Someone I know is heavily involved in Ripple, to the point of trying to set up one of those 'gateway' things as a business. He's a smart guy and I don't think he's gullible enough to fall for an obvious scam, but perhaps the Ripple people are clever as well and have some secret to making money beyond their public declaration that they've 'premined' some ripple for the purposes of bringing in a return as a business (I'm pretty sure they had originally posted that on their web-site, didn't they?).