Congratulations to the Ripple folks. However, I prefer the security of a self-contained autonomous financial system such as bitcoin or bitshares. As the fiat currency crisis deepens, defaults will inevitably occur with some ripple gateways IMHO. Some gateways will be in need of a bailout and may or may not get them. The only true flight to safety will be inside systems that are not subject to counterparty risk such as bitcoin and bitshares. Ripple provides a much needed patch for the legacy banking system but I believe the entire legacy system needs to be replaced completely. Make no mistake, when you trust a ripple gateway, you are trusting someone else with your money, which has been proven to be a bad idea. Of course, who am I to argue with the market.
You speak out of ignorance of mechanics of Ripple AND mechanics of the current Bitcoin/BitShares ecosystem.
Any current Bitcoin of BTS exchange issues "account balances" a.k.a. IOUs.
What Ripple does in ADDITION to Bitcoin is formalize the role of such entities in the protocol.
However, even tho Ripple Gateways do cash-in / cash-out operations into and out of Ripple, UNLIKE current banks or crypto exchanges ALL their balances are tradable and once issued, cannot (in general with some exceptions) be frozen.
So there is absolutely nothing new here.
I personally NEVER hold any value in any IOUs inside ripple, but rather use them for what they are meant to be used:
Cash-in & Cash-out.
It's a whole huge discussion on weather or not Ripple is currently centralized or de-centralizable in the future.
And I can answer specific questions, but I see 9 out of 10 people criticise Ripple out of complete ignorance about what it is.
Just spend an hour reading the wiki and come out better informed next time:
https://wiki.ripple.com/Main_Page