My opinion on Ripple is that it's not needed. When you lend bitcoins or fiat, you are also creating debt out of thin air, and when the debt is repaid, it vanishes. Sure a system that allows you to lend/borrow bitcoins based on reputation might have it's use but such system does not need it's own kind of currency like ripple. The market value of ripples is crashing and for good reason I believe. Litecoin shares the same faith in my opinion. I remember a book I read at the time from Sony or Philips and there the mantra is, a new technology needs to have at least 7 big innovations for it to have a chance to succeed. Bitcoin has that over fiat and gold, Litecoin does not have that over bitcoin. Litecoin is a copycat with very few innovations over bitcoin. In a network environment where the value comes from the amount of participants, copycats do not have a chance.
From an investor's perspective the altcoins are like low end real estate. In a real estate boom it goes up even more than quality real estate, but it loses much more value when the inevitable crash comes. And chances are there that it will never recover but will be bulldozered down, as no one needs it anymore. Whereas the quality real estate, although highly undervalued, will continue to stand as there continues to be a need for it. I might be totally wrong so counterarguments are very welcome.
Ps: Also note that the analogy made for litecoin that it is silver versus bitcoin gold is not valid. When gold was money, there was not enough of it, so silver was also used as money. There are enough bitcoins to serve the whole world.
This is the altcoin subforum so I am not expecting balanced opinions on replies, but I want to expound a bit on the "copycats do not have a chance" thing.
The way I look at it is, that the digital currency world is actually much more cruel than that of PMs, as there is an inherent risk associated with copying Bitcoin's model of blockchain-you need to survive at the mercy of the Bitcoin network, some Bitcoiners can conduct a 51% attack on your network either with their big GPU farms or through botnets if they really feel the need to protect their stash, the most powerful network always wins, and the smaller ones could fail because no one will be interested in a unusable network.
As for Ripple, it's essentially a centralized network, and if I want to process my transaction centrally, I would rather go to some certified pros to do it in a legally enforceable way.