2nd point of OP is a good question. Right now, mining (and thus ensuring the system keeps working) is rewarded by bitcoins. If they reach their target number, the wikipedia article mentions "transaction fees" that could become the new incentive to offer computing power. I don't get what those transaction fees would be, and who would pay them? Am I missing a crucial part here?

same here. more or less useless post to get to 5. there must be a more elegant way to solve the problem of spammers, no?

I'd like to use this opportunity to ask a question that bothered me for a few days now:

I read only good things about bitstamp, and was pretty determined to sign up with them and start trading there. But then I looked at their 'about' page, noticed they're a company based in Slovenia (so far, no problem), using a bank account at a Slovenian bank for fiat transfers.

Here's the problem. Slovenian banks are under some stress, as a result of the Europe-wide banking crisis. Maybe not as bad as, say, banks in Cyprus, but probably not risk free like most banks in, say, Germany or France either. Here's the OECD report talking about the Slovenian banking problems: http://www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/slovenia-2013.htm

What I'm wondering obviously is, how safe is my money at the bank that bitstamp uses? What's the point of trading bitcoins if I am at risk of losing my fiat funds when the associated bank goes bancrupt.

The following is a big newbie question, I am aware. Don't judge me, k?

If I never mined bitcoins, and never installed a bitcoin client, but I *did* sign up on of the exchanges (say mtgox), do I still have a wallet? Or are the bitcoins I buy on an exchange stored in some kind of "proprietary" wallet of the exchange I signed up for?

I get why there need to be some restrictions, but you practically invite us to game the system:

every newbie interested in posting will simply fire off 5 trivial messages, wait 5 hours, and he's in.

(like what i'm doing now)

Huh, never quite understood the point of introduction threads, but there you go:

Hello world.