Howdy,

I'm a relatively new user of bitcoin - bought 10 BTC in mid 2011, and was surprised when their purchasing power was suddenly much higher.

I'm somewhat well read in cryptography, mostly Bruce Schneier's various books (Cryptography Engineer is my most recent read), and I'm a big fan of the concept behind BTC.

I'm still trying to get my head around the economics involved - I guess my current understanding is that the currency is designed to self-regulate with a controlled rate of inflation for some time until all BTC are mined, while miners will compete forever for bigger shares of the current pool of total processing power.

I've put in an order for an ASIC miner, mostly because I find it interesting (I ordered a single from BFL, but from reading around, I shouldn't hold my breath on a delivery date). If it's not economical to mine by the time it shows up, I might try using it for other fun brute-force SHA256 applications (not sure how hard that will be, but hey, why not give it a whirl?).

I'm a somewhat experienced software developer, and distributed systems like this are a lot of fun for me.

-btccontractor