For solo mining, you either solve the current block or you get nothing for your efforts.  So you are right - there are no shares.  BTC Guild is up to 1,800 TH/s and they can go for an hour without getting a block or they can get three blocks in a row.  The odds of beating the mining pools with a solo miner are not good at all unless you have a very good setup.

In the status area, NB is the number of new blocks seen on the network, A is the number of blocks accepted from you and R is the number of blocks rejected.  You show 117 new blocks, which is about right for the amount of time you have been running (18 hours and 18 minutes works out to an average of a new block every 9 minutes).  No blocks have been submitted (A and R are 0).  So it doesn't look like you have found anything (not surprising since your total hash rate 7.5 GH/s)

Also, it appears that only 2 of your devices are working.  Don't know if that is intended or not.

I have 5 GH/s mining in a pool which yields about 0.0035 BTC per day (was 0.0046 BTC before the latest difficulty increase).  But it has been fun and educational and I expect to break even shortly (which is probably the best you can do)

It means you have to trust the server to correctly process your transactions.  If you run a full node, you don't need to trust anybody.

It just depends upon your level of paranoia 

Bitcoin-Qt establishes 8 outgoing connections to peer nodes when it starts up.  It then listens for incoming connections and will accept connections until the maxconnections limit is reached.  By default, Bitcoin-Qt will use uPnP to open the 8333 port on your router if it is supported.  You can specify listen=0 if you do not want to accept incoming connections.

I use NetLimiter to limit the upload bandwidth used by Bitcoin-Qt and I specify maxconnections to limit the total number of connections to something that is manageable.

Use the -datadir="location" option to move the blockchain data to a different drive where you have more space.  Be sure and copy the contents of the original data directory before starting Bitcoin-Qt again or it will create a new wallet and restart the blockchain download.

I'm using BFGMiner with 15 USB block erupters.  BFGMiner needs the CP210x-VCP device driver.  Make sure you have enough power for the erupters (0.5A per erupter).  It is also a good idea to use a fan to keep them cool (they can get too hot to touch otherwise).

I'm using the following command line with BFGMiner 3.6.0:

bfgminer -o <mining pool> -u <worker name> -p <worker password> -G --no-adl --scan-serial erupter:all

This setup has been stable and runs continuously for days without a problem.

I use a personal finance program that supports investment accounts.  I'm treating Bitcoin as a stock and each purchase represents additional shares of that stock.  I'm handling my mining shares as reinvested stock dividends (you are supposed to pay the IRS for this since mining shares represent income which you can offset with your mining expenses).  The program than tracks the cost basis for me (trading fees are handled as commissions).  When I sell, it keeps track of the lots used to fill the order.  Since you don't get to pick specific purchase transactions when you sell, I'm using the FIFO (first-in first-out) accounting method.

You also have to consider the upload speed of the node you are downloading the blockchain from.  Upload speeds are typically much less than download speeds (my connection is 15 Mbit/s down and 1 Mbit/s up).  Even worse, when I check the network traffic for my Bitcoin-qt client, there always seem to be 2 or 3 nodes fetching the blockchain at the same time from me, so my 1Mbit/s bandwidth gets divided among them.

Ron

I'm using BFGMiner with USB erupters.  The secret was to specify --scan-serial erupter:all when starting the miner.  You don't need the icarus options with the latest version of BFGMiner (3.6.0)

Here is what I am using with 15 erupters:

  bfgminer -o http:<pool address> -u <worker id> -p <worker password> -G --scan-serial erupter:all

Ron

You can still receive coins automatically without any extra work.

You can use your original address or generate another one (I use different addresses depending on why I received the money)

You will need to supply your wallet passphrase when you send coins

Fees are paid by the sender, not the receiver.

Most block erupters draw 0.5A.  Since your hub has a 3A power supply, it should support 6 erupters.  To be safe, though, you might want to stop at 5 per hub.

You can daisy chain hubs (I think the limit is 5 tiers with the computer counting as the first tier).  I'm running three 7-port hubs with 5 erupters per hub.  I'm also using a USB fan to help cool things down.

Ron

I'm going to treat bitcoins as an investment asset until things are clarified.  This means keeping track of the cost basis (BTC purchase price + fees) and subtracting the basis from the net sale (BTC sell price - fees) to calculate the capital gain.  The advantage is that capital gains held for 1 year have a lower tax rate than normal income.  CoinBase provides a CSV export for its transactions as does the Bitcoin-QT client.  If your exchange doesn't provide a paper trail, you'll need to keep your own - be sure to include the transaction identifiers so you can use the blockchain to prove when coins were purchased and sold.

Ron

I feel that the price has risen too fast this year and is due to drop off.  But over time, it should continue to increase, hopefully at a slower pace so it can actually be used as a currency.  As a merchant, imagine buying inventory using BTC and then trying to sell the inventory in two weeks when the exchange rate has increased 20%.

Ron

Same story - I heard about bitcoins last year but was focused on other things and didn't do anything about it then.  I did get in on it earlier this year but didn't invest any serious money in equipment or buying coins.  It was mainly an intellectual exercise to see if I could wrap my head around the concept (I worked on Kerberos and SSL, so I had a good start on encryption and public/private key theory).

Ron (retired programmer)

I've been mining with a 5 GH/s setup.  This obviously is not the path to riches, but it is interesting and yields small amounts of BTC.  I also run a full bitcoin-qt client as a way to help the network, although I had to use Netlimiter to throttle it a bit so it didn't consume all of my bandwidth (15Mbit/s down and 1 Mbit/s up).

There is a bit of a feeding frenzy at the moment caused by the recent rise in the BTC exchange rate.  The result has been a significant increase in hardware prices as well as the growth in network hashing capability.  I don't think Bitcoin is going away but there is still a lot of work to be done for scalability (just take a look at github to see what people are talking about).  It will be interesting to see how things look next year.

I look at bitcoins as a speculative investment at the present time.  Yes, the number of bitcoins is fixed but the recent rise has been too rapid.  I expect it to decline at some point before resuming a more gradual increase.  Although I have been wrong about interest rates for 2 years now ...

Ron

I saw a similar problem in another thread.  The proposed solution was to send the money again to the correct address and include a higher transaction fee.  This should cause the transaction to get quickly included in a block.  When the bad transaction is eventually processed, it will be rejected as a double spend.

Ron