Ripple is a closed source scam startup. Anyone who buys into that crap needs their head checked out.
The distribution of the XRP is the main problem. There are no clear rules set, Opencoin Inc. has billions over billions
of them and chooses how to give them away. At least with bitcoin the rules are set in the software.
The first giveaways were receiving up to 50000 XRP, now you get a few thousand if you are lucky.
This is very bad imho and makes the XRP exchange rates artificial high. Why not give out more XRP
to keep that somewhat stable. This also causes other problems, for example people buy XRP now
at super inflated rates thinking it will be Bitcoin 2.0, what if Opencoin starts to give away a few billions
on Facebook or so. XRP would probably drop pretty good in value and burn some people.
Also I don't like how it is advertised as open, while it is not (yes I know it is in beta blabla, bitcoin is too, so what, I can still look at the code)
Maybe the system should be reset with a fair XRP distribution system and the server opensource from the start, then I would like it :/
XRP has a consensus model, not a proof-of-work mining model like Bitcoin that uses mining to distribute the coins. It would be an interesting problem to somehow combine the two. If a consensus model distributed coins to miners, that would seem to imply that only those who are part of the consensus would received the mined coins, which would also seem to not be fair. As a future exercise, it might be interesting to create a coin that allows a consensus to build among any interested parties that still uses the virtue of distributing the coin through mining.