While I seem to remember hearing reference to Bitcoins a couple of years ago while I was studying computer science at uni, I only recently re-discovered the existence of them in the last few weeks.
I've been doing a fair bit of research on them lately and I'm already getting interested in getting a little mining operation going. More as a little hobby project more than anything; I'm not quite sure if it's still a viable way of funding the hardware by itself (as it appears to have been before the value of bitcoins dropped last year), but as long as it wouldn't be running at a loss (in terms of electricity usage) then I'll probably give it a go
![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
I'm already signed up to BitMinter and I've been hashing on there for the last couple of days. Unfortunately I'm only on a laptop at the minute (albeit a decent gaming one), so I max out at around 150Mh/s for now - but can comfortably have it doing 110Mh/s in the background with no noticeable drop in desktop performance. Which is nice!
Sorry for the long introduction, but I think I'll be hanging around here for quite a while from now on =)