders have donated 80 billion to OpenCoin - already there's alarm bells - they're keeping back a 20% stake of an entire economy for themselves?!
And then OpenCoin doesn't have a simple or fair way to share out the XRP, nor have they even pledged to distribute all of it, and yet there are even a couple of active gateways in place already? How come I, for example, can't just go ahead and open mine? It all seems stacked against the eventual users, which is a real shame as the overall concept is nothing short of brilliant.
Like with the founders of certain Bitcoin clones, I think their greed may be their undoing.