Possible, but not likely, since if Ripple takes off, XRP (ripples) will become viable as a store of value too. ...
I doubt it, since as I've said there is
no way to verify how many ripples there are in existence.
The better system addressing the problem Ripple purports to may be
Open Transactions, where everything is decentralized and verifiable. Perhaps the Ripple supporters should promote with a community where verification isn't held in such high regard.
Just because you don't understand how something works does not mean it is not possible to do. You can access any ledger with a simple API call and do a sum operation over all XRP yourself if that helps you in your quest of verifying the number of XRP... XRP are as verifiable as BTC and I even told you in the thread you linked how to do that.
Open Transactions is a neat system, true, it still is not in use anywhere besides alpha/beta testing though as far as I've seen.