Use gpus for gaming
I am not a fan of buying gpus exclusively for mining, they have other uses

Total money spent exclusively for bitcoins: ~$350, 2x BTL jalapenos, but I wont get them til nov/dec I suspect.
other spending:
1x6870 on my fileserver which I bought with old mined bitcoins [Thanks to btcbuy!]
Sold my GTX570 to a friend for $180 and got myself a 7950 for $350. [-$170]
bought another 7950 for $330.
so totally $330 + $170 = $500 on gpus.

Why dont I call them spending? because I use those GPUs for gaming when not mining, so technically not exclusive investment in btc

I've been looking for a way to rent my computer power for money.
Then I found bitcoin, knew that it is a p2p decentralized project, which means it is extremely hard to kill! just like bittorrent.
I tried it first on crappy nvidia gpus, over a year i made enough to buy a decent ATI gpu with bitcoins only! installed that on my home file server for 24/7 mining.
then sold my nvidia cards for ATI ones and made my main computer mining almost 20/7

I was mining for over a year on crappy nVidia cards until I bought myself 6870 fully from the mined bitcoins
That was my win

If I understand correctly the OP is wondering what makes bitcoins valuable.
The closest thing to bitcoin is gold, if you exclude using gold in jewelry [which is mostly to show it off], bitcoin and gold are similar in many ways.
Compare bitcoins to gold ingots, they turn out to be similar in many ways:
-Both are rare and limited in the world.
-Both require effort to produce.
-Both can be traded anonymously and are accepted as payment methods in many places.
-Both have no way of reversing the payment unless the person who received them willingly sends them back.
-Both have a deflating value, not really deflating but rather than the money we use is inflating

The money we use now is originally used as a replacement for gold, I think the old US Dollar had something that says you can refund the money to gold anytime you want.

TL;DR version: bitcoin is the new gold

Hello
I signed up to pool-x to mine LTC
Downloaded the ScryptGUI miner
I have copy-pasted all the info to avoid typos, URL/WorkerID&Pass/Port etc..
I clicked start mining but nothing happens
The miner says it takes a minute to update its status but I have waited over 10 minutes with nothing happening.

Then I downloaded the LTC application, it keeps telling me "Miner started" then immediately says "Miner Exited".
I have triple checked all the information, I have checked that the pool is active through the pool status.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.