I don’t remember if I had ever talked to Ryan, but I remember talking to people about this in forums and in person at Stanford and Cal in 2007. By 2005, the financial system was showing signs it was headed toward a point of no return because there was no revenue basis to justify the debt leverage, and the only way out was either extreme dollar scarcity, or previously unthinkable monetary base injections. Either way, there was some concern that we’d need a system of barter for those soon to be left behind by the banking system, and some hope that a massively decentralized barter network would be a more just and stable and productive economy regardless. The main theoretical discussion was whether a system could exist without a central currency. Most ripple believers thought that central currency was basically antithetical, although one based on unskilled labor hours might be acceptable as fallback. I believe this transformed into a resurgence of interest in HashCash, which had only been interesting for spam mitigation, but now looked like a possibility on Ripple. There were some weaknesses in the protocol, however, and as soon as the sci.crypt community got pulled into it, they dove into the double-spending problem. The old methods of Chaum’s blinded signatures didn’t work for decentralized exchange because you’d have to trace every coin back to its original minter. So the question was whether to use the network of confirmations to create an acceptable level of trust, or to maintain a central ledger, which looked a lot like a central bank. Satoshi’s concept was to use hashcash to both secure the ledger and issue currency. This was brilliant but antithetical to the no-currency concept, and re-ignited the debate, with Szabo and Dai reviving their own currency ideas and heading toward implementation with Finney. The ripple crowd were mostly interested in new ideas in economics, and as nobody could find a way of securing a decentralized exchange network without a currency, most of the interest faltered. Sure; you could decentralize the currency, but it doesn’t succeed in prioritizing reward to those performing useful work. At some point Mazieres entered with a more rigorous defense of trust generated by the network, but it still relied on a central token of value to process each exchange. Bitcoin emerged from the impending doom of financial collapse as a less hopeful but more realistic option, and interest in cryptocurrency in general fell off dramatically as the Bitcoin network went through its dead period of only one consistent miner, Satoshi himself. Ripple as XRP emerged much later in the post-Doge altcoin boom with huge investments, big claims about XRP in deals to replace Forex, hiring a lot of people, and were the only job option for the people that would be their critics. To the original ripple supporters, XRP looked no different than a central bank with, except that it was even more autocratic, unaccountable, and unequally-distributed. In no way did XRP fix the basic problem of allocating more rewards to useful work.
I could go on... but... just my recollection...