good post myrm. thanks!

Downloading email attachments from untrusted/unknown sources is a bad idea anyway!

jeanjean, sorry to hear about it, but I guess you will survive 
It's the first time I hear about mybitcoin being hacked. Maybe you should start a new thread about that where people can report?

ahitman: no, it does not help. it may work against you in some situations, but certainly it will not help.

alex: that works too, but it may be more time consuming 

Well, I'm surprised the KGB and the little green men from Mars were left out of this conversation 

Well, allow me to disagree  No offense intended!

I know a few miners with LOTS of hardware which is already paid for, and with little or no electricity costs (at least THEY don't pay for it, someone else does  )
It may be that there are many miners out there in the same situation. OTOH, during the winter mining rigs are money-making heaters, which makes electricity costs less relevant if one lives in a cold area.
Also, more miners seem to be getting into the mining business and many do not spend a lot of time with cost/benefit analysis 
IMHO, we will not see any difficulty stabilization unless the price of bitcoins goes really low.

Regarding the "luck factor", using a pool DOES NOT cancel it out, it just makes its variance a somewhat smoother. But, it comes at a price: usually the pool operator takes a commission.

Right. I was joking 
...however: Satoshi DOES NOT control your funds, while PayPal DOES.

It's on slashdot too.

Tradehill will hopefully learn something from all this, as well as the users...

the one about the aliens. if there isn't one, just make it up!  

Getting emotional about your investments is not healthy 

Well, for most people it usually works like this:

1. read the docs. understand them. repeat a couple of times
2. formulate questions and ask them on the forum.
3. armed with the new knowledge, goto 1.

 

Well, this is the fundamental difference between PayPal and Bitcoin. Satoshi is NOT minting the money 

There will be more scams in the future, and hopefuly more secure exchanges. Such is life...

It depends on what happens to the price and to the difficulty, and... how lucky you are. You MAY solve a block in your first minute of mining if you're really, really lucky...
Since your hardware is paid for and electricity is not an issue for you, you're in a MUCH better position than most miners. Go for it, no matter what happens, it will be better for you than for most!

Beany, the forum is not a substitute for reading the documentation...

Guys, let's give MtGox a break. At this time the investigation is still going on, and I am sure they have more than one hypothesis about what happened. As it is usually the case, only time will tell what is true and what is not. Meanwhile, there IS something useful we can do: stop speculating and start gathering objective data which can be used during the investigation. I am sure that many users have noticed something about their accounts that might be useful to find the truth. Please make notes and post them in an organized fashion. This is not the time for a MtGox witch hunt, but a productive collective effort!

Or maybe the Iranians, trying to retaliate for stuxnet... c'mon guys...

I am not sure that having more exchanges would prevent future MtGox-like incidents. Having too many exchanges creates different types of problems, for example:
1. if any script-kiddie can start an exchange tomorrow, security will be worse, not better.
2. building a secure open-source codebase is difificult, requires many COMPETENT contributors, and takes time. meanwhile, what prevents a hacker from exploiting weaknesses found in the code (which would be, of course, open and public). this is NOT the Linux community, with thousand of geeks eyeballing the soure code looking for love and honor, not money 
3. the user base being relatively small, too many exchanges could fragment the market to the point where the price would fluctuate a lot simply because of fragmentation.

I am absolutely sure  everything around us is a CIA conspiracy! Or maybe I'm paranoid? But hey, the fact that I'm paranoid doesn't mean they are not out there to get me! They got bin laden after al...