A big heads up to wizkid057 and all the people putting lots of effort into keeping the best pool - obviously Eligius - up and running.

I donated a nice pair of new shoes to your girlfriend's address ...  

Edit: 53a34af18e4a03203d507149b24f52000c451b707d84d48dd1cde553ee73c38f

Try solo mining, dude. Might save yourself and - more important - the rest of the pool mining people al lot of time  

You made the first step, posting in the Newbie forum 

I am heavily following this forums for about 9 months now but only recently felt the urge to start posting.
Well, it took me some time to figure out how to get post permissions and so I ended up here.

Judging from the ridiculous stuff I discovered in some threads on this forum, a whitelist might make sense.
However, it seems to fail preventing people of questionable [self redacted] to spread their brain farts.

But I guess it would be worse without that procedure  

EDIT: typos

I currently follow the same goal - earning 10 BTC - but I got some money to play with on the exchanges.
I made my first BTC within the last 4 weeks from daytrading but it is risky and time consuming.

I think there is no good or bad point to get into bitcoins at this stage. There are currently a lot of things going on and the near future of the bitcoin price is unpredictable.
As a long term investment I personally believe that it will turn out to be a successfull investment.

Just don't invest more than you can afford to loose or forced to hodl due to short term price drops.