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)
Their clients would sue them and win.
I'm going to sue Bitstamp for their Ripple IOU; are you kidding me, have you actually used the system yet? There is nothing even closely resembling a contract between me and Bitstamp. When you transfer Bitcoins to Ripple there is nothing but "Enter your Address", there is no text as to what they will give you, what that means, what their obligations are...nothing...somehow I'm going to use that to sue them?
Also what if I didn't get the IOU from Bitstamp directly. It may have come from Bitstamp 10 years ago and passed through 10,000 people before it got to me and was then worthless. Somehow I'm going to trace back the debt through 10,000 people and bring Bitstamp to court?
And even if you could sue Bistamp, then what, you get half of Ripple trying to sue a company for money they don't have?
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
If you're worried about that, then don't invest in XRP. You only need tiny amounts to be able to use the Ripple functionality for other currencies, including BTC. And of course, OpenCoin has not motive to do this, because they would be shooting themselves in the foot if they did. They want the XRP exchange rate to go up, not down, just not uncontrollably.
You act as if XRP and the other currencies within Ripple are totally isolated and each in individual little bubbles...when in fact any panic with XRP would immediately spread across the entire system. As soon as the confidence is broken.
And of course Opencoin would not try to shoot themselves in the foot, but all it would take would be to slightly misjudge the number of XRP they were able to safely unload without affecting the market. Too much and people start to notice and panic, panic, withdrawal, withdrawal, uh oh the gateways were running factional reserve and we have our first virtual "run on a bank"
3) What if Opencoin get shut down by the government?
The protocol is distributed, just like Ripple, so governments cannot really shut it down any more than they can shutdown Bitcoin or Bittorrent.
How distributed it is; are there any stats available on this (ie how many full server nodes run by how many different organizations?
*This may be a noob question; but the only why I was aware that I could access my Ripple account is at
https://ripple.com/client/, so if someone someone hacked that server, or managed mess with the domain...doesn't that mean bye bye Ripple, at least until they can get a new site up and running?
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..
Only a problem until OpenCoin releases the source code. It is in their interest to do so, precisely because it will dispel fears like that.
How is it only a problem until source is released...if when the source is released it contains serious security flaws; and hackers are quickly able to put through double transactions, or steal balances etc...
In which case what will OpenCoin do, start rolling back balances? And the fact that they have the ability to do this is another cause for concern.
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...
Scare mongering.
Not really trying to scare people; I'm just asking questions that I can't seem to find answers that I'm satisfied with.
P.S. I don't think Ripple is a "scam"; i just think there are too many things that could go wrong, and probably will go wrong.