From my initial research the cheapest way to buy bitcoins with $USD appears to be via Mt.Gox using Dwolla (please tell me if this is incorrect!), however this requires a verified account.  I sent them my information, and now am #5640 in the verification queue.  They state that it takes about 10 days to verify personal information.

Can Mt.Gox really verify ~560people/day and this is expected, or is there a volume spike right now and it's realistically going to be much longer than 10 days?

Stopping by on the road to strip my newbie status.  See you on the other side!

Has anyone sat down and done the math behind what $BTC has to get to in order for buying a rig to be profitable?  With the massive increase in difficulty that ASIC miners can fuel, I'd imagine it would be extreemly high.

Hello, I come from a futures trading background and my interest skyrocketed when someone mentioned that bitcoin Futures/Options markets exist (icbit).  I signed up for icbit but their contract definition and pricing is incredibly puzzling to me.  I'm still stuck in the newbie zone, and there doesn't appear to be a way to pose a question to ICBit directly, so I'm forced to post here.

Rather than going into why I am so confused about how products are specified, let me just post an example, and tell me if I am interpreting what is going on correctly.  Here is a screenshot of what I currently see, and I'm about to enter a quote:



So let's say I click "Sell".  How I am interpreting this is "At expiration, I am obligated to sell $10USD @ 81.5BTC/USD."  In other words, when the contract expires, I will receive $0.12BTC, and will give $10.

I realize that this interpretation is probably very wrong, and the inverse explanation (At expiration, I am obligated to buy $10USD @ 81.5 BTC/USD) isn't much better for different reasons.  What is the correct way to interpret what happens at expiration?