the people who take out Western Union with a disruptive network...
Will be people who go to India and Mexico and China...
And build offices and Dev Teams on the ground in the Third World.
NOT candy asses who attend Panels in Silicon Valley...
And fly 1st class between SF and NYC.
I dig your sentiment and I agree with you. But these "people who take out..." will probably use Ripple, Bitcoin, and whatever other tools are at their disposal. I'm picturing a new global Hawala-like system building out of the old Hawala system and the Western financial system. There will be no single system (Bitcoin, Ripple, etc.), or single service (Western Union), so less limitations and points of failure.
The point is that the work OpenCoin is doing is very important. There are gateways in China, USA, Europe, Canada, Sweden, and soon England. If the distribution of XRP and the conduct of OpenCoin is a problem, at least the world will have their technology.
I spent about 2 months studying Ripple...
And made about 500-1000 trades XRP/BTC and XRP/USD in May-June...
I was doing about 1% of XRP volume as a Market Maker...
(Which I do for a living on the NYSE since the 90s).
I was left very unimpressed by Ripple and OpenCoin...
All these "gateways" are Mickey Mouse 1-2 person operations...
With the single exception of Bitstamp which is 100% dependent on the Croation banking system...
So the only source of USD on the Ripple is one Croatian bank with a UK branch.
It gets worse...
Because many of these "gateway" are small legacy Ripple Classic operations...
Who are philosophically at odds with everything corporate OpenCoin stands for...
They are Trojan Horses waiting for the servers to be Open Sourced so they can fork away.
This is the whole community LETS sub-culture...
IMO, LETS is a classic example of a "solution in search of a problem"...
It's never caught on in modern urban culture... and never will.
Both the Ripple network and Ripple Forum are Ghost Towns...
A good measure of the health of the network is XRP trading volume...
Which is down 70-80% since I was trading in May...
Those 25,000 accounts they brag about are dormant...
Virtually all Ripple activity is OC, Devs, and a few dozen traders.
The company I was thinking of that, unlike OpenCoin...
IS ACTUALLY GOING TO THE THIRD WORLD to take on WU...
Is this article below... while I see that OC is hosting yet another swanky conference.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/20/buttercoin/In order to take on WU