What about mining?  Mine alt coins and sell them for BTC.

You can mine quarkcoins with kind of rate... and switch them to BTC

You can also try to mine alt coins.  For example you can mine Quark coins with your CPU and thn trade the quark coins for BTC.
Many of the alt coins are still profitable to mine with a graphic's card.

OK...first of all, mining is still profitable if you know what to do.  It takes some homework but it is profitable.  For example you can buy gh/s on cex.io but your return rate will slowly drop over time.  So you have to be clever.  I run a very profitable operation with my cex.io account.  Another way to mine is to mine alt coins and sell them for BTC.  World coins are a good example of profitable coins.  Check out : coinwarz.com  for some other examples.

What do you mean?  "what is the deal?"  They are simply versions of BTC.  Some are useful, most are worthless.