I do not really understand the question. If you have lots of coins, you cannot do anything with it unless you make money from it, right?
And to make money from bitcoin you need an exchange like MtGox or Tradehill, right?

Also you do not have to speculate. You can also long term invest your bitcoins, given the (99%) fact that bitcoin will rise, as seen in long term.

Mining isn't profitable, at least if you pay money for your energy, which you surely will.
If mining is profitable for a short time, more people start mining, which automatically increases difficulty, making mining less profitable.
Mining is a service to the community and an interesting hobby, but certainly not for earning money.

If you want to earn money with bitcoin you should trade, buy low, sell high. But beware not to play away your allowance

There is an separate thread for introducing oneself, you know.

Yes nmat is right, it was the first time that bitcoin got into the public view.
It was like a virus, the more people knew about bitcoin the more people were talking about it and thus, even more people knew about it!

A huge bubble like that won't come next time. Instead, bitcoin will climb slowly, but it will. There will be heights and depths, of course.

When you do solo mining with just a single PC (even a good one with excellent graphics card), it will take you approx. a year or even longer to mine your first block.
If you want to do solo mining you should own a bot net or at least lots of good mining rigs.
Thats what pooled mining was invented for. With pooled mining you get your income one a much shorter period of time (maybe hourly).

Note that mining cannot make you rich. If it would much more people will start mining which increases difficulty which makes it much harder to find a block which decreases your income.
This way, the system regulates itself in a way that mining doesn't pay you much, but also doesn't make you poor.

If you want to get rich, start trading bitcoin on one of the mayor exchanges like Tradehill.
Also note that wrong trading with too much money can indeed make you poor.. 

Somehow I've read satoshi hard drive..

 

The important thing from the wallet.dat are the private keys belonging to each receiving address.
The private keys from a receiving address "contains" all the coins which you received with that address.
You can import these keys in a new wallet.dat which may bring these coins back, although there is no guarantee.

Maybe this is helping you: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0

My Graphics card (ATI Radeon HD 5700), if I recall correctly, gave me 200 MHashes and only got me 0.5 bitcoin in more than a week.
You can't get rich with mining (if you pay for electricity). If you mine, do it for fun or for the community.

If you want to make money with bitcoin, you have to buy and sell bitcoins and speculate a bit.
Note that you can loose lots money with, but if you take the risks you can gain some bucks..

Since the hashes are declared as uint8, you should see it as unsigned, so no they will never be negative.

Interesting image, is it from a video game?

Note that some topics are locked, you can see this on the lock icon. Nobody can reply to a locked topic.
Additionally, as a newbie you can only post and reply here in the newbies section.

This is no rocket taking off, this is a hovercraft hopping over the ground...

*whop* *whop* *bump* *rumble* 

The question is, will a sharp edge on the ground make the hovercraft break down or will it catapult it high into the sky???

This person seem to be very popular in the USA and a big advocator of Bitcoin 

You want to "make" bitcoins???

Go to a bit smith! Give him a kilowatt, maybe he will forge you a bitcoin!

But Note (German):

"Wer Bitcoin nachmacht oder verfälscht, oder nachgemachte oder verfälschte sich verschafft und in Verkehr bringt, wird mit Zuchthaus nicht unter zwei Jahren bestraft"

 

How do you found out about bitcoin and when and why did you actually got started with actually using it?

I found out about bitcoin in the end of May 2011 because of an interesting article on http://www.golem.de/1105/83829.html, a german IT news site.
At once I was absolutely fascinated about this great technology and immediately read more about it, all the tutorials including satoshis technical paper. At first I started gpu mining on my PC which I gave up when difficulty was risen too much. After that I started buying some amounts on bitmarket.eu, just too loose nearly all of its value in the following months..

So what is your personal bitcoin story?

WTF is forum gold???

If you refer to the coins underneath the user name on the right side, you can't buy them  

Anybody who can copy or read your wallet.dat can transfer all your money to any bitcoin address he wants.
Therefore you should use the wallet encryption feature include in the standard bitcoin client.

The wallet.dat contains your own private keys which belongs to your receiving addresses.
Because of that, anybody which has a copy of your wallet.dat is able to transfer your money to any other bitcoin address.

Theoretically you could even sell your bitcoins on ebay or another market place..

as long as somebody on earth is willing to pay money for bitcoin you can sell it to that person.
Given the fact, that bitcoin is transferrable around the world in no time and at almost no cost, that is the principle..

WTF is FG?