Cryptsy appeared during the great copy-coin surge of 2013 ... those coins where usually exchanged on the boards with a lot of scammers taking your btc/ltc and sending nothing in return.
The guys took the opportunity and launched their site where you could safely trade almost anything against btc (safe as in "you get what you paid for", even if you paid for crap, of course ^^)
Even if those coins where worth almost nothing, crypsy takes a moderate fee on each transaction (.6% gox anyone ?) with the assumption that a little bit + a little bit + ... you know what I mean ^^
So we can at least thanks crypsy for keeping those boards relatively clear from the continuous flood of WTS/WTB threads ^^
Except cryptsy has had numerous issues (double deposit, lag, floating point trading, orders which are higher than the opposite side, etc). I mean besides all of that and the constant downtime, yeah it's going pretty well I guess in comparison to the always online, never had an issue mcxNOW....
On the other hand, it seems to me that mcx was initially build specifically to dump mincoin. (mcx stands for MinCoin eXchange doesn't it ?) It evolved from there, but this is quite a shady start to me.
(Also I don't like much the "I made it myself in C++ so it's secure because nobody knows how it works" approach ...professional bias on my side maybe ^^)
mcxNOW originally was meant for "microcash exchange now". MicroCash being the crypto currency I am working on for some time now, check the whois of the domain to see it was registered way before mincoin. Mincoin was added to the exchange because there was a bounty, it was before the flood of altcoins hitting the market and it was a good test for the exchange. It is no more a scam than any coin, so it's silly for anyone to say that. No one forces you to invest in any coin, no one forces you to mine any coin, go look up the definition of a scam.
In regards to the exchange security, it's been officially pen tested by 3 security experts I know and it's been heavily probed by hackers already. It withstands DDoS and can handle hundreds of thousands of users if it ever grows that large. I am confident in my ability (and have more experience than most people in cryptocurrency development) , you shouldn't be offended by that. I'm not some amateur making an exchange because "it can make me rich" like most people do it.
Ask yourself why someone like bigvern would start an exchange in beta and do things like use floating point numbers for financial code, it's pretty clear the motives of some of these exchange operators.