for hundreds/thousands of years, we all used horses.  Then the motor car came along:  game over for horses, for most use cases.
Nation states and their fiat/central bank/currencies have existed for hundreds/thousands of years.  Whilst these constructs were useful, we now have blockchain crypto.
If the state of Russia (and its accompanying ruble fiat) was such a compellingly useful thing, the rest of us humans have had ample decades/centuries to leave our lesser home states (U.S.A., Europe, etc.) and 'join' the Russian one.
I note most of Planet Earth's residents have not voted so with their feet.
Buy more coinz.

There is growing awareness among crypto particpants that governance - who makes the decisons and how the decisions are made - is a critical/ultra important part of a currency, whether fiat or crypto.

The basic message from the Ripple fan club would be:  "trust us, our motives are pure!"  

Meanwhile, upcoming coin Tezos will hard-code open governance into the codebase itself.

Trust strikes at the heart of any currency, any community, any consensual process amongst human beings - the coin with the best trust will win the most.

US Dollar bill = "In God, We Trust"

XRP/Ripple = "trust us, we know what we're doing"

Tezos (and future imitators) =  don't trust me at all, change the coin itself/its codebase as the way of effecting change/making decisions, codelogic=governance process  (think 'strange loop', or the game called 'Nomic' >  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic )

I agree, BAT ICO seems insane.  A few (preferenced? insiders?) buyers who got in for the 24 seconds that the ICO sale was reportedly open for seems to imply obvious whales who now will own this coin to the exclusion of the rest of us, unless we pay whatever pricelevel they now set in the regular aftermarket.  (How Whales Get Richer Off You.)

On the other hand, when a Monet or Van Gogh painting sells for $100M++, the price seems insane but it's arguably a good spillover influence on the rest of the art market:  it educates lazy outsiders/buyers as to what the value now is of an asset/market.  Musical chairs for a while, then  --> bag holders!

Part of me thinks:  let the ICO's of BAT, Tezos, and other new coins go crazy now, it can't help but create good press in Main Street where the mums and dads will hear of this and be forced to bestir themselves.

Wiser hands will wait for the current mania to quieten down in the next 3-6-12 months (risky assumption, I know, but manias and bubbles do tend to exhibit periodic surge behaviour), where we can then step in to buy the better coins during their dormancy, ready for the next breakout mania after that.

Did someone in the late 1990's once say "irrational exuberance"?

Ripple is, as Ripple themselves happily state, a solution for banks to exchange things with each other. 
Bravo.
Problem is, in the 21st century, seven billion humans are now starting to realise that we can exchange value (in other words, socially-agreed-to consensus, much like a US Dollar exemplifies) and trade with each other directly, peer to peer, without needing a bank or government in the middle.
Ripple hoping to fuel the continued health of the historic banking model into the 21st century is like a grower of hay hoping to fuel the horse industry after Henry Ford starts selling the Model T Ford.
Email killed stamps and envelopes and the postal authority.  Blockchain crypto currencies will kill banks.
Ripple's destiny is pinned to banks.
Does Ripple have an assured future?
Twenty, forty, fifty years from now, humans will send cryptocoins to each other over a blockchain as our way of keeping track of whom deserves what.
Why do I need a bank for that?

