What is Ripple?

[hypostatization]

I think he meant that ripples can be taken away from you by the owners of Ripple

They can't as Satoshi can't take away your Bitcoins, there is no difference.

Well, Ripple is centralized. Isn't it suposed to be controlled by the owners?

Ripple is not centralized, nor a scam. ripplescam.org was created by reputed scammer TradeFortress:

https://www.google.com/search?q=tradefortress

Its open nature competed with his and other closed centralized systems. He had a vested interest in attacking, and has now allegedly fled after inputs.io collapsed.

Ripple source code:

https://github.com/ripple

It has a lot of great features and concepts contained within, that could benefit the crypto community at large.

I am most excited by Contracts, and hope to see similar systems adapted to other next gen coins:

https://ripple.com/wiki/Contracts

A lot of people disagree the decision of Ripple Labs to mint all of the internal currency at launch. They will control its initial distribution.

Like GridCoin and CureCoin, you can earn XRP by contributing to a humanitarian cloud computing project:

https://www.computingforgood.org/

Ripple Labs recently raised the daily giveaway to 1,250,000. As of this moment, it looks like the Ripple team is ranked at 140 out of 98,770:

http://www.allprojectstats.com/showteam.php?projekt=0&id=1824713

Here is a discussion on earning XRP via cloud computing:

https://xrptalk.org/topic/786-setting-up-cloud-servers-for-beginners-for-wcg-points-generation/

A fork is underway that seeks to eliminate pre-minted XRP:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=372486.0.

While I hope Ripple itself succeeds, it will be great to see the broader innovations of their system embraced in new competing systems. It has a massive amount to offer.

[jakedeez]

To boil it down to the simplest terms a bitcoiner of any level should understand... Ripple is a payment network.  It is a step forward in the evolution that is the bitcoin network.  It is currency agnostic and frankly, far more elegant then the btc network.

Ripples or XRT are their currency which as of now doesn't really hold much value.  They are suppose give away about half of it.

[hypostatization]

To boil it down to the simplest terms a bitcoiner of any level should understand... Ripple is a payment network.  It is a step forward in the evolution that is the bitcoin network.  It is currency agnostic and frankly, far more elegant then the btc network.

Ripples or XRT are their currency which as of now doesn't really hold much value.  They are suppose give away about half of it.

I disagree slightly. I do not see Ripple as a rival to Bitcoin, in an evolutionary manner; it solves for different concerns of centralization, and focuses on decentralization at different levels.

I see it as a complementary to Bitcoin (and all currencies) by design. Its beauty is in not trying compete. Instead: use Bitcoin!, or any currency you choose. A lot of people miss that it seeks to enable users to pay for any transaction with any currency they choose. Bitcoin, itself, is beautiful in its own unique ways.

It is a bridge between all currencies.