That's because there is nothing "special" about it. It's just a crypto-currency. It prevents spam and can be used natively without trust lines. Use it, don't use...Outside of the fact that each account needs about 100 XRP reserves (less than $1) for the prevention of spam, it's really totally irrelevant to ones use of the network. It's just one of dozens of potential fiat and crypto currencies. I really don't understand why people are so obsessed with XRP. Chances are, XRP is never really going to be worth anything significant, so who cares?
Transaction time is much faster, and they require no mining, which means that less energy and hardware is used to secure transactions with the Consensus system. I assume there is also no need to store the blockchain on the hard drives of thousands of users. I think it's worth speculating on.
Ripple is great. XRP is scum. Open Coin is scum. I'd love to invest in Ripple because it has great potential; it's the most versatile payment system I have every come across. Unfortunately, I can't touch XRP -- there is an endless supply of it in very few hands that can and will dump your investment to nothing. I made a few coins off of trading XRP in May/June, but once I saw how quickly a
very small fraction of the XRP held by Open Coin insiders nosedives the market simply by being shown on the order book, I got out for good. Open Coin recently made a payment of 200 million XRP to an unknown entity, and, big surprise, most of it has been sold over a few weeks. July has been a bloodbath, and looking at the ripple forums, holders still don't seem to understand why they are getting fucked so badly.
The thing is, discussing Ripple outside of the context of XRP is not very useful, as Ripple is completely useless at current adoption/liquidity levels. There is nothing you can do
except speculate on XRP -- which is why it was marketed so heavily to bitcoiners. I don't even understand why they released the client so early; it's so buggy and unstable that it appears to be more of an alpha than beta. I don't know on what kind of time frame we should expect Open Coin to have the protocol fully implemented, but I simply don't trust them. Why would I?
If and until there is a far more robust system of reliable and trustworthy gateways, I would be very wary of holding value in any currency on Ripple. And even then, I'd be wary, considering I can only either hold debt from gateways, or a currency that by definition is under constant threat of manipulation.
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