Buying ASIC miners goes against the common good. It give an individual the upper hand for a while until most miners upgrade to ASIC. By that time, a 5Ghps miner will give the same a amount of bitcoins as a 200Mhps GPU miner gave 6 month before.

In the long term, we all loose and the only winners are the ASIC manufacturers.

This is a fine example how group behavior eventually goes against the common good.

But I guess it's too late for that now... the hash rate snow ball is rolling faster and getting bigger by the minute.
 

Does it matter if it's ASUS, ATI, AMD, Sapphire? Or all that matters is that it's HD5750 Radeon?

The current blockchain is about 10GB big. What's gonna happen when bitcoins become what we all want it to be? We are gonna have 1000 times more transactions a day. The blockchain will become a monster. Can the bitcoin network/clients can handle such a huge blockchain?

I decided to accept bitcoins in my online store only to realize that anyone who wants can type in my wallet address into the block explorer and see each and every transaction made to my address. This way, anyone can know hoe much money my business is making.  Today I obviously keep this data secret and never publish sales data...

Isn't that a HUGE reason for businesses not to accept bitcoins?

I am interested in BitForce 5 GH/s SC, but I can't figure out their current status... do they ship now? if not, when? do they actually work?

When mining for a new block, the miner choses unconfirmed transactions to include in his block (should he find one before another miner).
Why a miner will not choose ALL unconfirmed transactions (until reach the maximum block size)? What are the considerations when choosing transactions (other than the highest fee)?

If not, what do I need to run so I can be a part of the network and contribute to it?

Say a friend sells me a paper wallet, how can I make sure that the wallet has the balance printed on the paper? What online service or software can I use to import that wallet and start using it?

I did some reading but I still can't grasp the relationship between transaction confirmations and miners... What is a confirmation exactly?
I got it that each transaction is written to the blockchain to the current block and I know that miners generate new blocks. But after it is written, can it be removed if it's not valid? Where exactly in the blockchain does it say if each transaction is confirmed?
When a new block is 'found' by the miners, who checks if its valid or not? who/what decides to add it to the block chain? Do miners generate empty blocks which transactions are later appended to?

Would be happy to get a good explanation (since what I read in the wiki, only raised more questions...)

Hi, I am new here and already did a lot of reading on the bitcoin. One of the main issues I can't understand is why confirmation takes so long (yes, 2-3 minutes is a LONG time, not to mansion 6 confirmations which can take hours). In today's eCommerce system, when I pay for something, confirmation is instant i.e., I click "confirm" and I am done and can continue about my business.
With bitcoin, how does it work? When I pay to a certain wallet, after how long can I be "sure" the payment arrived? How long will I be hanging in the air until the transaction is complete? What if I choose to make the transaction without a miner's fee? What fee will make the confirmation instant?
If I take it a bit further into the future and want to pay for my groceries in the supermarket, I can't hold the line waiting for a confirmation...