I started looking into this much too late, so altcoins are really my only viable option for understanding just WTF is going on with transactions, mining, pools, so on and so forth without wasting a lot of time and effort.

The more I read up on it the more I'm interested in Bitcoins, but since I don't have any use for them right now I'm not about to run out and convert my cash into bits when the price is so high/volatile. It makes much more sense to me to burn up my graphics card over the weekend to make an altcoin than to do the same for a satoshi or two.