Best practices for procuring BTC?

[byte]

Hello, I'm a bit new and this topic is very broad, but there is a wealth of information on these forums and much of it is very foreign to me.

I'm interested in ways of procuring bitcoins that are as anonymous as can be. It seems like most methods require some form of identification. I've heard of people trading money BTC for money through Paypal (except it seems that Paypal has a bit of trouble with reversible transactions and so forth), and this seems like a likely method to get BTC--from reputed forum members, I guess. There doesn't seem to be a lot of safe guards set in place, when trading person to person.

Since it is likely to take me a while to build up any sort of reputation enough to procure Bitcoins through forum members, are there any other services I should look into? The world of e-commerce is quite confusing! The first time I tried to get bitcoins, I signed up for a number of different services, in hopes of getting them faster than the standard 3 business days of Dwolla, and ended up sorely disappointed. Speed isn't all that huge of a concern, but the faster the better.

Anonymity would take precedence over speed.

Any suggestions? Guides for me to utilize? I'm sure I've skipped over a great deal of relevant information, and I am sorry for doing so.

Thanks for any help.

Edit: Might as well also ask if bitcoin mining is even worth it anymore? I hear the chances of seeing any return from my i5/4870 hardware is very slim.

[1715356492]

1715356492

[deepceleron]

If you meet someone in person, they won't need to know who you are, hand them the cash and give them your Bitcoin address.

http://www.tradebitcoin.com/

[byte]

That looks like a good method for physical transactions, but it seems no one is even remotely in my area. I was looking for something that is online or a service I can use without ID.

[Stephen Gornick]

Related: http://mndrix.blogspot.com/2011/09/easily-anonymous-bitcoins.html

[byte]

To list items on Silkroad, a fee of 50 BTC (last time I checked) is required.

[nmat]

You can try bitcoin-otc. Nobody really cares who you are, as long as you can sign messages with your GPG key. But you need to build reputation...