I have a question for ya guys has anyone tried withdrawing these btc to bitstamp yet? I have and it only worked once but not after that? it just says no path found
That's what you get when you extend trust to someone you shouldn't trust. (There are maybe other areas where TradeFortress can be trusted, I just don't know him well enough. He can't be trusted regarding anything related to ripple, though).
Let me tell you something that really happened to me a long time ago:
When I walked to my car, a guy walked up to me and told me he had lost his wallet, needed a few bucks for a train ticket so he could get home - he would pay me back immediately via bank transfer. He looked like he was sincere and really in need of help, gave me his name and address and he signed a piece of paper that he owed me that money. I was young and naive, so I gave him some money. Of course I never got it back - I was stupid, and he was just a scammer.
Now this is what happened to you:
TradeFortress walked up to you, promising you he would give you 1 Bitcoin (via a ripple IOU) if you trusted him for 100 Bitcoins. You are young and naive, you don't understand how ripple works, and you believed that a promise from TradeFortress is worth real money, so you trusted him.
Now you find that the "piece of paper" where he promised you 1 BTC isn't even usable to wipe your arse since it's just virtual.
You believed that he would keep his promise to give you 1 BTC (in return for the IOU) and now you find out that he never intended to do that.
He calls it a social experiment. I see a very clear parallel to my case where I've been scammed. Who is the scammer here - the paper on which he promised to pay you 1 BTC (which is an analogy of the ripple system and theh IOU expressed in it), or the guy who promised it to you knowing perfectly well that he will not pay?
And just in case you still don't know what the real scam is here: it's not his empty promise of 1 BTC (everybody could promise me 1 BTC - if they don't pay I haven't lost anything) but his tricking you into trusting him for 100 BTC. In the ripple system, this means that up to an amount of 100 BTC you accept "his" worthless BTC IOUs as substitutes for BTC IOUs from actual trustworthy gateways.
If you don't trust a gateway to pay out the BTC they owe you, you definitely should not do business with them, whether in ripple not in the "real world". So now you should immediately reduce the trust level for TradeFortress in ripple to zero and hope that there hasn't been too much BTC rippled through your account - that amount would definitely be gone.
Note that there are valid criticisms regarding to ripple, such as it being based on IOU instead of irrevocable value transfer such as Bitcoin, or the discrepancy between the bold words of openness on their web page and the closed-source server code. These points have been discussed to death, but TradeFortress seems to have chosen to not accept the answers and claims that his questions have not been answered.
Onkel Paul