.

Last I heard it has been a long time since you could economically mine bitcoins with a generic computer. The electricity is supposed to be higher than the value of the mined coins.

bit coin mining machine!!

I guess those living in post-secondary institutions in the Western world could do this overnight/in-class.

Well... Started mining LTC and its going well. Got 3$ overnight :]

so at 150 it's 24h, 18.5 means 200+ hours?

Heh what's amusing is Coinbase isn't working (at least for me; I've been trying to buy the Android w/ PC Bundle 8 bundle all day) so this is all moot =p.

Edit: This info is a bit moot now, but I didn't want to leave bad info. Apperently Coinbase was having some trouble earlier and I attempted to buy the bundle too many times ending in failure so my IP was temp. blocked. Using my cellphone's 3/4G IP and browser I was able to get my copy this way.

As far as this topic as a whole, it's about a year too late. Sure you can try your luck at making it big with some cypto-currencies besides Bitcoin (I personally recommend PPC as I think it will be the 2nd most valuable very soon), but people just entering the field will find it hard to see a return on investment when it comes to Bitcoin (some of us got lucky and horded our Bitcoins... I made some sales at $120/USD, $250/USD and ~$1,000/USD and made most of those coins when they were only worth $20 or so).

Unlike Bitcoin and other SHA256-based hashing, Litecoin and it's scrypt brothern hasn't seen a huge spike due to specific hardware not really being commercially available (it would be possible, however scrypt has a very give a take way of computing it's values, esp. in memory, which makes it an awesome tool for security but very hard to replicate into an ASIC chip for example).