Thanks.
It took a little while to figure it out, but it's fairly simple once you start using it.
I had to think of my BTC and LTC as "tokens" inside the ripple client.
There's not much liquidity yet, but i managed to send a few bitcents to bitstamp and paid in LTC which i thought was pretty nifty.

rny2WUYwfCUEeUmxzyFUFRdSyA946vye91

i want to play with ripple,  i cant decide if i like it or not.

rny2WUYwfCUEeUmxzyFUFRdSyA946vye91

well since i commented i should say something halfway useful

Ripples sounds like a great idea.  The feudal trust metric thing sounds like it would work if implemeted correctly.  Also it sounds like something that the current financial infrastructure would be more likely to get behind than something like bitcoin.  They would feel more in control, while keeping the network somewhat decentralized.  But I think a poor implementation could become unbalanced fairly easily and i dont have much faith in ripples given what little i've heard.

um another newbie quota comment

oh yeah, and ripples seem kind of sketchy too

people will save bitcoins like cash but as demand to *use* bitcoins increases, the average price will increase and more miners will liquidate more of their holdings.  As the amount of circulating coins meets the demand the price will smooth with less spikes and "ringing".

Wider adoption, more goods and services available, and more liquidity/circulation.  Bitcoin price is currently primarily speculative.  It's loosely tied to difficulty and cost per hash to mine, but with limited real world uses these hoarding and dumping cycles will likely continue as circulation is restricted and miners need those spikes to entice them into releasing their investment out into the wild.  More circulation means more liquidity, less spikes, and a price that better represents bitcoins true market cap and usefulness as a currency.

I'm having private key issues.  I dumped some devcoins on a cold bitcoin address expecting to import the key into the devcoin client at a later date. Unfortunately it wasn't what I expected.

--For demonstration purposes on a throw-away address--

Using joric's pywallet with password on encrypted wallet, or rpc on both encrypted and unencrypted wallets I get:

        {
            "addr": "13E4sDkWHMBJqFe9yFWM1JyBmJz5LZKUEL",
            "label": "p2pmining",
            "sec": "L5iyipTyQ6kHHcumG2ihbBnqJFGBq9nXY53Mmp3uPBg5FE82vNTC"
        },

   

with jackjack's pywallet on unencrypted backup
 
       {
            "addr": "13E4sDkWHMBJqFe9yFWM1JyBmJz5LZKUEL",
            "hexsec": "c17449119f6cc1857f07d3cb53868b8df79b20d8c5a282d88ae19cb7d67ceba0",
            "label": "p2pmining",
            "sec": "5KHV7MizuJ9FXfoK1jongbYeAHiDL49FAQphAyoUgJ8jUrJi56i"
        },

when entering jackjack's keys in pywallet or bitcoin address utility, sec and hexsec match but return 1GHBZWaFFMfRh7AebRagZzkB7McaCZ5DPs as address instead of the 13E4sDkWHMBJqFe9yFWM1JyBmJz5LZKUEL address.  The key from the other methods only gets error messages.  I've imported keys from vanitygen before and everything was fine.  What am I doing wrong?