I discovered Bitcoins  just before the price doubled, from the Gawker and a couple of other articles. Since then I've been following this forum, including the "mining" threads.

I've researched the costs of building a mining system, not so much because I'd expect to make a lot of bitcoins with the ever increasing difficulty, but because I'd like to have my own desktop supercomputer: I've been researching trading systems for stocks & commodities and while alpha can be quantitatively achieved, it requires enormous number crunching capability. The solutions I was considering before didn't include GPUs, now they do.  Building a bitcoin mining system might be an easy introduction to GPU computing. Right now I am trying to understand the programming resources available for Clear CL vs CUDA, ATI vs. NVIDIA.

As an anarcho-capitalist I love the idea of bitcoins, and a bitcoin economy; but I can see many barriers to widespread adoption. For now, and for a long time I see it as a plaything for hobbyists, a vehicle for speculators, and as a medium of black-marketeers. Perhaps when the US government finishes Zimbabweizing  the economy and the currency people will turn to bitcoins, and it will then be a life-saver for many.