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mining bitcoin is only good when it's profitable, and it doesn't seem to be that way right now.
I never mined. High end graphics cards were the way when I got involved. I could see that mining would be mostly losing battle unless the price exploded, and if that happened then sitting on BTC was going to work well. Much less effort and much less accumulation of obsolete gear.
My only regret is that I did not find out about and speculate a bit on ASICMINER shares. Sounds like people who did that really cleaned house. For a while at least. I was always dubious that ASIC's were actually real until ~friedcat pulled one out of his hat and demonstrated it conclusively.
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To the "use" not "hoard" guy I'll say this: I've always felt that "using" bitcoin in the way that most people dream of would kill it. Won't scale. Hoarding it might turn it into a 'reserve currency' of sorts where it could retain it's distributed peer-2-peer nature and the strength that is derived from being so. The value (both in monetary terms and in terms of solving a needed problem for society) would still be huge even without everyone buying Skittles with it.
The only time I spent actual money to 'help' Bitcoin as a system was at the end of 2011 when I felt I was doing the system a service by trying to mop up excess liquidity in Bitcoin's dark days.
That worked out very very well for me.