---

Same, same, but different.
Ethereum is a full blockchain.  It is an immutable historical record in that it is a chain of linked (inter-dependent) proofs (mathematical calculations in the form of hashes) that cannot be easily undone (spoofed, impersonated, recalculated in a corrupt way).  Each current change in our balances (e.g. you send coins to me) requires a transaction that then is evidenced (the nodes reach consensus again) after a bunch of hashing calc's are performed by nodes so as to agree to a proposed update to this inter-linked historic chain of crypto calc's.  The participating nodes constantly re-compute this blockchain so as to arrive at certainty that they can 'more safely' agree to a new consensus about this chain, and this forms then the new consensus that you rely on when you look there.  The trust is because of the amount of maths performed by the peer nodes.
Ripple is a consensus ledger.  It updates an ongoing ledger of any changes, e.g. add some coins to my account entry, subtract some from yours.  There is no blockchain with crypto calculated proofs chained to each other in intricate crypto fashion that requires huge amounts of mathematics to compute from scratch.  Instead, in Ripple the maths and CPU cycles are used for the work of just updating that shared ledger (recalculating this consensus ledger as each change happens to this central ledger, when you send coins to me).  In Ripple you are invited to trust the latest ledger you are offered, there wasn't a huge bunch of block hashing crypto calc's performed (as per the blockchain, ethereum, bitcoin model) that you can now derive a sense of safety from.
At a practical level, in Ripple you as a peer client don't need to download a blockchain if you want to verify the proof of a historic or recent transaction;  instead you trust that the current round of consensus calc's (the current ledger) is a correct up-to-date reflection that has the correct current account balances for us all.  In Ethereum you can inspect/re-verify  (re-calculate for yourself, from scratch) the whole chain for any transaction anytime you need to.

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The question you may have also been asking is, why do banks seem to like Ripple more than, say, bitcoin or ethereum?
Given the way that Ripple is just a constantly updated consensus ledger, this echoes the way that banks work internally:  banks don't care where each dollar bill came into existence in the distant past (was this stash of dollar bills once used in a cocaine deal?  Was this stack of bills used in human slave trafficking?  Did this stash of bills come from Bernie Madoff?), banks only want to know the current state of the ledger.  So a blockchain is, potentially, an embarrrassment to a bank:  ideally they don't want for you to be able to self-calculate from their blockchain where all those dollar bills came from.
The pernicious side of me also suspects that banks want the ability to manipuate the consensus ledger 'after-the-fact', should the heat get too strong again, one day in the future:  "explain to me, all you banks, how you managed to lose all our money, again, a la GFC?  Show me your historic blockchain ledger so I can self-calculate where you sent all those funds....."

"The key thing was that the Internet was not a network controlled by the government."
Visited Turkey, Iran, North Korea lately?
The government did not think of the ideas that gave us Facebook, Google, Uber, bitcointalk.org, Wikipedia.....your favourite web business/site.  People, us, we did that.
If anything, government kills or hobbles or undermines nascent industries.
Arguing that government is an essential ingredient before you can make something new is to suggest that progress can only be assured by centralised states like Orwellian ones.....e.g. North Korea, Syria, past versions of Communist Russia / China, etc.  Ummm, when was the last time any of these pro-government models made your life better?
Ripple might try to be clever and co-opt the engine house that modern banks might be....but 20th century banking is an inherently compromised model that Darwin will not suffer to continue....banks as constituted today will be superseded by an animal fitter to adapt and thus survive.

Banks don't have money today because they worked hard and sweated and laboured tirelessly for every single dollar in their vaults....banks survive a la GFC, because the government gives them a license to print dollars into existence and then underwrites them with implicit guarantees (taxpayer funded).  Banks take the dollar you give them then they rehypothecate it / fractionally reserve lend it into being 10 or 100 dollars as loans to mortgage owners (you and me, who are silly enough to slave away at our cubicle farms for forty years to pay back a mortgage debt plus fat interest) or as loans to businesses (who use lawyers to pass the buck to bag holders, a la Bernie Madoff).
So yes, banks have lots of money TODAY to potentially path into crypto currencies....but will they?  ....can they? .....given how they need to externalise their problems onto bagholders.  This ship will sail.
Banks are a 20th century legacy idea, 21st century will replace banks....with something like cryptocoins or their successor.
Banks are an idea whose 'use by' date has arrived.

