Some reasons I can think of (I do not work for or am affiliated with Ripple Labs by the way, so these are just what I think their reasons are):

BTC are very slow (orders of magnitude slower) to confirm compared to Ripple's ledgers.
Jed said from the beginning he doesn't like the idea of burning electricity to secure the network.
Ripple validators would need to track the ledger _and_ the Bitcoin block chain.
Bitcoin scales poorly, if transactions on Ripple were done on Bitcoin, transaction volume would go through the roof (reminds me that I have to collect stats about transaction volume), already now Ripple likely has a higher transaction volume than Bitcoin, which is currently hard capped at less than 10 TX/s (imagine being able to only do 10 trades globally per second!)
Bitcoin transactions are crazy expensive (https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/5044482 estimates one typical transaction to cost about 0.8 mBTC).
Marketing reasons probably too, also even though it is improving, BTC don't have the best rep out there. It would be kinda hard to get banks to buy BTC first to transact something on Ripple, a fact that Mastercoin, Counterparty et.al. are going to find out soon enough.
Of course also the possibility to make/earn money from the system while being able to go fully open source with it asap (they do not earn money by providing the infrastructure or software, they earn money by people using their product and they hope for the network effect to kick in so there is no fork emerging that is more popular than their network)

They messed up a few things too by the way, calling XRP "ripples" is what bugs me most. Instead of calling the smallest unit (1 µXRP) "drop", they should have jsut called the whole currency "droplets", "waves" or something else. Especially their first target market (this forum) did simply treat it as another altcoin and by having the same name, it messed up a lot imho. (It's like a large bitcoin exchange calling itself "Bitcoin" - just see the confusion with The Block Chain and blockchain.info already)

Alright, I checked the new "Audit" tab, however it apparently (of course) does not take BTC used in swaps into account, as they are probably sold for USD or LTC by whoever borrowed them.

I however also have lent out some USD and I believe not all of them were used to buy LTC. Do BTC held in open positions show up somewhere too, maybe in trader's audit info?

Also it would be great to have a python script available somewhere where we can just copy-paste the hashes or whatever else is needed to verify the info.

You can download the client repository and execute it locally, another option might be to have a signed browser extension, similar to the blockchain.info wallet. Node-webkit seems reasonable actually, in case you want a more static/local experience without a browser.

Congratulations. Since there are funds in BTC at Bitstamp too, this means Bitfinex has significantly more BTC than 103% of user funds, right? Or did you just pull them off Bitstamp for an hour and redeposit?

How can I verify that my User ID had the correct balance at audit time?

You can use any browser that can run Javascript and run the client there.

Rippled is not necessary to use Ripple, you can operate even a full gateway just fine without it (I'd still recommend setting one up in-house so you are safe from people DOSing RippleLabs' servers). Most "clients" with installers or at least native code that I've seen were trading bots or other specialized stuff, not general wallet applications.

Maybe a package that can be installed but just contains a browser engine and the JavaScript client might be nice to have(?) for people who "need" to install something locally? I don't really see the benefit of having a strictly local client though, there is nearly no computation done besides signing of transactions locally and browsers are easily fast enough to handle that.

Edit: https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit looks promising if you want to "install" Ripple-Client locally.

https://ripple.com/wiki/No_Ripple unfortunately gives no reasoning.

Maybe ask this at the Ripple forums, I guess there might have been some way to loophole the system in some edge cases otherwise. I didn't really think or research a lot about this functionality though, sorry.

Since this was not sufficiently answered so far imho, I'll give it another shot...

Yes, this has been addressed, new trust lines are created with the "No Rippling" flag enabled by default in the official client (the general default when using the API still is "rippling enabled", though it can be argued that someone who writes their own client might also be able to set flags as she pleases). It also is an option exposed in the UI, so it is easy to set/unset this flag on existing trust lines too.

The basic problem (trusting someone who is not trustworthy) though is something that can not be resolved in any system like Ripple or otherwise, see MtGox or inputs.io or pirateat40 or mybitcoins or ... - you will always have to trust someone holding your funds in escrow at least to a certain point and it is up to you to ask for things that would make it easier for you to trust someone (e.g. audits, open book accounting...).

