Rippled is only needed to take part in the transaction ordering process, maybe a bit similar to bitcoin in the sense that you don't need to mine to use them (though mining also gives a reward besides purely confirming transactions).

Everything that happens on the network itself can already be done using open source software. This includes running a gateway of course and issuing/redeeming IOUs.

You can only end up with worthless IOUs in the case of trusting a fraudulent gateway, like the stunt tradefortress pulled off. Even this could be prevented, though i doubt that the settings for that would be in the official client by default. They could be patched into a "paranoid" fork though.

You are not able to force IOUs upon anyone that they don't want - if you manage to trade a mattress IOU for RUB directly, this person has to have trusted the mattress IOU issuer explicitly.

What is more likely is that you trade mattress --> USD.Bitstamp --> RUB.RussianGateway which involves two atomic trades, where someone gets the mattress IOU they are willing to accept for USD.Bitstamp via an open market order and someone else gets these USD.Bitstamp and give you RUB.RussianGateway, as well through an explicit market order. There is no way the second person will end up with a mattress unless he/she explicitly want them.

Ripple works similar to your bank account: Whoever sends you money (e.g. I send you 10 EUR from Deutsche Bank) - it will be converted in the end via one or more intermediates to a balance of USD IOUs of your own bank. Yes, there might be special cases, I know, but the basic principle is that if someone sends you money from a different bank, you don't receive something that can be only redeemed at that other bank - you receive a balance with your own bank (gateway). Ripple just makes these conversions explicit and public, instead of implicit and hidden away (you cannot choose on a free market who exchanges my EUR.DeutscheBank to your USD.BankOfAmerika for example).

As there will be, as you correctly said, always be uncertainty on how much you can trust a gateway, there will also be always fees in between from people who are willing to take that risk. Take BTC.TradeFortress for example - if you believe there is a 1% chance that TF would actually send you the amount of BTC on the block chain that he received on Ripple when redeeming the IOUs, as soon as you buy more than 100 BTC.TradeFortress with a quite surely redeemable BTC.Bitstamp, you might actually have made a profit. There might be other people with different valuations etc. but the basic principle is still that of an open and free market for price (and through price: risk) discovery. Just like what's currently happening still with USD.MtGox vs. USD.Bitstamp.
You are just criticising that prices and conversion rates between IOUs can and will never be 100% certain - this however is in my opinion a basic premise of any IOU and to some extend even something that applies to real goods and assets. It is like saying stock markets are bound to fail as there is no way to determine the real value of shares.

inputs.io is not storing Bitcoins, it stores Bitcoin debt that can be redeemed on demand. You do NOT have the private keys for your coins there.

Electrum as far as I know has implemented the "Seed key" feature to generate many addresses from a single seed (so that's the only thing you need to back up and keep secret) while Bitcoind still generates addresses in a purely random way (that you all need to back up and keep secret).

For other wallets, maybe check the subforum here.

If you are _that_ dependent on my approval...

I can understand a certain excitement, once you start claiming that Satoshi is also developing Ripple though you might actually need to take a deep breath, step back from the keyboard and just be happy that XRP gained so much recently, just because Patrick said something on a Bitcoin meetup in NYC that was recorded.

Would you allow people opening inputs.io Bitcoin IOU<--> Ripple Bitcoin IOU bridges/gateways?

There is an API to add your own gateways to a Ripple client, the Bitstamp one seems to be in there by default though (something I don't like either, though as the client is open source, I can easily patch that out).

The main difference between inputs.io and Ripple is that you don't try to open anything up to the public, so you have the benefits of running fully centralized. You simply don't need to create public ledgers, a way to rate-limit decentralized peers or a way to make sure which transaction was first, as this ALL will be handled by your centralized, closed, IOU-moving server(s).

DividendRippler is not an exchange, it is a gateway to enter the distributed exchange that is called "Ripple". Depending on your viewpoint it might be easy to confuse them with an actual exchange, as the process goes hand in hand (similar to SVN --> GIT similarities and differences). Also there are several layers on Ripple that are decentralized to certain degrees - gateways that issue/redeem IOUs, XRP as assets, the rippled servers that process transactions, ripple clients that construct transactions and display information... so far anyone can build a gateway based on the public API, the client code is open source and XRP are as valueless as BTC initially (though they might be worth something based on their usefulness and network effects). Even if rippled is open sourced, this can and will not change anything about the distribution of XRP - luckily they are not (unlike BTC) the only thing that the network can transact.

All in all I guess there is a lot of misunderstanding and misinterpretation going on around Ripple, which can be also seen here, as nearly any post about it (even if it does NOT deal with XRP as currency) gets moved to Alternate Cryptocurrencies while threads about other exchanges, markets or IOU issuers stay in their respective forums even if they rarely deal with pure on-chain BTC (or never at all, like BitFunder, who ONLY deals in weexchange BTC IOUs!).

AmazonStuff has earned a place on my mental ignore list by the way, this kind of making up facts is irritating and only serves to make Ripple users look bad (or heavily invested in XRP...).

