I've read the Wikipedia post and some of thease forums, followed your steps for GUIMiner as well as figuring some out myself and it's nevertheless stuck. But I think that the bitcoin currency is a good idea and right now I don't mind investing time in helping out with getting this stuff working more smoothly even if it turns out I can't make a profit with it anyway.
Your right, generating bitcoins seems like it dosn't involve much, it's a game of waiting, like idleRPG except less pointless.
I like the idea of trading bitcoins although I know little of the theroy of have any practical experance of trading for example stocks, although as far as I can tell there seems to be a lot of randomness in trading stocks. Although 1bitcoin in bitcoins = 1bitcoin in bitcoins, I can't see how trading would work unless it is bitcoins for services or products.
I'm open to the idea of earning them although I can't think of anything that wouldn't have occured to me before with standard money.
Yes, but as more people start mining, the difficulty goes up, therefor the harder they are to mine, therefor the price of bitcoins go up, so say you have 1BTC, this time next week it might be worth 1.2BTC, then you've made a profit.