Oh this thread is great in showing that side of ripple which most people don't understand and are not even aware of. The way the system works basically looks like a three-click scam creator for script kiddies.

I am waiting for the first ripple gateway-gate. There will be someone who'll create a gateway and bunch of fake ripple users trading on this gateway like crazy, providing lower spreads and much greater liquidity than Bitstamp's gateway users. Plus some marketing efforts to gain the traction. Most of actively trading ripple users will trust that gateway to be able to trade on it with its users, then one day they'll suck all available BTC.Bitstamp and USD.Bistamp and *.OtherLegitimateGateways replacing them with “equally trusted” BTC.Theirs and USD.Theirs, then withdraw to Bitstamp/other gateways real systems, exchange any USD into BTC and send the real BTC away, then close the shop and laugh.

This is what I learnt about ripple because of this thread so thank you both webr3 and TradeFortress for your contribution in the overall awareness of how ripple works.

Totally on the side: ripple web interface is rubbish. I played with ripple for the first time yesterday, and the interface is totally unreliable. You create a trade order, two seconds later see a confirmation that it has been created and even see it in the order book. You cancel the order to create a different one. You see all confirmations, you see order book showing your orders as you'd expect. You do that creating/canceling couple of times. Then you close the client and open it again and you see that your client was totally out of sync with what really happens on the backend. There were some orders that you cancelled and saw cancelled which actually are still open. There were some orders that you created and saw in the order book which actually aren't there (and weren't executed). I've been using a semi-reliable cellular connection yesterday so maybe it doesn't affect most users in their everyday usage, but the fact that it happens on unreliable connections shows that the software is very broken and if it's rubbish in the web client, you should expect it to be rubbish elsewhere as well.

Considering that ripple idea has some serious no-nos (just screaming to use it as three-click scam creator; founders holding tons of XRP; lot of things happening behind closed doors with no transparency) and their software is rubbish, I think it settles my opinion on ripple.

Regarding scam accusations, I'm too new here to throw rocks so I have nothing to say here. Forgive me off-topic post but I found this thread great in providing warnings on how ripple works and how it can be used to replace real currency with worthless IOUs in clueless users wallets. The whole situation deserves to be described objectively and sticked in the altcoins board to warn people on what might happen when they use systems they don't understand.