Dude, his name clearly indicates that he's somewhere in Africa, and from his previous posts he has stated a couple times that power is not only cheap, but massively subsidized by the government.  This seems like one of the least wasteful uses of an African hydro subsidy I can think of, since if as he says he is using it for a lesson for some advanced students, this could be a great idea.  I'm going to assume this is somewhere in sub-sahara, as internet is super expensive down there.  If so, think of all the horrible multinationals that are using ENORMOUS amounts of that wasteful, subsidized power to further fuck up the landscape and subdue the local populace with shitty, dangerous mining and logging jobs.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with using power that would be wasted on planet-rape anyway to get a few bitcoins to use to teach some students both economics and comp-sci.

This sounds like an excellent idea, even if you get very few bitcoins, because I think it would be a really good teaching tool.  The whole concept of bitcoin is so fascinating, especially to someone who is already interested in computer technology.

+1 to SteveB for helping a fellow Canadian and total bitcoin n00b get $150 in Mt Gox USD at a 1:1 exchange rate.  This way I could use interac email money transfer for $1.50 and get some bitcoins in exchange for CDN$ in a matter of a couple hours.

Thanks!

From what I have read here, I'm definitely not the only person new to this whole bitcoin thing who doesn't understand why there are so many damn sites to deal with, firstly, and why none of them seem to work unless you happen to live in America.  Seriously, isn't the whole point of a digital currency for it to be independent of the country you live in?  It's kind of insane that I can find 5 or 6 reputable exchanges in the US that will take money from other bank transferring companies in the US (ie, dwolla.com -> mt.Gox -> bitcoin [ps - what the hell?  why so much damn work?]).  I can totally understand the point made above about how all of these steps involved in the transaction serve to exponentially decrease anonymity of one's personal details.

However, I really couldn't care less if some transfer company has my bank account information as long as it's been around for a long time and is trusted.  Honestly, you guys who live in the US and are complaining about how dwolla takes a day to register your account?  Stop whining, dammit.  As far as I can tell, the only method for me to get bitcoins short of mailing a money order to Mt. Gox is to use a networking site like bitcoin.local to meet someone in my city.  Sounded like an easy enough idea.  Unfortunately, when I looked at the map for my city of 3 million (Toronto), there were about 5 merchants in the city, two of whom had forgotten to include any contact information.

So... after spending several hours trying to figure out how to buy the damn things I'm having a lot of trouble understanding how they ever increase in value. and how anyone in Canada could get bitcoins without waiting 10 days.  The exchange rate on this thing is so ridiculous it could be 4x as much by the time my snail mail envelope arrives there.  That's totally unacceptable and unfair to Canadians.  Of course, I want to make it clear that I'm not actually complaining about any specific site here - just the entire concept of bitcoins.  I read about this "mining" thing too, which also is apparently worthless to the poor average citizen like me.  This whole virtual currency just looked so cool until I realized it seems to be some exclusive club for a bunch of dudes with server farms and US bank accounts.

Does ANYONE know a site that will take CDN bank transfer, such as interac email money transfer?  I would like to avoid WU and MG, as they cost over $20 and $10, respectively.  I find it extremely odd that Mt Gox has an Australian bank partner, an EU one, and no Canadian one.  Would anyone from Canada personally like to sell me around $100 of bitcoin with email money xfer?  I don't really have a problem using PayPal either, if anyone outside Canada will sell to me, but I would rather avoid it if possible because of its general lameness. 

Someone please help!  I want to be a fun economics hipster!