Bravo!  The community needs more folks like you.   I bought some Alpaca socks.  There are other things you can buy listed here:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade#Material_.2F_Physical_Products

If you're mining bitcoin in order to make a lot of USD, you're doing it wrong (arguably, of course).

The point of Bitcoin is not to turn them into USD, it's to trade them for goods and services.  Buy things with your BTC, sell things for BTC -- this is the way you add real value to the community.

I'd like to buy creative design services -- T-shirt design.  It's impractical to buy something like music until the artist themselves wants to be compensated in BTC.

as27605, you get bitcoins by selling something that somebody wants (like USD) in exchange for them, in a market.  There are several ways this can happen, but most (if not all) of them require you to establish some form of identity.  This identity might have nothing to do with your Real Name or forum name -- it typically corresponds to a GPG keypair when trading on IRC.

Alternately, your identity can be a user account on a trading website such as TradeHill.com.  If you want to easily buy and sell BTC, you'll need an online way to send USD.  Currently "Dwolla" is popular for this.  Paypal is frowned upon, since transactions are reversible.

One popular "over the counter" market is available to you via the #bitcoin-otc IRC channel on freenode.  See this webite for more about that method:

http://bitcoin-otc.com/

Note that you'll have to be comfortable using IRC.  It helps tremendously if you're familiar with GPG too.  Remember that your IRC nickname is different from your GPG identity -- you link them them you authenticate with "gribble" -- the bitcoin-otc bot.  You should ensure that everyone you deal with OTC is authenticated with gribble and has a good trust rating.

I'm rgm.  I'm interested in digital currency but disappointed with the usability of Bitcoin so far.  I like thinking about what real value means and how my actions can add real value to Bitcoin (aka, accepting Bitcoin for physical goods and services).

I'm generally anti-speculation, but have hung out with interest in #bitcoin-otc attempting to sell actual things.

I've tried both compiling from the git repo source and using the 1.5.3 tarball but am unable to get it going due to this failure:


This is a Mac running Snow Leopard booted in 64-bit mode.  I found someone seems to have worked around it by using yasm -f macho64 and a patched assembly sha256 implementation from here:
https://github.com/jgarzik/cpuminer/issues/31

But I couldn't get this to work for me.  Has anyone been able to compile cgminer on 64-bit Mac OS X systems?  If you have a 2009 mac with relatively up-to-date software, you can enable 64-bit mode by typing:
then rebooting.