In my view the whole concept of supporting debt/transactions through trust is majorly flawed.
Why create a system that is based on IOUs and trust?....."faith"?....."credit"? <--- The last two words are use by the U.S. govt when making promises they can't keep based on IOUs.
We already have that type of broken system...it's called the Federal Reserve System.
That's pretty much the only way to provide an electronic payment system for fiat currencies. Ripple is "less broken" than existing payment systems for fiat currencies because users can exchange balances with each other without needing the permission of any central authority.
Now that I think about it.
If you get scammed while using ripple by a user that decides to be untrustworthy there is no recourse.
In the traditional banking system recourse actually exists. So I'm trying to figure out where you fix the scam portion of things when you still need to trust someone. I do not see any government or institution willing to (and able) to provide recourse to financial victims if they are scammed using ripple.