No. I'm keeping hold of them. Right now, they're not worth much and there's a reasonable possibility that I'm wrong.

Who knows, they might even be worth quite a lot before they implode.

So trusting a registered, established business is just as risky as trusting someone you don't know anything about who happens to be a friend of a friend of a friend?

Heck, even your best friend may not be a good person to trust compared to a well established business. Family is typically even worse. A well established business depends on reputation to continue trading. Your brother? He'll always be your brother.

There's no way to peg a virtual currency to a fiat currency without a central "bank".  It defeats the whole purpose of a cryptocurrency, and it would require a central authority with a lot of money to keep the price pegged.

Makes no sense not reasonably possible.

No. But only foolish people who care so little about money not to do a basic level of research will fall into this. If someone is careless enough to simply assume that extending trust is meaningless, without doing a modicum of research, he shouldn't be using Ripple. My advice to newbies: if you aren't willing to learn about Ripple, don't use it. Same goes for bitcoin -- lots of lost coins out there due to very careless people.

You should only trust an established business. If you want to trust your friend, just like IRL, he may never pay you back. I don't understand this idea that people need to trust everyone they know. That's just part of a marketing scheme to make Ripple more relevant to the average user. If my friends or family needed money, we'd figure out a way to get it to them. I don't need to extend trust to every single person (so that I never know whether or not my funds are liquid). If someone needs BTC, I can get them where they need to go easily and without any risk via Ripple.

I would agree insofar that people will make mistakes and get burned. Just like with everything else.

But that's just it.  Ripple is being marketed as a social network not a trusted exchange backbone system.

You can only replace the legit ones with fake ones in the accounts of people who granted you trust.  It would be up to them to cover their losses or let it "ripple".

Yes, like fiat itself.

Totally. I don't advocate for how it is being marketed. I don't like OpenCoin and I think the way Ripple was rolled out was pretty scummy.

Still, I see great potential.
Well aware of ripplescam.org and tradefortress. Nothing new there. With the former, again, I disagree with many aspects of Ripple's launch, but I don't see the issues outlined as exhibiting inherent flaws in the protocol -- not at all. And what about tradefortress? If users would take a few minutes to learn the basics of Ripple, they won't be scammed like morons.

And I am quite sure that you couldn't steal "over 100 btc today" through a trust scam. Make me a wager! You couldn't get anywhere close.

The only reason more than a negligible amount of BTC were stolen in the tradefortress fiasco was because a user offered up over 9 BTC, announced it on the forum, and told tradefortress to make his point. Hence, the IOUs were stolen.

People *are* morons. And assholes too. And greedy.