I'm quite neutral but Ripple seems like a damp squid coupled with a bad launch of XRP that's near infinite in number and the few that have found value then suggest a market cap of $ 1,451,152,125 <- really?.. I don't see it and I'm trying to see it, what does that suggest for how poor their product and/or ability to communicate that. Perhaps I am missing real useability development and it'll suddenly be in our faces as the obvious contender but perhaps it just needs a relaunch.
The problem is they can't be honest about what Ripple is and still get as much buzz as they currently enjoy.
Right now they, and all the other projects which advertise user-created currencies (Mastercoin, Ethereum, Open-Transactions), are benefiting from this reaction: "Create my own currency? I'm gonna be rich!"
This is
deeply irresponsible.
What they should call them is "user-created loans". This is far more accurate, but if they started using that terminology then all of a sudden everyone would remember that loans eventually need to be repaid and that doesn't look nearly as attractive. It's not that liability accounting isn't useful - it is - but it's not sexy and isn't going to make anyone insanely wealthy.
Bitcoin showed us that currencies do not need to be somebody's liability. Currency has been that for so long that it's no surprise that most people don't see the difference, but now that such a demonstration has been made it's dishonest to use the same word to describe tokens which describe liabilities and tokens which are assets.
Anything with counterparty risk attached to it is not a currency. Call it something else: debt, liabilities, loans, IOUs - just don't call it a currency.