"Das Angebot gilt nur für Kunden mit Wohnsitz und Rechnungsadresse in Deutschland" - gleich wie Amazon Student...

Sorry, aber uninteressant und hat wohl auch nichts mit kochmanns Angebot zu tun.

The address TradeFortress used to issue this bad debt was funded by... rMyHUbgreHFvvxoD5pGmg1fKRdSBHisy39 - the TradeFortress address is by the way the ONLY address that this "aadje93 address" was funding (Funding means the first initial transaction of XRP in Ripple that are partially held as account reserve).

aadje93 seems to be a guy named Adrian from the Nederlands or Belgium (if you take the 93 as birth year, he's likely 19-20 years old). I'm not too sure that he is actually TradeFortress (different writing style amongst other things) but I really wonder then why he sent some XRP to this address that was used to scam people AND managed to scam them for real as well afterwards. There must be some connection between TF and aadje93, after all their addresses are far to closely linked in the Ripple graph for this to be accidential or by chance.

I guess you mean "without"?

You could get them at giveaways for free (similar to Bitcoin faucets), other than that XRP are designed to be bought. On the other hand, you'll likely will not need to buy any significant amount to use the system basically forever (and I am talking about "1 coffee at a café" amounts converted in USD), after that holding any more XRP is speculation just like with any other asset.

Well, it will be "crippled" in the sense that it is not too likely that suddenly everyone and their mother puts the node someone just brought online in their UNL - so someone unknown starting to run rippled would have limited impact on the actual network initially.

"Crippled" in the sense of for example "not being able to take part in consensus at all" or "can only run testnet" is unlikely, as there would be need for major restructuring of the code base to even remotely accomplish that. Also it could trivially be patched back in. I would recommend them to make rippled start by default in testnet mode (as a lot of nodes coming up at the same time might overload the p2p network with requests for historic data) with mainnet only available with command line switches or non-default config settings, but other than that I see no indications for "crippling potential" other than the mentioned "network killing itself due to sudden influx of nodes" scenario, which is not really part of the source code.

The 1000 XRP giveaway from SnapSwap is more tahn you'll ever need in a lifetime likely... I'd call that a large quantity.

Schubs...

It already could, as there are more non-OC servers in the network than OC servers online. Most of them probably use OC servers exclusively in their UNL though, to ensure that any needed changes actually are accepted until opening up.

Ripple is already now able to establish consensus without any centralization, the only reason it maybe (I can't tell which UNLs server operators are using) does still trust OC to a degree that it could be called "centralized" is that there could still be changes to the protocol that need to be done and that would be hard to do in a decentralized way if the operators of servers operate them in a "fire and forget" mode or start actively forking and/or testing the network.

Ripple is secured by having a diverse UNL (Bitcoin by computational power of miners), so the biggest issue that needs to be solved still imho is how to actually build a good UNL with trusted, non-colluding entities asap after going live.

It seems to me like people trust web services that are closed source and opaque far more than client applications, even if the web applications get more "dangerous" data inserted, so my tip would be to work on a 24/7 hosted bot platform that allows people to sign up, input their API key(s) and select a strategy. It would also eliminate the need to keep a PC running at night which is something that few people of your target audience do probably.

You do not own Bitcoins when using inputs.io, you own IOUs (Bitcoin denominated debt) issued by them. Think of it like a bank account, where you deposit money - if you look at their vault, you also can't tell which bills are yours, however you trust them that they are still there.

For example your daily interest will never be lent out, unless you do so manually.

Also I'm not 100% sure about how bitfinex handles partially taken lending offers with auto-renew.

Giga has more than enough information available to send me the BTC he owes me and I have also offered to sign something with the payout address of mine he has on record.

Unilaterally closing a contract after imposing unreasonable requests for private information + a signed statement that definitely wasn't part of the initial contract does have nothing to do with GLBSE closing.

Autolend automatically creates lending offers with any balance that is not yet lent out or in an offer. You can specify either VIR or a percentage rate.

Also it seems to cancel existing offers and recreates them at the autolend rate you set, I'm not sure if this has changed since I last checked. It won't lend out at market rates, it creates limit offers.

What do you count as "not really being decentralized"? It is unlikely that there will suddenly be hundreds of trusted server operators out there on the same day that it (supposedly) is open sourced... Currently there are a low 2 digit number of rippled servers running of which only the minority is operated by OpenCoin. Is this enough for you (and at which point was Bitcoin "really decentralized" by the way?)?

There are multiple open source bots available, why should anyone use your closed source one?

Also bots are only as good as their strategy... and of course their connection to the API/exchange. I personally would recommend to take a look at existing bots and trading libraries already out there before you start (again) to implement the Bitstamp API from scratch. If you think you ca do better than the bot you bought, do you mean that you can have a nicer interface and/or more stable program running or do you mean that you have ideas for better trading strategies?

His account hasn't been funded yet, so besides getting giveaways, he needs to buy on the external market and can't use Ripple internal...