Yeah, ripple is great because most of us want our money to be entirely controlled and issued by our owners.
That's exactly why I invested in the decentralized Ripple = BitShares.
BitShares was born of a traditional fair launch of a POW coin (Ptotoshares), and the Protoshares coinholders are now BitShares owners who vote on who gets to be their miners.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yrif9uThwSYIf you are a great miner and want to mine BitShares, then apply to work for the (Ripple-style 10 sec block times and 24/7 Bitcoin 2.0 trustless asset trading) blockchain, then fill out a job application here:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?board=61.0(these are miners who are begging to work for the public blockchain)
BitShares is currently a $44 million market cap DAC that you can come work for if you want to. You just choose your salary, introduce yourself on the forum, and we vote you in! BitShares will soon have milti-sig & escrow (due in the next release), and aslo due later on are DNS, voting, and a turing complete scripting language (not really a big deal, it just sounds cool (it's a buzz word that gets attention but is an easy feature for great devs like Dan or Vitalik to construct because they are a lot alike in brainpower)).
I know, these facts sound an awful lot like hype, so they must be "hyperfacts"
Smart Contracts with turing complete scripting environment has been added to the BitShares roadmap to facilitate growth and prototyping of new features. This feature combined with BitAssets should give Ethereum some serious competition in the smart contract market.
Ripple is cool, but a little too centralized for my liking. I tried and loved the split second trading, but I missed the cold wallet features of Bitcoin and BitShares.
BitShares is like the public's blockchain because you get to tell it what to do (like a powerful Asimov robot who must listen to your commands and obey you) unlike Ripple and Bitcoin. The coin owners are in control, not the Bitcoin foundation or the Ripple preminers.