I'm putting this post together for some friends that are really crypto noobs and are now heavily investing in ripple. I don't think that ripple is bad or anything I just want everybody to be careful if they trust a company which holds 61 % of all tokens.
The distribution
The amount of XRP in existance is limited to 100 billion. They are premined e. g. created from the company called ripple. No more XRP can be generated. The company holds about 61 % of all XRP created. This corresponds to about 61 billion XRP. However ripple is not free to sell it when they want. The coins are locked up in smart contract that only allows the release of about 1 billion XRP per month. Of course ripple has no interest in releasing all coins at once and crashing the market but what if they need the money to cover the development cost? Or if they no longer believe in XRP and just want the quick cash? Today XRP is worth about $2,82. Even if they sold XRP for less than a fifth of the market price ($0.5) they would make $ 30 billions in cash! None of them would ever have to work again. Despite the fact that the ripple ecosystem would collapse.
Transactions per second
Ripple states that they handle 1500 transactions per second and that they can easily scale to 50'000 transactions per second. Bitshares on the other hand claims to be able to handle about 100'000 transactions per second and even doubles the performance of Visa. The question that remains for me is, why ripple sticks with 1500 tps if they could handle 50'000?
Fees
If a ripple transaction is made a small amount of XRP is burnt (e. g. destroyed). This is to prevent the network from malicious denial-of-service attacks. The transaction cost increases with the load on the network. The standard transaction fee is about 0.00001 XRP this is equal to $0.000028. Iota on the other hand has zero transaction fees which makes it suitable for very small transactions.
Conclusion
XRP is largely different from Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. For most of the older "bitcoiners" XRP is not a real cryptocurrency. As it may have a functional business model, investors should know that they trust a third party entity (e. g. ripple) with their money. Make sure to learn more about ripple before investing in the "next bitcoin".
Also have a look at the tweet from Charlie Lee the founder of litecoin: twitter.