With the proliferation of currencies out there, what vendor would bother anymore to use a shopping cart that doesn't automagically allow pretty much any darn thing out there to buy what they sell?
-MarkM-
This.
Ha ha, oh dear. Do you have ANY idea of how long it has taken for just a few hundred companies to dip their toes into BTC? And you are asking them to support a bunch of shitty altcoins? Bitcoin is literally the ONLY currency of even remote mainstream interest and even with $1 billion market cap it barely offer enough trading volume for the API's for accepting it to be useful.
No, the altcoins are just more dinner bill divvying IOUs like any other made up IOU, it is not the IOUs part of Ripple that vendors will buy into, it is the part where they can accept any fiat currency, even ones that Paypal or Dwolla or whatever other payment processor doesn't support that they buy into. That this means Joe Sixpack can buy using his accumulated dinner-bill IOUs from his buddies is totally incidental, as is that people can use bitcoins, litecoins, whatevercoins, the vendor doesn't care unless the exchange rates are so insane that they make their prices look uncompetetive.
So likely vendors would want the payment processor to be very very clear how much of the price shown is actual price and how much is because no one really trusts your lunch buddies to pay their IOUs so you are getting really crappy exchange rates when you buy using those IOUs...
But hey maybe you are right and Google was foolish to invest in Ripple because it will never catch on...
(Heck maybe like the petroleum industries who buy up all the engines that run on water patents Google is only buying it up to ensure it never catches on? Or like the big companes that buy seats on standards organisations to ensure the standards never catch on so their proprietary solutions will continue to reign supreme?)
-MarkM-
