I bought from local sellers and from exchanges. I did say that exchanges are necessary now during the transition to a Bitcoin economy. If Ripple can make the exchange system better during this transitional phase, I am all for it. But the direction that most of the people in this community want us to go is toward an economy where Bitcoin the currency can be used on the Bitcoin payment network for all transactions. If Ripple helps us get there, good, but I think we are already on that trajectory regardless of what Ripple does or becomes.

I see that nobody in Ripple wants to talk about counterparty risk.

Simply because counter party risk is the same as with classic crypto-currency exchanges, so not a difference between Ripple and Bitcoin.

The worlds transactions are based on trust.  There is no way around that, as Bitcoin itself has found out.  What do people think BitPay and Coinbase are?  They are centralized companies based on trust.  The businesses they sign up don't accept BTC....BitPay and Coinbase accept BTC as 3rd party, centralized companies.  (clearing houses)  They in turn pay the businesses in USD.  So businesses are really just accepting the fiat currencies they are used to and Bitcoin is using a central clearing house to achieve this.  The same as Visa does or banks via ACH.  The goal is to move away from that.  (At least for me.)

With Ripple, the consumer and the merchant can cut out the central clearing house.  Consumer sends BTC and the merchant receives USD.  Confirmed and irreversible in seconds.  This is distributed exchange.  Globally this can be any currency.  Consumer sends BTC and merchant in China receives Yen.  Confirmed and irreversible in seconds.  Or, consumer sends frequent flyer miles and a merchant in India receives Indian Rupees or gold even.  Whatever.  Confirmed and irreversible in seconds.  The possibilities are limitless, ridiculously fast and cheap because we are trading peer-to-peer, instead of peer->to central clearing house->to peer.

So again, if you're one that plans to only deal in bitcoin -> bitcoin transactions, Ripple doesn't offer you much.  There is no argument there.  However, with hundreds of digital currencies and hundreds of fiat currencies, a scenario like that is simply unrealistic for the majority of the planets population.  Just as we don't all use AOL for email.  We use countless email platforms but we needed a protocol, SMTP, in order to communicate outside our specific email platform.  

So Ripple (RTXP) will do for money, what SMTP did for email.  SMTP was and is not a competitor of Gmail or Outlook or AOL or any other email platform.  It's just the protocol that allows them all to communicate and exchange information directly.  Just as RTXP (Ripple) is not a competitor to Bitcoin or Litecoin or DogeCoin or any other digital or fiat currency.  It's just a protocol that allows all these things of value to be exchanged directly.

https://ripple.com/ripple_primer.pdf

No.  Bitcoin is the SMTP for money.  Ripple is a company marketing a new incompatible email system based on closed standards partially opened up just to say so. 

The SMTP comparison is really a way to express the fact that Ripple is a federation protocol to bridge the gap between all money systems including legacy fiat money, blockchain based crypto-currencies, virtual currencies and other types of exchangeable values such as airmiles.
Nobody denies the fact that the Bitcoin network was the first network to allow trustless teleportation of funds accross the world, but Bitcoin network is solely designed to transport Bitcoin currency and nothing else. It is a great and very robust transport, but it doesn't federate  anything and using Bitcoin you won't be able to pay a SecondLife merchant in Linden Dollars using your BTC balance at Bitstamp (this scenario is already a reality in Ripple).
There is absolutely no overlap between Bitcoin and Ripple in term of functionality: Bitcoin is the store of value backed by the most powerful computing network the world has ever seen, Ripple is a medium of exchange where Bitcoin can be exchanged instantly to or from any other type of asset.

Do you post this stuff in any other exchange's announcements too?

The funds that are reflected in your bank account or Paypal account or Bitstamp or BTC-e or Cryptsy or Visa card or Reward Points cards, etc...are all just balances.  What's a balance?  It's just an IOU.  They "owe you", X amount.

Ripple just allows people to exchange these balances (IOU's) between one another.  The trust you put in the places where you have balances (IOU's), is really up to you and has nothing to do with Ripple.  


I'm not totally familiar with how OpenTransactions works but from what I've heard around, it would be a much more compariable "idea", than trying to compare Ripple to Bitcoin or any other currency.

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