Hello all. So I put a considerable amount of money into ripple yesterday because I got caught up in the hype. After reading some of these posts that say that it all may be a scam, I wish to get them back to BTC. I have sold my ripple but they are still 'stuck' as BTC in ripple's snapswap. I realize that I'm an idiot, but is there a way that I can get my coins back to my BTC wallet?
You have three choices:
1) Follow snapswap's withdrawal process. I've never withdrawn BTC from snapswap, but the usual way is that they give you a destination tag, you make a Ripple payment in BTC to their address with that destination tag and they credit your snapswap account. Then you withdraw to a BTC wallet using their web interface.
2) If you don't like snapswap's withdrawal process, exchange your snapswap BTC inside Ripple for another asset that you can more easily withdraw.
3) Make one or more direct payments to Bitcoin addresses from the Ripple client.
I'm probably one of the biggest Ripple supporters that there is, one of the first people to work on it, one of the designers of the protocol, and employed by Ripple Labs. There is no scam. However, the price of XRP is extremely volatile and behaves entirely unpredictably. I do not ever recommend people buy XRP as any kind of investment. There is always a significant possibility that its value can drop drastically, possibly even to zero, in a very short period of time.
I don't think anybody knows why the price of XRP surged over the past few days. It is almost axiomatic that it can drop just as quickly and nobody really know why. Buying on hype is a particularly bad idea. It is basically mathematically impossible for everyone to buy on the rise and sell before a subsequent decline. It is even possible for Ripple to succeed wildly as a payment system and the value of XRP not go up significantly.
Okay, but as long as I have them converted as BTC into my wallet at ripple, then I should get that exact amount of BTC at some point, correct?
Maybe, maybe not. That's up to the gateway. Ripple can't force anyone to give you BTC if they haven't agreed to do so. I believe snapswap BTC can be sent over the outbound bridge at no fee, meaning you should get the exact amount out if you send to a Bitcoin address from the Ripple client.