Some people might have ethical or technical problems with Ripple, but personally I don't care, as long as it makes some money for me. I own some Ripple, but not much at this moment. In the future I would like to add more to my portfolio, as I believe Ripple will be much less volatile compared to Bitcoin, so that would give more ease of mind. Of course, the profits are likely less as well.

That's fine, but it's really just different from a cryptographic currency. It should be seen as a bank settlement service company, and be treated as such. You can trade the token, which is weird, but it's more like a company stock than anything else.

It is becoming more and more decentralized as time goes on. From May of last year:

https://ripple.com/insights/how-we-are-further-decentralizin...

I also have concerns about distribution of coins. I get the feeling that there is a cartel that own 90% of the coins and is keeping them off the market to inflate prices.

That's my concern about RaiBlocks too. I love that it's zero-fee and instant transfer with no proof of work or mining, but the fact that it's only on a few exchanges with a daily volume of 0.003% of the total supply is... dubious.

So what.

I love decentralized crypto stuff. But let's be real, most people don't care how their payments are processed.

I think those people are OK with Visa, MasterCard and PayPal.

Yes, and this is exactly the market to go for if you wanna go beyond the speculators and crypto nerds (like me).

So then why do those people need a cryptocurrency?

They dont, thats the point.

Sure; but at that point why tie your payment processing protocol to a premined external company, instead of going with something like R3's Corda?

If XRP is actually valuable, the risk of compromise of its huge wallet should be really scary for anyone.

Truth lies in the middle, probably people would sacrifice purity for other apparent benefits

Ripple is the vehicle the Central Banks use to influence crypto. It's meteoric rise is premeditated.