Ripple is merely a medium to get bitcoin from point a to point b instantaneously and with extremely low fees. No need to wait for confirmations any more and no need to mine.

You have to 'trust' bitstamp for a certain amount of bitcoin/usd in order to transfer that given trusted amount to your ripple account. Note, you cannot transfer anything to your ripple account until you have itleast 300 XRP(ripples) in your account. If you need ripples either wait for the next give away from opencoin, hope someone will donate you 300 ripples by asking nicely on the forums or trade someone bitcoin/litecoin for a given amount. If you go that route do your home work on the current rate. Last I checked it was 1BTC=15-20K Ripples. Good luck.

I'm beggining to think all bitcoin transaction for real goods and some services should be done through an escrow service. Its way to easy to get ripped off otherwise.

Agreed, sell something/anything for strictly bitcoin or plan b buy into the market with our own hard earned money. If you've got the know how, trade bitcoin as a day trader or write your own trading bot todo it for you.

Feathercoin is currently worth nothing. Given the alt crypto currency competition no ones going to give feathercoin a serious look for a long time. A 51% attack would be pointless right now.

Agreed 1000+ and stable, Bitcoin is as valuable as gold.

I like it. +1

Constant pushing up delivery date = don't know what we're doing. They may legitimately wish to sell asics but they don't know how to engineer them as evident by weekly updates stating there some new problem with the chip or the board they didn't anticipate.

"You will receive" tells you how much funds you will actually be withdrawing after btc-e's fee.