Personally, I think that a lot of people here are eager to trade ripple and talk about it like it's another alt-coin/cryptocurrency.
While they're adopted a blockchain for their ledger, ripples aren't actually intended to be used as currency, and if I understand it correctly different ripples will eventually carry different values (yes as debt) within the ripple network.
I'm not 100% if that last bit is a good way to describe it, and I haven't been able to get any ripples yet.
However as soon as I do I'll be putting the Rippled client up and exploring their APIs.
The client app is currently available in source at
https://github.com/rippleFoundation and they are offering bounties (in ripples) for bugs reported in the software or the system right now.
Anyways from what I've been able to sort out there's a lot of butthurt over ripple as a "scam crypto-currency" right now, when that's not what it's intended to be at all. This consists of the accusations of "premine" and "pump and dump" and whatnot.
Those guys (The ripples founders or insiders as they're called here)are likely to become fabulously rich if this works. There's no need to run a short con for a few million bucks. And (also if it gets going like they want) it will be the frosting on the cake of cryptocurrency.
Right now, it's just that they gave a bunch out here at bitcointalk.org and people want to speculate in them. Why not, apparently it's been quite profitable.
In the end, those 100b ripples need to be moving, to make the real money here. It's a centralized, trust based system and trying to compare it to bitcoin just because it has a blockchain is like saying "Hey this orange fruit is a really shitty apple".
Last I read you can fund an account for 200 ripples or less now, and the account reserve (unspendable ripples) is 50. I read somewhere else you may be able to fund for as low as 100 but i didn't read that anywhere official.
Just my thoughts on it, I'm by no means an expert. But I'm about ready to buy a few hundred ripples because what these guys are achieving with the campaign is keeping a lot of people "wondering" when they could be in there learning how it works.
I'm trying to sort it out so if you know that I'm completely wrong about something feel free to correct me. Most of what I'm saying is gleaned from their blog/forum/etc or their developer site and github.