Wanting to be part of the crypto revolution through only owning Ripples is like wanting to be part of the internet revolution by buying Barnes & Noble shares instead of Amazon shares.
Wasn't the idea of Bitcoin and crypto and blockchains and DAO's to get us away from banks?
I liked Ripple, but my thinking has moved on....I want a crypto that gets me away from banks, not back towards them.
Coins like Ether, Tezos, NEM, Heat, Ardor, PIVX, Sia and perhaps even Stellar Lumens represent the current evolution of crypto software coding.  These coins too will next year be obsolete or seen as ageing.
In the future, all humans will use software-coded coins to exchange value and to conduct trade and to run countries.  This genie ain't going back in the bottle, she only gets more evolved and virulent.
Buying a first generation cryptocoin, like Bitcoin or Ripple, is like buying Windows 386 or MS-DOS 3.3 in 1990 and thinking it will serve the computer industry for the next fifty-to-hundred years.
Cryptocoins are nothing but software code and code evolves daily, so will our coins.
Move on as each new generation of cryptocoin emerges, Darwinian evolution in the flesh.  There's no going back, TINA (there is no alternative).

Tezos appear most innovative given their focus on formal verifiability.  Given how the reentrancy bug gave us TheDAO episode, Ethereum and Solidity likely remain at risk of crypto geeks figuring out that OCaML/Michelson, as used in Tezos, precludes such bugs. 
NVO is interesting in the DEX space.  https://nvo.io
I don't think it's yet a world-beater (maybe one day....), but I have sentimental favour to Zen Cash too.

possible new entrant in the DEX race:  https://nvo.io

Just some thoughts from me, may be self-evident but perhaps worth stating anyway:

- centralised exchanges typically owned by some single entity (e.g. a company);  decentralised exchange arguably able over time (more and more, or at least somewhat) to be 'owned' / steered / influenced by those people who use it, who add liquidity to it, who contribute to the sourcecode, who lead the community.  In other words, avoid the downside of 'shared fate' if single owner does something you don't like one day

- centralised exchanges possibly can be audited/tracked by governments, tax authorities;  decentralised exchange can use privacy/encryption/other means to keep our transactions away from 'unwanted eyes' of the tax man, the police man, etc when they decide to go silly on us sometimes

- question of scale:  peer-2-peer nature of decentralised exchange means capacity probably linearly scales as more nodes add themself to the network;  centralised exchanges typically rely on single owner knowing how to build a scalable website that can service the users - ask Poloniex how this feels!

- centralised exchange is like Amazon/Facebook/Google website; decentralised exchange is like bittorrent.  Arguably: no central decision point, no central server, no central owner to monetise the users' patronage of their service, decide on what content is allowed, exploit your viewing habits, sell your browser history, track your usage for surge pricing model.  In other words, exploit you for their gain

- decentralised exchange is like Linux;  centralised exchange is like Windows.  Open source, crowd sourced means you harness a wide user base who can (potentially) steer, improve and take ownership of the project over time to increase its usefulness, like Linux.org.  Try telling Microsoft how to steer/improve Windows codebase over time.

- decentralised exchange depends on users trading with each other, users decide what is traded, what is bid, what is offered, users generate the price discovery and market depth as it suits us;  centralised exchange relies on single owner entity acting as market maker, providing liquidity, clearing trades, conducting the market, deciding what to offer, policing rogue traders/HFT's

- centralised exchanges often give preferential treatment (discounts, trading costs, IPO's) to large clients ("whales");  much less likely under decentralised exchange / open source / P2P model

- centralised exchange assumes it can legally avoid or pass off mistakes to us bag holders (tax payers, bail outs, Bernie Madoff, GFC, 'moral hazard', FDIC);  decentralised exchange less likely to require 'bail in' from the user base

.

hi,

[forgive me if I am meant to have figured this out or derived this by reading the crowdsale materials so far]

I'm only a small fish:  is there a minimum amount of BTC, ETH or other of the acceptable coins I have to send to the relevant address in my account on the logged-in NVO crowdsale website?  In other words, what's the minimum contribution/'investment' amount for me to participate in this crowdsale?  e.g. 1 ETH minimum, 0.01 BTC minimum, etc?

cheers