[jancsika]

For one thing, it had no bootstrapping mechanism to speak of. Most of the early conversations about Ryan Fugger's Ripple started with, "Imagine that X participants are using Ripple and extend credit to each other." But users couldn't test out that scenario and get a feel for the network because it was non-trivial to get X participants together and have them extend credit to one another.

Meanwhile, people were downloading Bitcoin and clicking a button to "Generate Coins." Great, so you've got coins. Now what? Maybe you offer 10,000 of them to anyone on the internet who will call in a pizza order in your area. Somebody does it and your pizza gets delivered. You send them 10,000 of your whacko coins in return. Boom! A working cryptocurrency is born.

You just couldn't achieve that with the early Ripple.

The later Ripple which wasn't written by Ryan Fugger added a cryptocurrency called XRP to this scheme, and apparently spent most of its time arguing that its new cryptocurrency wasn't a cryptocurrency but just spam protection. A sizable portion of this spam protection was divided up among the original investors/author. It was fun to read the comments on that one.