Ripple can hardly be called an altcoin. The currency was all premined and seems to only be used by some banks as an alternative to ACH. You need to choose which

Ripple can hardly be called an altcoin. The currency was all premined and seems to only be used by some banks as an alternative to ACH. You need to choose which nodes to trust, which can be a small set of easily compromised nodes. So once again you are trading speed for safety. It seems more like a distributed database with the cryptocurrency slapped on it to make banks think they are getting in on new technology.