I need to choose a Ripple Gateway trustworthy enough to hold $10's of USD for me while I test out Ripple. I have no experience with any existing BTC exchanges/counter parties.
So my open question is? Who do you trust? Tell me your GOOD experiences? No flame wars please.
I will trust you for $10 USD if you like, for 1 year. You can use the currency freely and it's bitstamp backed so you can withdraw / exchange it etc. This is the point of ripple.
I've had good experiences with both WeExchange (for smaller amounts under $200), and Bitstamp for larger amounts (Up to $40k).
Regarding Bitstamp being a trapdoor, they run their own instance of rippled server, and being a rapidly growing business, the people who operate the rippled server are out of the office quite a lot, the thing works like clockwork, but if it goes down and nobody is there, then you need to wait until somebody is able to restart the ripple server, and let it catch up with the ever growing rippled. It's effectively the same as an exchanges bitcoind server going offline then needing to catch back up. On the other side, for putting funds in to ripple from bitstamp, they use a hotwallet which gets reloaded with about $50,000 USD and 500 BTC at a time, when it's empty, it needs reloaded with more funds. It would be very irresponsible for them to put more money in there, or have it auto filling, so it takes a staff member to reload it. This is about the only factor which can affect deposit/withdraw times. All it takes is some patience, and a support ticket when needed.
PM me your ripple address and I'll send you some USD and some XRP if you need it.