Call it "escrowed funds" then?

"Bank note" or "balance" might also be correct terms, in the end it is not strictly defined by the network though what your RippleState entries (the internal name for trust lines) reflect - they can be debt, money, time, goods...

All Bitcoin exchanges (even localbitcoins with their escrow system) use strictly IOUs, not "real" Bitcoins by the way.

You need to spend less than one single dollar buying XRP for a few million transactions + reserves, after that you can spend all other dollars for BTC, dogecoin or whatever else you want to buy on Ripple. It's an exchange mostly with an "altcoin" attached to it for denominating fees, not the other way around.

Yeah, just tried it - neither works in the middle, end nor beginning of a file if there is any other data beyond just the EICAR test string.

People get abused or treated poorly on the WoW forums or youtube for understanding/using Bitcoin.

This is bitcointalk.org, it is kinda expected that people are critical towards anything that might look like endangering BTC. Also, maybe I need to remind you that you were also kinda trolling against Ripple for some time.

Calling people who don't understand a concept stupid, dumb or dense does not help at all. Also generalizing from a vocal minority to "bitcoiners" is a bit far fetched. English is not my native language and probably also not the native language of a lot of people around here, so there can be just very simple misunderstandings too.

ripplescam is relatively well designed and written and I regularly have to fight down the urge to create a similar page, just with Bitcoin as an example of how FUD and twisted words from someone who is relatively well informed about a system really can look like. Then again I constantly try to remind myself that Ripple as well as Bitcoin a few years(!) ago both took some time for me to really "sink in" and that it took quite some time of reading and asking until I understood it better. Pointing out (or making up) flaws of Bitcoin will not make Ripple any better or trustworthy, it will just make Bitcoin look worse. My hope is that while there are usually a handful of trolls showing up who try to upset me from time to time there are people that are genuinely interested in understanding more about Ripple and how it benefits Bitcoin as well as the anonymous mass of "lurkers" who do not post in these threads but just read them and form their own opinion.
Also it helps my own understanding a bit better to be asked beginner questions or to debunk common myths (like the "it's not open source" or "it's centralized" stuff).

I actually had an idea for something that I would have called "cripple"...
Idea is on the backburner for now though.

Something that I'd love to see though would be to integrate BTC as second native currency into rippled (yes, this means validators need to track the bitcoin blocks too - compared to what rippled uses ressource wise not much of a deal really...) to be used as alternative to XRP when paying for transactions etc.

You can trace them back to ledger 32570 at the moment, in the future maybe to 0 too. The link between 0 and 32569 is lost atm. though, so 32570 is the earliest one we have and to which one can trace everything back. You need to verify balances in ledger 32570 (they look reasonable and add up to less than 100 billion XRP, as advertised) and transactions since then to verify everything available in Ripple. If you only care about more recent events, you can also define ledger 5.9 million as genesis for yourself, verify this one as being correctly assembled + hashed and only look at transactions since then.

Because I don't know what ledgers 0-32569 contain. If you run rippled from back then (or also a current version), you'd start with just the single root account and 100 billion XRP in it. As I was asked about theoretical possibilities, theoretically anything could have happened in there. It is very improbable but not impossible.

32570 is called "genesis" ledger (https://ripple.com/wiki/Genesis_ledger) because it is the oldest available ledger on the network atm. It is not the first ledger though. Ledger 0 is the one with (very, very, very likely) 100 billion XRP, 32570 misses already a few fractions of an XRP from transactions that took place in the meantime. As I said, there is a chance that older ledgers could be reconstructed. There is no way to go "below" ledger 0 though, so that is the definitive starting point.

Rippled actually usually just loads the most current verified ledger (~82 MB or so atm.) and uses this as "genesis" (all balances etc. are known after all and can be traced back cryptographically), you can instruct it to fetch more history if you want to. Bitcoin on the other hand always starts with block 0 as genesis and starting block and replays all transactions since then, because you can not know if a transaction is valid just by looking at the latest block in the block chain.

