I can't see a price discovery mechanism in ripple .....a trading point ... a board .... where bids and offers are matched and a price is fixed like in an exchange
You mean like this?
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Also.... NOT directly connected to this question, Ripple has a counter party and the founders have a huuuuge stake
There is no counter-party risk for holding XRPs. No one can take your XRP away from you, or prevent you from sending or receiving them. It is true that there are large stakeholders of XRP but this is not significantly different from Bitcoin. Furthermore, it's not in OpenCoin's best interest to cause the value of XRP to drop through a sell-off.