Ripple is a trademark of OpenCoin Inc, a private for-profit company. I am breaking their Terms of Service by using the trademark Ripple without permission. Sue me.
Satoshi Nakamoto:
The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust thats required to make it
work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of
fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our
money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles
with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them
not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make
micropayments impossible.
With Bitcoin, you hold your own money. You control it.
With Ripple, you don't hold money. You hold debt, IOUs. You hold debt issued by a "gateway", a central authority.
With Bitcoin, miners are required to use their computational power to earn new Bitcoins and transaction fees.
With Ripple, OpenCoin Inc issued themselves 100 billion ripples. They promised to only keep half (50%) for themselves.
With Bitcoin, nobody can spend your money without your private keys.
With Ripple, as the server source code has not being released and it is still proprietary, OpenCoin Inc can change the rules and spend your money.
Bitcoin is v2.0 of money - where you control it in a democratic process via mining. Core network rules are embedded in open source code.
Ripple is v1.1 of money - building on top of existing central banks, and fiat money.
Learn more:
http://ripplescam.org/I will address and refute all the points/myths of
http://ripplescam.org/Ripple is in closed beta - the protocol will be open sourced given time. Satoshi did not open source from the beginning.
Anyone can start a node.
Ledger consensus in the distributed Ripple protocol withstands a 51% attack - try 80% attack. Given time Ripple will decentralize but in a distributed manner. Complete decentralization in the Bitcoin protocol in which every client holds the blockchain and receives blockchain headers means that spam and DDOS-like attacks on the protocol are possible (limited scalability, transactions per second, speed, inefficient storage use).
XRP is premined for a reason. Bitcoin is fatalally flawed in that mining and verifying the block chain wastes resources. If mining ever became unprofitable it would taper off, leaving an opening for a third party to attempt a 51% takeover, double-spending into exchanges, buying BTC back, repeating the process, and gaining control of BTC at an exponential rate. Even if mining stayed profitable, the resources diverted to it would far exceed the value created by the protocol. (Matter cannot be created or destroyed, only changed in form). With Ripple, the value of XRP increases as XRP is used to pay off the debt of other currencies (direct value - value transfer, no inefficiencies). I would rather be part of a protocol consisting of clients I trust that is less vulnerable to the attack of any third party.
The top .01 bitcoiners hold > 50% of BTC. Built in inflation of Bitcoin? OpenCoin does not want inflation - that would devalue the company.
Claiming that "debt is money" is flawed is just like claiming fiat is flawed. It is all trust based. Without a platform to exchange debt the financial system will not work properly. When transferring debt in the Ripple protocol you may only receive debt you explicitly trust. This is the only way things like insurance will work in the Bitcoin economy. Chains of debt will not go many steps farther than universally trusted gateways. If you do not wish to hold debt you need not to - gateway to gateway exchanges or transactions may happen instantly. A stable currency and economy cannot functionally operate without a way to exchange debt and communicate between different gateways and exchanges in order to alleviate bottlenecks and mitigate the affect of DDOS on the overall economy.