Your balances on Ripple are not real. They don't exist, they never existed in the first place and will never exist. Some people honor their printed Ripple balances, but for how long?
How long will bitcoin be around? Does it matter? You could use the same argument against mtgox or any online service which allows you to deposit BTC into it. "Sure mtgox lets you keep your BTC on their service...but for how long?"
If you have trust issues, that's your problem. But if you trust someone for 1BTC, and that person trusts someone else for 1BTC, then that 1BTC of value can be transferred between you. You do not need a "real" bitcoin in order to make a transaction happen, and that's the whole point. Let the "real" bitcoins stay in a more secure location and let trust be allocated via 'lighter' ways.
What if the gateway loses all the bitcoins through a natural disaster and a poor back up strategy?
...
What if the Department of Homeland Security seizes the gateway's stored bitcoins, like what happened earlier?
The whole point of Ripple is that there will be *many* gateways and that a complete loss of one will only be a trivial problem. Sure there's only a few right now, but there will be no barriers beyond legal ones(and good luck with that).
The answer is.. nothing changes. You never owned anything of existence in the first place.
Equivocation. You owned something, and that something can be recreated. Unlike real bitcoin a balance can be reinstated after a hard disk is lost. Obviously not all gateways are going to do this but there's nothing preventing a balance of 1BTC from being put right back after a hard drive is taken. As you've pointed out these are not bitcoins these are *promises* of bitcoins, which is a different thing but, when treated right, can function *just as much of a currency as bitcoins themselves*.
Ripple is a centralized network controlled by one company. It is closed source. You have to trust gateways that they actually pays out.
I would encourage people who believe this go check out the source code to villages.cc and other releases of Ripple. It has been a continuing path of decentralization, ending at the next version which is not yet released but which TradeFortress seems to have some kind of an issue with.
you don't have to trust anyone
Which is fantastic, if you're living in a cabin in the woods and don't have any friends but can still order stuff at gunpoint off of the internet.
Unfortunately most of us *do* trust people and our trust is limited to fairly local trust networks, and mostly sits unused.
Ripple allows you to use that trust so you, along with your entire community can build wealth that is not available without it.
History repeats itself. Don't blindly follow Satoshi, but as someone who has created Bitcoin, you have to give their word a moment of thought.Satoshi has NEVER commented on Ripple. TradeFortress is building an argument based on misunderstandings of what Ripple is.