Wow!  Stunning rebuttal.    Seeing that you continue to fail to recognize that you can't be forced to accept someone else's IOU's that you don't trust, I'd venture to say that it's your argument that is flawed, not Ripple.  If you trust some guy on the street corner with a sign that says, "bank here" and you give him your money, you deserve to lose it.  That's not a flaw of the banks, that's your flaw.  But who does that?  We use real, trusted banks for that.  If you send your BTC to some random, no name exchange claiming to be safe and secure to trade your BTC, you deserve to lose your BTC.  We use trusted exchanges for that.  Same is true in Ripple.  If you're going to accept IOU's from some untrustworthy joe smoe, you deserve to lose your money.  We use trusted gateways for that.  And since in both examples, the bank and the exchange both operate in IOU's, the attempt to paint Ripple any differently is ridiculous at best.