This is now showing up on Coinwarz as one of the most profitable, but I don't see any recent discussion on it anywhere.
It's not even listed on coinmarketcap.com - am wondering why it's resurfacing and if there's any point to mine it now ?

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/25/bitcoin-collapse-exchange/5818955/

Article on USA Today ... sounds somewhat postive

So is the consensus now that the bottom is reached and it will only go up? Would you trade in all your other altcoins for BTC right now (while BTC is cheap) or hold them?

WTF $445 USD on coinmarketcap, this is unreal, there was a short rebound yesterday... they are starving us out.... I will not sell even if it goes lower, I will not sell until it goes back up to $800, and then only maybe a part of the 2.3 I have.

It's a shame that mining is getting less and less profitable for the small miner. Now that the price is way down, I'm only making about $3 a day with my cube miner, and it looks like a 24% diff increase in 8 days. Makes me almost regret getting into it. It's going up for sale on Ebay in another 6-8 weeks if things don't improve with the BTC price, at least folks are still paying $300-400 for them. At least I plan to keep my 3 GPU rigs, they are netting almost $400 a month combined on altcoins, but the $80 or so extra on my electric bill really sucks.

OMG it's crashed from $580 to 570 on coinmarketcap.com just in the last 10 minutes, sure doesn't look good. ~ $650 - the way it's been averaging the past week or so wasn't too bad for a calm before the rise again, but this looks disastrous.

Thanks - I do believe that link is still for the old version though. Hopefully will wait a few days & see if the new one is posted.

I downloaded the Linux wallet from the front page here where it was recommended to do so, and I'm still getting
protocolversion" : 60001. I downloaded it just 2 days ago.
and it never finishes synching. Also I send 2 payments there from my pool which don't show up either.
Do I have to use the Windows version to get the latest?

The blue light bulb is a very good choice, definitely feels like a smart consumer-oriented look for mainstream.

My cube miner I paid $900 in Dec. for is now only making $4 a day at these rates, set to get worse in a few days.

Time goes more slowly when you spend so much time in front of the computer waiting for the price to rise. This mini-crisis has only been around for about a week. Right now, even though pushing the low 600's USD, I see the bottom end just about where it is now, and hopefully it will push up again to the upper 600's in a day or so. I don't see it breaking 700 in the next few days, but give it 2-3 weeks I see a very good chance of 800 again. That should get the ball rolling. Tough times require patience. As for the long term, it would be nice to see a steady rise, maybe $1100 by May 1? I wouldn't bet on it though, not until we see what happens in the next couple of weeks.

Sounds like a great idea, a way for low-income folks to supplement their income. In my case, for example, I earn less than $900 a month, am 59 and only have 20 hours a week of work. Property tax and car insurance are the biggest burdens, and I usually have to buy food with a credit card (we make a bit too much for food stamps). Just an extra $100-200 a month would make a world of difference. I've known about Bitcoins since its inception, but only got involved the past couple months in mining. Seeing how it was supposed to go up and up, I invested (on credit) $900 in an one ASIC rig, and another $2000 for GPU scrypt mining with building 2 new rigs and upgrading another. All this hoping that after the ROI it would give me about 50% more income a month to pay bills. I've only mined about $600 so far in 7 weeks due to the price downturn, but seems like a good investment given time.
As for your idea, a new coin based on a needy persons identity on Facebook or elsewhere who could sign up as a verified identity could work, then a pool set up with passwords given out only to people who maintain a good standing with the group and demonstrate need. Perhaps some type of CPU coin, where it wouldn't be so much the hashing power but "proof of presence" on the network to say that they are working/needing it, and then a fixed reward for the presence there alone. Just as an experiment, I've been mining memorycoins on 3 CPUS for the past week, and they only net me one every 3 days which are only worth a penny, but that doesn't take away from my mining other altcoins with my GPU's (which I would never give up). This sort of thing would give "presence" on the pool, and then the pool could distribute the rewards to members who are active both there and on Facebook. For some people just $2-3 a day would be a big help. This would also be an incentive to get a lot of folks interested in altcoins, many who have never heard of them before and be a boost to the "brand", including to Bitcoin. The coin would need to be stable, and each person should be able to  earn that. Then as you say, too, someone could earn more for getting new people involved and having them join and download wallets, among other things.

Got this earlier this morning trying to connect to blockchain.info:

A strange thing happen to me today too. Maybe this is common, but it's the first time for me.
I withdrew .033 BTC from Coinex to my BTC address on Blockchain. It appeared right away, then disappeared,
then a short while after receiving the email below it reappeared again.

Transaction Confirmation Failed

A transaction made through Blockchain.info has been removed from our database because it was taking a long time to be included in a block.

Any funds have been returned to your wallet and you can now spend the coins again. Please consider including a larger fee in future transactions.

I just bought some BTC (about .03)  for DOGE both are moving around a bit, DOGE is up, but not really moving fast. If it does go up quite a bit more with respect to BTC, I may by more BTC. It's all just a gamble, but I've been holding most of my DOGE's the past few weeks, as they seem more stable right now, and yes, sort of independent from what's happening to Bitcoins, which is a good thing.

I'm using tagmining.com, and it shows last block found 56 minutes for the pool. Is that usual/unusual or just unlucky? Are there other pools with a higher hashrate which may give more luck?

The sample longer tagcoin.conf that dabs posted on page 117 of this thread is working. It's now syncing for me once I created it and restarted the wallet.

I've just started mining these, where's the best place to download the latest wallet? Linux, hopefully

mNHhDxPaXTSy1PMVqTzEu3niDtq1nHtYpf

got this from /.maxcoind getaccountaddress ""

Now when and if I can get anything from a pool, how do you check your balance, and then send?

How can I unzip the Linux wallet, not working !

unzip Maxcoin-linux64.zip -P 3l0NEXbv12eycRtCcPY .
Archive:  Maxcoin-linux64.zip
  End-of-central-directory signature not found.  Either this file is not
  a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive.  In the
  latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on
  the last disk(s) of this archive.
unzip:  cannot find zipfile directory in one of Maxcoin-linux64.zip or
        Maxcoin-linux64.zip.zip, and cannot find Maxcoin-linux64.zip.ZIP, period