1. Don't forget reserve and trust & offer reserve requirements, i.e. just because every Joe & his uncle gets 500 XRPs doesn't mean most of them won't be sequestered in reserve.
I thought they got more then that? Something like 30k
The give away in bitcointalk.org forum began with 50,000 XRPs and every one or two weeks the amount was decreased, not it's down to 20,000 XRPs and will soon stop all together.
Facebook giveaway to "early adopters" will likely not be more than 10,000 XRPs and will get smaller as time goes on ...
The point is that only early adopters will get thousands of XRPs, the unwashed masses will get < 1000 XRP each by the time 50 billion is given out, most likely vast majority of the late adopter crowd will only be given 500, i.e. just a bit more than reserve requirement to allow the accounts to be fully functional (until the reserve maybe lowered by network consensus).
2. OpenCoin would have to be idiots to deluge the market and undermine the system, clearly they are not.
Can you explain how you know they would not make this mistake? This sounds like a sweeping assumption.
Because, the system will be open sourced, distributed and they will give up control over the network, their only conceivable source of revenue will be XRP sales (the 30% sold to gateways & banks).
Clearly, with that kind of business model, where they literally bet the company on the stability and appreciation of the XRP vs. USD .. .they are not incentivized to undermine themselves by flooding the market with too many XRPs too soon.
3. Giveaways will proceed at the same time as an orderly XRPs-for-sale market will operate within Ripple, similar to what's been happening until now, where there is enough investor interest to acquire XRPs in larger quantities then given away to ensure a stable dollar-pegged crawling appreciation rate of XRPs.
Has this been announced by OpenCoin? If there is a document or post I should refer to, that would be great to see! I guess it would fall along the lines of a monetary policy by OpenCoin, or the like.
There is not official proclamation I can give you a link to, but this was stated in private conversations with insiders over IRC, in person during recent Ripple meetup and even in Skype. If you feel like digging up old IRC logs, I refer you to #ripple channel on FreeNode.
