I think you're really missing the point of Bitcoin mining. It's like gold mining, in an economy using Gold as a currency; you'd never expect the majority of economic effort being involved in digging the stuff out of the ground. Rather a small segment of society does that, and the rest of society does whatever they do in the economy, buying gold from other people as needed.

Bitcoin mining was *never* meant to be the way that the majority of people would get their Bitcoins. Rather it's a way of securing the network, namely in that Bitcoin essentially consists of an accounting system, where value is exchanged by writing public key crypto signed messages saying things like "Alice gives 10 bitcoins to Bob". Mining is required because there needs to be some canonical way of ordering those transactions in time. That's done by saying that whatever at least 51% of the computing power in the network thinks is true, is. So long as no one party ever controls that 51%, you can determine if coins have been spent to another party before you decide to accept them.

Look at the pool hashrate diagram. Each of those pie slices is a group of dozens to hundreds of users, each with at least a few hundred dollars worth of mining hardware, securing the network. Do I care if they are making more in Bitcoins than their rigs are costing them? Heck no. I just want a secure network so when I receive some Bitcoins I can know that they haven't been spent before. FPGAs and the upcoming ASICs are good for that, because they perform so much faster than off-the-shelf CPU's that any attacker would have a hard time getting enough computing power to attack the network.

Besides, if I did want to become a miner, all I'd have to do is spend about $600 on a Butterfly Labs fpga platform and I'd gradually have Bitcoins trickle in. But it's a lot faster to just buy them from someone else, just like it's a lot faster to buy gold from someone than mine it.

Great advice. Also use the Google Authentication feature of blockchain.info, that way even if someone manages to steal the passphrase they still need to hack into your phone to get the Google Auth code. For that matter, use Google Authentication for everything... I do.

Regarding backups, if you did use a secure passphrase, you can also have blockchain.info automatically send copies of your encrypted wallet to an email address every time a new address, IE, a private key, is added to your wallet. If you ever need your coins back and blockchain.info is down you can get them directly out of that backup as long as you still know your passphrase.

Transferability is the very point of Bitcoin. Sure it'd be nice to have a stack of gold, but good luck sending that over the internet without involving any trusted third parties. Look what happened to e-Gold services, all shutdown by the Feds. Possibly the only alternative will be trusted devices such as the in-development MintChip, although the final version is likely to be restricted to very small amounts and not as anonymous as claimed.

Of course, hilariously on the MintChip Challenge website, the most commented upon idea for what you could do with MintChip is buy Bitcoins...

I posted this link elsewhere in the thread. Myself, I'm pretty convinced it was the guy who made the site. After all, it was a 17 year old immature kid.

Also, many in the community think that Zhou Tong, the buy behind the site, was the one who stole the money in the first place. For instance, after the initial hack and after Bitcoinica shut down, a bunch of money was stored with a legit exchange, Mt Gox. Well those funds got conveniently hacked, and another exchange noticed Zhou Tong trying to transfer the same amount of cash, as well as the fact that an email address associated with the hack was in control of Zhou Tong himself. Source

Ever heard of the term "bucket shop"? That's exactly how Bitconica functioned. Sure you could sell, or sell on margin, your Bitcoins for imaginary US dollars, but you couldn't never withdraw or deposit anything but Bitcoins. What went on was people would use the margin given to them by Bitconica to speculate on the price of Bitcoin, then they'd conveniently lose their whole positions whenever the market went against them, which is quite easy to do if you happen to have everyones Bitcoins to manipulate the market with. This happened so often that a new term was invented for it: zhou tonged, named in honor of the 17 year old kid running the site. (seriously, 17!) Hell, even in the Bitcoin community lots of people were calling them out on this right from the start, for instance here is a post by one of the main devs, obviously concerned about all the other scams that of course have cropped up using bitcoin. Speaking of, wait'll you see the press when the pyramid scheme known as "Bitcoin Savings and Trust" fails, as it of course will given it pays out %3400 a year.

Personally I'd suggest you use your Bitcoins for something reputable, like buying pot, getting cash out of Argentina or donating to wikileaks. All this investment non-sense, as opposed to just using the currency for moving value around digitally, is getting out of hand.

Doing out the math... CF lightbulbs have no more than 6mg of mercury per bulb. (voluntary industry standards, 5mg is typical) (wikipedia)

Most "low-mercury" fish has up to 0.1ppm of mercury, with canned tuna at the top. (http://www.obfocus.com/nutrition/Seafood.htm) So, 1kg of fish will contain, will have 0.1mg of mercury. As pointed out by other posters, the mercury in CF bulbs is metallic, and not particularly well absorbed by the body. In fish it's presumably organic mercury, and much more dangerous.