Quote from: pringesgood on January 02, 2013, 08:28:28 AM

so if you mine in a pool, if the pool gets a block, everyone gets a share of the reward right?

Depends on the pool and the payment method. And the payout is going to be relative to the amount of work performed, so not every miner gets an equal share. Someone mining with three times the hashing capacity of another gets three times the revenues.

As far as the amount of proceeds from mining that can be expected, that is entirely up to three things:
1.) The exchange rate at a future point in time. (That's like on January 1st asking if your investment in AAPL stock will be profitable at the end fo the year. Nobody knows.)
2.) The difficulty at a future point in time. (Again, this is unknown.)
3.) The amount of hashing power you are using (and, for calculation, your cost of electricity, and which hardware you have so that the amount of electricity consumption can be estimated).

Given those three, then your returns from mining can be determined.