The average person can never own a single Bitcoin

[BurtW]

Nobody will every buy gold, because 1 ton of gold is out of reach for 99% of the people on the planet.  BTW at last spot 1 ton of gold is worth $36,000,000 or 35,000 BTC.  

Hey, I cannot afford to buy even 1 kg of gold, and kg is basic MKS SI (as opposed to CGS) unit of mass weight Newton being the unit of weight/force. In fact I have 0.01 kg of gold, some call it 10 grams of gold  

FIFY

[uininPeter]

Nobody will every buy gold, because 1 ton of gold is out of reach for 99% of the people on the planet.  BTW at last spot 1 ton of gold is worth $36,000,000 or 35,000 BTC.   

Hey, I cannot afford to buy even 1 kg of gold, and kg is basic MKS SI (as opposed to CGS) unit of mass weight Newton being the unit of weight/force. In fact I have 0.01 kg of gold, some call it 10 grams of gold  

FIFY

Nice, thank you for corrections 

[Ulysses1994XF04]

1 million dollars is out of reach for the average person.

Best buy these whole Bitcoins while you can.

Correct 1 MILLION dollars is out of reach, but the DOLLAR itself is not.

Yeah, but it doesn't matter. Why would you have to own a whole dollar if a single cent became worth $10,000? You're hung up on the concept of comparing it directly to fiat and that people need to hold a whole bitcoin. Just think of 1BTC being equal to 1 million etc.

Until I can pay for food, gas and rent in Bitcoin (or milliBitcoin/mBTC as others here have suggested) then it will ALWAYS be translated into USD in my head; I'm sorry but that's the reality for me and that's going to be the reality for most people until it becomes a widely accepted alternative currency.

[Ulysses1994XF04]

I'm still trying to understand this concept about "Blocks" and "Blockchains."

Are Blocks just digital records of transactions that need to be processed before they get approved and the Bitcoin changes hands? Is Mining lending your computer power to process these Blocks?

Pretty much, give or take a lot of technical detail.

I see. Why is mining becoming more difficult and less profitable?

Why are huge, commercial-like facilities needed for mining when it used to be possible to do it on a laptop?

[BurtW]

I see. Why is mining becoming more difficult and less profitable?

Why are huge, commercial-like facilities needed for mining when it used to be possible to do it on a laptop?

By design the Bitcoin protocol adjusts how difficult it is to find the next block so that one block is found about every ten minutes.

This means that if only a few people/machines are looking for the next block, like in the old days, then the difficulty is very low.

But when more and more people/machines are trying to find the next block then the protocol raises the difficulty so that even with all these machines trying to find the next block it still takes about 10 minutes to find it.

Right now, worldwide, there are about 6,278,525,000,000,000 attempts to find the next block per second.

Hence it has to be very, very difficult to do in order to assure that it takes on average 10 minutes to find it.

BTW you can see some very intereresting graphs showing all about the current difficulty setting, the next difficulty setting and difficulty history here:

http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty