Just The Facts
I've made this a moderated to prevent repetition of baseless accusations. To be clear, here are some well established facts about Ripple:
1. Ripple is a payment and accounting system, not just a cryptocurrency.
2. XRP is Ripple's built in currency, and it is used for important things.
3. Only 100 billion XRP can ever exist, and OpenCoin starts out with all of them.
4. Transaction fees, paid in XRPs, can be lowered or changed through consensus.
5. Ripple server is closed source but will be open sourced soon. The client is open source now.
6. OpenCoin says their plan to make money is to "hold XRPs and hope they go up in value."
7. Ripple founders own 20% of all XRP.
8. OpenCoin plans to give away 50% of all XRP to fund new accounts and promote the system.
9. OpenCoin will sell the remaining 30% of all XRP to finance operations and repay investors.
10. As long as OpenCoin holds most of the XRP, they can influence its price.
You do not need to invest large amounts of money in XRP or hold a significant amount of XRP in order to benefit from Ripple!
Well, you're posting this on a forum for a p2p cryptocurrency that was designed to give the _users_ of the system control over their crypto-tokens, so let's be clear-- you _must_ hold XRP in order to gain anything like the control over your own tokens that you have in Bitcoin.
When I say "control", of course I mean a type of control that comes with all the price swings/risks of scams/hacks/bugs, and everything else that may in the end make that control more theoretical than practical. That control includes:
* irreversibility. I send you XRP/Bitcoin, you have XRP/Bitcoin. No double spends, no questions.
* no counterparty risk. You send XRP/Bitcoin to a nonprofit, that nonprofit _has_ those XRP/Bitcoin. No third party can "freeze" those funds (though idiots can certainly make overlay coin-taint systems that hurts the fungibility of the currency in general)
* there is an unblockable (or at least _extremely_ difficult to censor) route from me to you that only depends on the system itself holding to the minimum protocol rules required for the system to function. If there's a bug in the system, or some unexpected fork it can make me decide to delay my payment, but if there is some bank account of an exchange that holds an alarmingly large portion of the currency that gets frozen it does absolutely nothing to delay my transaction (unless of course they hold my coins on my behalf).
Investing in XRP is risky as fuck!
Yep.