This suggests that you have a USB problem, not a heating problem.

You're running extremely cold, which means you're not hashing.

Is something you're running cranking your CPU to 100%? Like are you trying to CPU mine simultaneously?

I think this is completely correct. The gains from short-term speculation are chump change compared to the long-term potential of BTC really being a prominent international monetary instrument. If Bitcoin really does change the world, who the hell cares whether you bought in at $10, $100, or $1000 dollars if it hits the six-figure range.

Paypal has serious customer service-related issues that make it vulnerable to alternative solutions.
Anybody who has ever tried to make large purchases on eBay probably already knows this.

I think the overall attitude about mining ROI is predicated on a lot of assumptions that aren't necessarily valid.

There are many reasons to want to hold Bitcoin. If the goal is short-term fiat gains, then yes, mining is completely mentally retarded.

The endgame of Bitcoin is not something like buying at $180 and dumping at $350. Frankly that's chump change.

Let's get real about how this sort of thing could actually play out in real life, assuming that we're not strictly talking about pump-and-dump speculators. If a person's goals fall into that category, Bitcoin is the same as oil future is the same as pork bellies is the same as frozen concentrated orange juice, it's just a number on a ticker that you buy low and sell high for marginal fiat gains.

If the goal is to hold and grow a position predicated on believing in the value of this technology and not as a shady get-rich-quick scheme, mining makes perfect sense. It would be nice if hardware prices dropped for sure, but it still makes sense.

Imagine hypothetically you wanted to build a very modest position by mining for several months on some 5 GH/s Jalapeno unit or something of that power that you acquired today. Suppose you paid the full retail price of like $275 or whatever that unit is supposed to be, and after factoring in power consumption by the time you decided to take that hashing offline in several months, you accumulated something like 0.3 BTC.

Now say instead you bought a position outright on an exchange at ~$350, immediately holding something like 0.78 BTC.

Yes, of course, if your concern is rapidly cashing in for fiat, the miner is all manner of epithets: greedy, delusional, idiotic, incompetent at math, just construct your litany of disdainful remarks, all would apply.

But consider if your reason for getting into BTC is to be involved in the long-term potential, imagine several years down the line BTC hits the $100,000+ mark. Are we really going to cry about the difference between making $30,000 versus $78,000 fiat off of a $275 investment? Both of those long-term returns are completely outside the pale of anything except a revolutionary emergent technology. Furthermore, in the long-term scenario, how do we know that these two individuals know to cash out at exactly the same time? Wouldn't it be plausible to imagine the 0.78 BTC holder might be tempted to cash in at say $50,000 or even just $5000 because their decision-making process reveals a desire for fiat?

If the endgame for all of this is to build a position as a store of value in an emerging revolutionary technology, then these differences are nonsensical, because the person with that mindset is really only going to cash out to fiat to support living expenses or re-investment or whatever, because the ideal scenario for Bitcoin involves that person wanting Bitcoins.

If Bitcoin really takes off as far as say what Forex market share estimations would indicate if it hit critical mass in just that market, why should some aggressive Bitcoin holder really care if their holdings end up being worth say $30 million versus $50 million or whatever? Are we financing space programs here?

What could possibly be the purpose of paying somebody $1000 to crack a SHA256 hash other than some misguided criminal enterprise?

I personally verified with MtGox but I was spooked with their behavior and have no intention of ever using them.

I went through a huge runaround sending them scans of valid document after valid document for proof of residence constantly getting rejected for absurd reasons.

Finally after scanning an insurance bill, only to receive the response that it was rejected because "letters are not a valid proof of residence", I wrote a polite yet somewhat forceful reply saying more or less, "This is not a 'letter', this is an insurance bill. Can you please provide me with a real exhaustive list of what you accept so we can stop wasting time going back and forth?".

Sure enough, suddenly I receive an email saying that I've been verified.

If the customer service surrounding getting verified is on this level of unprofessionalism, I can't possibly imagine trusting them ever with any non-trivial amount of money.

I think there is good reason to believe that Bitcoin really already should be at $1000.

If you look at the behavior of miners with respect to hardware, they're already behaving as though BTC is worth about $1000. Granted some proportion of the hashing power being put online now are delayed pre-orders trying to recoup some of the sunk cost on what is already a negative ROI versus outright coin buying, but there are plenty of orders happening right now under very comparable return calculations. Are we to believe simply that all miners are just greedy delusional idiots?

The behavior of miners suggests to me that there is some inherent structural bottleneck right now artificially suppressing outright buying demand, probably something to do with the barrier of dealing with exchanges with national fiat (for example the delays in electronic transfers from conventional bank accounts is absolutely killer for anyone serious about trading). I think it's unreasonable to just assume that the higher level of anonymity inherent to mining (i.e. no "cash business" reporting requirements, etc.) supports that much of a premium.