This afternoon I completed a second step in an interesting exercise.  A couple of months ago, after reading about various alternative currencies, such as BitCoin, I signed up for an account with Ripple.com  which was born of an idea to use a decentralized currency system, base on the Ripple protocol for a payment network:

In its developed form, the Ripple network is intended to be a peer-to-peer distributed social network service with a monetary honour system based on trust that already exists between people in real-world social networks; this form is financial capital backed completely by social capital. 

Ripple uses the Ripple currency, XRP (sometimes called ripples).

I don’t understand the potential uses or the pros and cons of such a network, but I thought it would be interesting to see how they handled security and identity.

As of this afternoon, I now have a Ripple wallet at Ripple.com, and an account at SnapSwap, a new US-based Ripple gateway, that is linked to a personal bank account.  I have 2,500 Ripples in my wallet, placed there as rewards for signing up with Ripple.com and SnapSwap.  I think at the current exchange rate, all those Ripples are worth about USD $10. 

Somehow in this system, I am supposed to be able to exchange dollars for ripples and vise versa, but I haven’t figured out why I would want to.  Any ideas?