You can exchange right in Ripple. The ripple client has a built in exchange feature where you can trade your XRP for BTC/BitStamp, which you can then withdraw to BitStamp and send to whatever wallet you want.

Except when there are a couple people who have placed the majority of the bids. Then you end up with people who already have a bunch of bitcoins gathering more. If the large dump precipitates more selling, you could end up with less people holding more bitcoins each after the dump.

Just use mB for anything less than one bitcoin.

E.G. the price of a USD is currently 7.8 mB.

But when dealing with larger numbers it still makes sense to use whole bitcoins rather than mB.

E.G. I would sell my car for 31 btc.

It would be silly to say my car costs 31000 mB, and even sillier to say my car cost 31 kmB (31 kilomillibitcoin)

I would guess that a bit more than half the transactions I send are to myself, moving from one wallet to another, and that is not even counting the change I get back with almost every transaction I send.

Sure you can "brute force" a diamond: find a nice lady with a big rock on her finger, use your brute force to remove the diamond. Now you have a diamond which you didn't own before.

I tried to sell a couple things, had them listed a couple months but got no response so I took down the listings.

Sure, I could help you out, just send a PM to me with your name, address, phone number, birthdate, social security number, mother's maiden name, and if you have a credit card (just for collateral) send your card number and security code and expiration date. If it all checks out I will send you the BTC you need right away

When the time comes that it is advantageous to use bitcoin to do business, you will not have to spend 5 hours explaining why we want to use bitcoins, you will take 1 minute to say "We could use bitcoins", the guy you are talking to will already have heard about it, and then you spend a couple minutes working out specific details.

We are not to that point yet, but someday people will suggest to you to use bitcoins because it will be better for them.

It seems like this topic comes up once a week or so. There should be a sticky for it either here in "Newbies" or over in "currency exchange".

A couple other ways:
-go to the IRC channel #bitcoin-otc and find somebody to trade
-use one of the many exchanges (campbx.com, bitstamp.net, mtgox.com)
-look in the "currency exchange" subforum here

Could you first provide an explanation of HOW it is a scam?

Being proprietary and closed source does not equate to scam.

If they invested all their money at once based on what some people said on an internet forum, then they deserve to have lost a bunch of money.

Do you know what a ponzi scheme is? If it was a ponzi scheme, then opencoin would be using the procedes of the sales of ripples to pay current ripple holders. XRP pay no interest, therefore this is not a ponzi scheme. Try again.

Opencoin is in the US and under US law, thus it will be even easier for the US to shut them down than it was for LR. Look at how easy it is to open an anonymous ripple account: they don't even ask you for a name and email address.

If those people who bought at $200/btc had any sense, then they would also have bought at least as many bitcoins soon thereafter at $50/btc, thus their average cost of bitcoins would be no more than $125/btc, so they could sell right now for a profit. Even if they did not grab the dip, the price of bitcoins was under $100/btc for a while, so they could definitely have lowered their average cost by now.

I think you meant to say BTCT.CO without the m, because that is the share trading site.

You can use ripple to transact in bitcoin denominated IOUs, so therefore it is related to bitcoins.

LOL. Most of assets on BTCT and Bitfunder worth investing in are just pass-throughs to assets on MPEx, which apparently "barely anyone uses anymore".

One aspect I hadn't thought of until just now: Many of the news reports are mentioning bitcoins in one way or another while talking about the Liberty Reserve bust. Some talk about their similarities (anonymity, worldwide transfer of funds), while others talk about their differences (bitcoin does not have a central authority to arrest and shutdown the system). But as they say, any publicity is good publicity. There are people who are either hearing about bitcoins for the first time, or heard about them a while ago and are saying "WTF, bitcoins are worth $130, ten times what they were when I read about them in 2011, I should invest now before they go up another 10x!" So we might just see a "publicity bump", with another big bubble forming very soon!

In other words, "BUY! BUY! BUY!"

I think you have it backwards. the "trusted feedback" is not meant to protect against superfluous negative feedback, it protects against sock-puppet positive feedback gaming the system. I can make a bunch of accounts and give myself rave reviews, but those would all show up as "untrusted feedback" since you have no reason to trust any of those accounts, and thus you would still want to be wary of me.

You are saying the whole world is only worth 2.52 billion dollars? I think many economists would disagree with you. Just because there is a hard limit of 21 million bitcoins does not mean that each bitcoin is worth 1 21 millionth of the world, because they are just money and money has velocity.