I am very skeptical about Ripple, the difference is that the company OpenCoin owns the supply of it. They are giving them away on this forum to try to enter the market that has been created by Bitcoin. You need to be able to trust OpenCoin if you are going to store your wealth in Ripples. How does one trust an corporation that is designed to make it's investor's wealthy?
Don't store your wealth in Ripples then. Use Ripple as a payment network and currency exchange and store your wealth in whatever currency has the properties you like. I completely agree that there's huge risk associated with using XRP as a currency now. (There's huge risk with Bitcoin too, but that's another story.)
No central entity owns the supply of Bitcoin.
Today, but that was not always true. There was a time when the vast majority of mined Bitcoins were own by those who had been given early access. This may be true of XRP some day or it may not. If you think that's a necessary property for a currency, then don't use XRP as a currency. We're not asking you to. We're promoting Ripple as a payment network.
Satoshi could have kept Bitcoin closed. He could have sold mining contracts. He could have kept the code secret. But he didn't. And because he didn't, his Bitcoins are worth more today than they ever would have been under a closed model. We may be selfish, but we're definitely not stupid.