> Don't confuse the Ripple payment network with ripples, its native currency
Funny, you were arguing that XRP wasn't a currency not so long ago.
It looks like from the code that all the orderbooks are XRP<>other. Seems like you can't opt out of trading XRP for your other stuff... so the fact that you and the other opencoin people own zillions of XRP is pretty material.
You can have an order book between any two assets. The pathfinding engine will prefer whatever path is cheapest, assuming it's not too long for it to find. For example, the USD/Bitstamp <-> BTC/Bitstamp order book is quite popular.
This is important because the price of XRP is not very stable now. If you wanted to keep offers up for USD to EUR, it would be very irritating if you had to pull down and replace a USD->XRP and XRP->EUR offer every time the price of XRP changed (to prevent one order from being too good and the other too bad). Also, if you couldn't place a USD->EUR offer, what would you do if you really wanted to trade USD for EUR? You can't place an XRP->EUR offer because you don't have the XRP yet. And if you place a USD->XRP offer, you wind up with XRP that you didn't want.
In the future, if the price of XRP becomes more stable, order books to and from XRP may become more popular. But still people who just don't want XRP will place offers on order books directly between assets other than XRP.
Whether or not XRP is a currency is really an arbitrary thing. I just want people to understand what XRP is and what its role in Ripple is. If they think that makes it a currency, then fine. If they think it doesn't, also fine.
Funny, you were arguing that XRP wasn't a currency not so long ago.
It looks like from the code that all the orderbooks are XRP<>other. Seems like you can't opt out of trading XRP for your other stuff... so the fact that you and the other opencoin people own zillions of XRP is pretty material.