When I researched Bitcoin i was amazed at how perfectly everything ties together; there are no loose ends, and any questions starting with "What if this happened..." are already thought of and answered within the protocol...

However when I look at Ripple there are so many things that could go wrong, that you just have to assume that it will go wrong at some point such as:

1) What if a huge gateway (such as Bitstamp) just decides "nah we're not going to do Ripple anymore"...and all their IOU are now worthless; it would bring the whole thing down, everyone would be trying to unload their worthless balances, it would be total melt down.  And the best part is Bitstamp could probably continue to operate as a regular exchange (what is Ripple going to do about it)

2) What if Opencoin starts leaking their billions of XRP onto the market to try to turn a profit?  As soon as people start to notice everyone will dump and run

3) What if Opencoin get shut down by the government?

4) What if Opencoin gets hacked and hackers use their Opencoin servers to do all kinds of bad stuff

5) What if Ripple itself gets hacked (source is still closed so no one knows how secure it is, there may be major security flaws)

6) What if Opencoin decides to randomly start doing bad shit like making more XRP, confiscating balances, banning accounts...etc..

These are just a few glaring "What if"s, I imagine people with more knowledge on the subject could come up with 20 more than this.

Basically Ripple makes Opencoin the de facto Fed...

It really is insanity that every Bitcointalk account created prior to February is now worth $300-$500...lols already got my $500 (in BTC)...I'm surprised the bitcointalk admins have not been tempted to start using old accounts to post their own Ripple address and cash in on this madness.

I wonder is gateways, such as Bitstamp, really considered what there were getting into; I mean if Ripple took off, in 5 years they could end up with outstanding IOUs of billions of dollars...are you telling me Bitstamp is prepared to hold billions of dollars in cash reserve to cover their IOUs...?  The last thing I'd want to be doing is running a gray market currency exchange (and yes I consider Bitcoin still a gray market; as laws/regs have yet to be applied) and have billions of dollars in the bank...(MASSIVE TARGET ON YOUR BACK!)?  Or they are planning to operate a factional reverse...god help us all...either way I wonder if they really thought through all the ramifications.