IMHO, the biggest opportunity for scamming is the large scale DDoS attacks on the exchanges we've been seeing lately. I believe these to be orchestrated events by organized groups with access to large resources and are using BTC as a pure speculative market. Think of organized crime and investment banks. They engage in the DDoS attacks in an effort to manipulate the market and get their orders executed. I would imagine the savvy algorithmic traders and hedge funds are engaged in these practices as well.
The way to stop it is for the BTC network to get even more distributed and even more liquid (needs to be used for more transactions and not simply as a store of fiat currency value, but a value store in and of itself)
You should have to input your public key when you setup your account on a pooling service. You'll have to pay them a small percentage as well. Not sure if there's a way to mine w/o a pooling service. I'm sure there is, I just don't know how.
I'm curious if you're thinking that you'd PREFER XRP to BTC. If so, why is that? The only reason I can think of is that it's going to be a more liquid market, which is terrific, but XRP has much less time testing than what BTC does. It hasn't "proven" itself in the way that BTC has. In that regard, I think BTC is more "stable". Plus that, you can trade BTC for XRP at any time through your own Ripple Wallet...
Furthermore, I think Ripple has the capability to add XRP to the system at any time. Kind of the functionality of a central bank. Kind of counter intuitive to one of the main reasons crypto-currencies exist, IMHO.
This is good to know. It would be helpful to have a "why is there no reply link" when there's no reply link. I must have spent 20 minutes looking for how to reply.