If there is one thing I have learned about Bitcoins, its that mining them is not profitable or worth while. When you factor in all implicit and explicit costs, mining is a terrible loss.

That doesnt mean that you cant make Bitcoins in a profitable manner. It just means that you have to think more outside the box. You cant make money where everybody is trying to make money. You need unique, creative methods that you can scale up.

Actually, Bitcoin is like any other currency in the sense that you'll need to do some work, or provide some kind of good that others will pay for (and you're willing to accept BTC for of course).

OP fails at calculations.

If you're using ANY 5xxx or 6xxx series card, it is profitable to mine.  I don't care what your electric costs are, but the price/difficulty ratio isn't yet terrible enough for those who pay the most for electricity to be unprofitable.

No, such a dictionary wouldn't be practical.  The SHA-256 function can use a message input size of numbers anywhere between 1 all the way to 2^64 − 1 bits and produces a digest hash output of size 256 bits.  That is a huge huge possible number of inputs, basically it is ~2^(2^64).  Now of course the size of each block of transactions is currently rarely no bigger than ~64kb.  And, keep in mind that the entire bitcoin network only *publishes* 1 solution every 10 minutes, whereby a *solution* is nothing more than a pair of one number (of a string of 1's &  0's representing all transactions after the previous block) and a nonce such that it's SHA-256 hash is a 256-bit number with a certain number of topmost bits (depending on the current difficulty...currently 53 bits out of 256 bits) equal to 0.  Do you realize how long it would take to fill up, store, or even access an inverted hash table with 2^203 inputs?  And keep in mind these solutions are utterly useless (someone in the forums a few months back mentioned possibly to break cryptographic salt, but I don't see how).  And realize that the network only produces ~6*24*356=52,560 *solutions* every year so I couldn't even begin to fill this huge table.  And please, if you are trying to build a password cracking dictionary, realize that the binary format for a block of transactions looks nothing like the ascii text of passwords (if that is what you are referring to by brute force 'dictionary').

tl;dr summary is basically that all those hash cycles spent mining bitcoins all over the world is not producing anything useful other than ensuring bitcoin network security.

(edit: I see that other people already pointed out that the bitcoin block solutions are useless, but since it took me so long to write the above, I don't feel like deleting it.  And I apologize for any typing errors, since it is late at night.)

0/conf will work for retail transactions.  I bet the rate of people using a double-spend technique to screw people out of money would be roughly equivalent to the rate of people using counterfeit bills for a cash transaction.  And whoever the retailer is can use security cameras or other techniques to track the perp down and prosecute them.

If there WERE a place to go, what would it look like?  A lawless society, or a place of complete aloneness?  Because other than land ruled by established governments, I see no other options.