Like I said in another thread, these are the two categories for Ripple haters.
1. Fear (Usually old Bitcoiners with lots to lose. Scared of the disruptive nature of the powerful Ripple network - which actually looks to compliment Bitcoin with INSTANT transactions).
2. Laymen (Usually new-ish members. Believe the fearing established members and have no idea what Ripple actually is. These people will likely say Ripple is centralized (untrue), closed source (untrue) or a premine (this isn't BTC! again, you have missed the point).
Well said. But I don't think the early adopters have much to lose. There is plenty of time to diversify and Ripple will certainly help adoption of Bitcoin in the short term. In the long term the effect is unclear. On the one hand, while Bitcoin profits from the Ripple trading functionalities, XRP profits from them as well, so that could be seen as a threat. But as BTC increases in value, it will become easier for early adopters to fund similar systems based on Bitcoin. At one extreme, someone could create a Ripple fork with an initial ledger based on the Bitcoin blockchain, either by copying the UTXO set at some fixed point in time, or by using proof of burn. In the end I think successful cryptocurrencies will adopt useful features from competitors and offer painless transition paths.