There might be some downtime today or tomorrow. Will try to keep it as short as possible.

I'd like to conduct a test to see if anyone actually reads this page.
Please quote me if you have read this.

Theoretically the same IOUs could be issued using colored Bitcoins, but then you're cramming a round peg into a square hole. Because Ripple is designed to do this, it has features that makes this not just possible but efficient. Colored coins are good for smart property, but I don't see how they get you things like payment paths and distributed exchanges.

The network just treats a currency as an opaque 160-bit number. A portion of that namespace is reserved for three-letter currency codes. The network itself has no list of valid codes, so if you want to use "XBL" for barrels of crude, you can. The client has a list of known currencies, but anyone can modify that list and we can add configurable currencies to store in the wallet if there's demand.

On our planned feature list is fully custom currencies. A custom currency would be created by someone and would have an entry in the ledger. Its currency code would be a hash that would allow the client to find its specification. Custom currencies could be associated with a particular web site and have custom display rules and so on. The feature set is not fully fleshed out yet as the only real use case we have to far as demurrage.

Dust is by definition a transaction output (bitcoin) so small that it is economically worthless, and will probably sit around unspent.

The fee paid is irrelevant.

Well, coloured coins (or the approach in this paper there) are not much more than taking e.g. a 1 USD note, writing down the serial number and claiming that whoever hands you this exact note can choose to get your car instead of just a different dollar note. Then you sell it off for the price of your car.

This approach does still NOT deal with the issue of trust or fraud - while it would be impossible to counterfeit a certain Bitcoin, it might be possible, that the car does not even exist any more or the one who claimed to hand out the car actually doesn't want to sell the car... Same goes for anything else that can be tracked in the block chain. I could hand out 1 million coloured coins for 1 EUR each and sell them for bitcoins. If the price of BTC rises against the EUR it might even be possible to pull this stunt off, so for the extreme bulls out there, here's how to do leverage in the wild west!
Anyways, just like one has to trust me that I'll be able and willing to pay back EUR for the coins I handed out, there's also no way to force me to do that - and good luck in court with something like THAT ("I paid internet funny money for some different internet funny money, but this guy said he'd give me EUR for that different internet funny money that is actually the same internet funny money as the first one. - No, he's NOT a licensed e-money dealer at all, I just fired up this software...").

I prefer Ripple to this one, as it deals with this trust issue by involving people you know (as far as I understood it) instead of staying completely pseudonymous.

If the title reflects your ambition, then why not go all in and put Satoshi Nakamoto as the author?  After all, that too is aiming high.  I'd love to be in Satoshi's shoes and write a paper about Bitcoin.  You could also call him the "honorary author" if you want to make sure the feedback goes to you and all.  Like so we pretend he wrote it even though he really didn't, although it doesn't really matter.  Or you could call him the co-author, you could say you and he wrote it together.  It's not like he's going to appear just to say "Hey, I didn't write that!"