That's a definite no and that's what I tried to explain before with "it does not matter what happened before a certain point of time".

Wrong, here's the code (again!): https://github.com/ripple/rippled

Wrong again, every node constantly audits transactions. It is easily auditable and verifiable.

In Bitcoin terms the ledger is something close to a UTXO set in a deterministic data structure, so to run a full node you only need this data (just like in Bitcoin) and history is kinda optional. Something similar to this approach has been suggested some time ago for Bitcoin too, here's the thread about it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=88208.0

So far so good...

I think here is the issue that I probably did not explain too good:
You actually do know everyone's individual balance at ledger 32570!

It is not even that large, here it is in JSON format (every entry on a seperate line for better readability):
http://pastebin.com/P24vC3Vf

Every transaction since then is known and the result of applying them can be calculated and verified independently.

Well, just like with Bitcoin where you kinda need to use the Satoshi generated block chain, you kinda need to use the ledger chain RippleLabs started. You are free to run your own fork of course, but this has similar consequences as with Bitcoin (you'd create an Altcoin with Bitcoin rules or an alt-ledger with Ripple rules). Their validators are widely used, but not the only ones out there, so while they are currently still quite central to the network the network could very well survive without them. You can run your own validator by the way too, some people who are critical of RippleLabs would probably add yours to their UNL to have even more diversity. I might announce my own one "soonish" too, once it has a bit better hardware and runs more stable.

I already told you how to get the total number of XRP at any ledger since 32570, here you go again:
You can increment ledger_index and you'll see that these header form a hashed chain (see the value in parent_hash). If you want to see total balances of all accounts so you can make sure that they add up to the number in the header this is also possible.

I'm not sure how else to explain it, but if you deal with balances it does not matter what happened before a certain point of time, it matters what the state was at a certain point and what happened since then. Any ordinary(?) person with some knwoledge about accounting can tell you that and any ordinary(?) person that is a bit interested in programming and crypto can tell you that this is also verifiable on the ledger chain.

Look, you are suggesting that instead of a software bug the first 10 days of Ripple transactions hide something that is not intended in the system, would shatter any kind of trust in RippleLabs as the developers and which would have 0 influence on Ripple whatsoever afterwards. It makes for nice theoretical discussions, the practical implications are however 0.

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The volumes for XRP on coinmarketcap are underreported (they only represent BTC.Bitstamp/XRP afaik.) though compared to other coins they are still low. A good realistic ballpark figure is ~250k USD. I don't know how to fix them "properly" though or how to give a "real" volume, since trading volume is so easy to fake (see Huobi et.al.) and trading on Ripple is so cheap that it would be trivial to fake any kind of volume. I guess it's better to let people do their own research or assume there is not much going on rather than dealing with volume spikes of a few million BTC every now and then once someone decides to have some "fun".

rippled is not a webserver, you would probably deploy ripple-client on a local webserver though. Then tell the client to connect to your local server instead of the official public servers and your local rippled server needs connectivity to other rippled servers of course (just like bitcoind). I am not sure what you mean by "Ripple Labs hosted transactions".

In Bitcoin yes (since it is based on previous outputs of transactions), in Ripple (which is based on balances) this is not true.

The thing about 21 millions was an example that some statements are often simplified ("there will only be 21 million Bitcoins" instead of "there will be at least 12.61 million Bitcoins and up to 20.999... million Bitcoins depending on miners acting economically rational or not") and as you see in this thread it is hard to find a balance.

I guess you mean RippleLabs... yes, the client code is just hosted on ripple.com for convenience, you can run your own rippled to connect to and set up a webserver with the client locally too (it's what I do for example), I linked the repositories before. I'd recommend to use the tagged release versions and not bleeding edge code as it is under active development.

You could try to double spend it, yes.

Not sure what you mean with "quantum attack", good luck with mining blocks faster than the network though...

Most used != best...

Sure.