The forkers would be ignored and cut out.
Of course they'd be "ignored", that's the very definition of a "split", each part of the network believe in its version of the ledger. But how do they get to common ground? How do you fix the split and merge everything back, without allowing for dangerous double-spends?
Since every validation must be signed, it is blatantly apparent who is lying.
I'm not talking about lying, I'm talking about honest splits, please read OP.
If my node's ULN doesn't share a large intersection with your node's ULN, we may split. Specially considering the high settlement frequency Ripple supposedly works with. At least that's my understanding of the protocol.
It is all reputation based - so if I have a reputation as a good validator people will choose to trust my node as a validator.
I'm not sure ordinary users would even bother to know what a validator is, let alone a good one, but anwyays, that's not the question.
Imagine taking out all of the spammers, "dust bunnies," and bad guys from the Bitcoin protocol
You'll only take out scammers and others if you introduce chargeback. But then you only push the problem onto merchants actually, who can take no action to counter these scammers (only their direct victims could have potentially done so)
Even if 80% of validators that somehow managed to gain trust decided to fork Ripple dishonestly the major exchanges, institutions, and people who matter in commerce would cut them out immediately and would never trust them again as validators based on their signatures.
You might be right. On the other hand, protocol changes can be introduced without people having to change their clients. If 80% of validators decide to introduce some change in the protocol, your node will automatically consent to it. In Bitcoin, you'd need to take the action of updating to the new protocol version.
I wonder if that's not a potential vulnerability. How many big actors would really change their validators? Introducing dangerous changes little by little, wouldn't that be a possibility?
What's more is that Bitcoin cannot change it's core without becoming an entirely different protocol.
I consider that an advantage. The contract doesn't change without your explicit and active consent. In Ripple, you may "consent" without even knowing it (passively).
If we increase the size of blocks we move toward centralization
That's false and FUD.
Even if Moore's law results in better connectivity and speed, we are still wasting all this electricity and processing power on mining just to prevent the 51% attack. Ripple helps solve these problems and is a happy medium.
Granted, mining is costly. But I'm still not 100% convinced Ripple actually "solves it". Nobody has yet answered this topic's question: how does ripple deal with splits/forks?
I would rather embrace a distributed, technically unified protocol that will transition from centralized to decentralized than a fragmented, bottlenecked protocol which will transition from decentralized to centralized.
Bitcoin is neither.