IOU junk is just confusing
It's not a difficult system. It's a replica of a system we already use. What do you think a check is? An IOU from you to another person making good on the IOUs your bank holds to you and ultimately based on the IOUs the government has issued to us all. I mean i'm not carrying gold nuggets around in my wallet...
That being said, people take banking for granted and don't understand or consider the underlying concepts. Banks, checks, debit cards are all just facts of life. "Abstractions", a programmer would say. The irony is that the system it replicates IS pretty stupidly astoundingly complex, thanks to people who have made a profit building up and building on the concepts of banking, debt, stock, shares, etc., etc.
Current ripple implementation requires to trust a gateway which gives the gateway access to the funds you hold with other gateways. Until this is eliminated ripples have no future
This is simply not true. By default, funds are NOT accessible to other gateways and if you choose to allow that, you get a big red warning to think twice. (This is called "Allow Rippling") You DO have to extend trust to the gateway, which IS tantamount to handing them your money and telling them they can hold it (see: bank metaphor). Not something you should do for just anyone but if you expect them to send you money, you have to believe they have it in the first place, I guess.
A list of gateways I would consider trustworthy is maintained here:
xrpga.org/exchangers.html
Among other things, they are required to disclose their funds and management.
*An easy solution if you have funds in a gateway you don't trust is to SEND those funds somewhere in a converted form. If you have $10 you don't want snapswap to hold, use it all to send bitcoins to your wallet. This will empty the IOUs from snapswap and put the funds in an arguably safer place.
