@Alexkravets: For a long time I was a ripple supporter and I understand all the benefits of Ripple and absolutely make sense and will be used in the future. Although I do not like very much its centralization...
Ripple is currently controlled by RL and is expected to gradually month into an international cartel/consortium of financial institutions listing each other on their respective UNL lists.
As BM pointed out, after a certain point decentralization hits diminishing returns, so a cartel of 1000 FIs is basically just as decentralized as a collection of 10,000 "nodes" ie decentralization should be measured logarithmically. The importan thing is that unlike presently, the system will not have a dental operator, somewhat similar to how internet backbones recognize each other for access to routing tables for example.
This maybe seen as a weekness by the "anybody can run a node to participate in consensus" crowd, but Ripple ( having no mining ) only provides a weaker indirect incentive of lower latency access to transactions and lack of middlemen trusted nodes as an incentive which is important for market makers and gateways but not Joe User.
Also, banks loove the idea of an industry consortium in control rather than some cowboy mining pools of Bitcoin.
What really frustrated me in Ripple and this is the reason I will never use it again as investment (buy xrp and hold) is its distribution. I was caught up in the huge dumping and there is no guarantee that this will not happen again when initial shareholders can massively dump. Every crypto can experience dumping but this risk with Ripple is much greater imho, especially after this rally the last month. Is there a reason to believe that this is not the case anymore?
Indeed, what I call Flood Risk struck with a vengeance last summer, since then the four parties with enough XRP to do massive dumping ( RL itself and 3 founders ) have been mostly neutralized by self interest and 3 slow-release lockup agreement.
Yes, XRP distribution is Ripples original sin and Flood Risk remains, but the adopters that matter ( FIs that wish to do settlement by having market makers trade their IOUs ) are never exposed to XRP Flood Risk, market makers and Long term investors too tho.
XRP puts could be used to insure holdings if/when they appear but, yes some residual flood risk remains. If XRP was NOT retained by founders but was gradually transferred by the ledger into well known RL accounts for sale and distribution, over say next 50 year, then XRP would've been trading at 10x market cap of BTC by now :-)
On the other hand Bitshares can do whatever ripple does and much more in a decentalized manner. Isn't it obvious that Bitshares is a better investment (buy and hold) than Ripple?
Bitshares does have user issued assets which could be interpreted as IOUs but it doesn't allow for the following:
trust lines
Multi hop atomic lowest-cost payment across both order books and market makers
IOU redemption mechanism, ie Ripple IOUs are debt with zero total supply not positive supply of BitShares user issued assets, while pegged assets cannot be used as IOUs bc they ain't.
What many hard money ppl tend to underestimate is that money-as debt allows for division of labour between issuers and market makers where the issuers/FIs carry zero counterparty risk in settlement while risk and rewards are transferred to market makers with their robotic algos
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