Interesting find!

Important to note: Ripple was invented (iirc) by Ryan Fugger around 2004(?), it was a technological idea about trading over a p2p network using IOUs, essentially. Somewhat cool idea that, unsurprisingly, didn't take off.

Around 2012(?) "Ripple Labs" was created, in the midst of the growing enthusiasm around Bitcoin. It was essentially a scammy attempt to get rich off the back of Bitcoin's success. Printed trillions of tokens (great way to exploit unit bias; even back then when Bitcoin was $10ish, and around $50 when they started their big marketing push in 2013, having something cost sub-1c appealed to people's monkey brains, just as it does now), and started by Jed McCaleb (see his earlier project, MtGox). I couldn't care less what the legal truth is, but they just literally printed a currency and sold it to people, for bitcoin and other currencies. They pretended it was decentralized but that was 95% theatre (at one point they lost the entire history of their 'blockchain', lol). Ripple as defined by Ripple labs is a joke, and the butt of the joke is all the mass of fools out there who don't understand the above.

All of this 'important to note' is because the discussion on this google groups thing is back in 2009, long before Ripple Labs scammers showed up. Just a tech group with an interesting but ultimately unsuccessful idea.