Now that there's more infrastructure around Bitcoin, more places to spend and trade it, it might be somewhat more stable.

I actually use bitcoin quite frequently to purchase products off the Silk Road. In the US, it's difficult to get high-quality molly, yayo, and such..but abroad (specifically, the NL) there are people willing to send it to me. I get enough at a cheap enough price I can get a pretty good profit in my area. Yay for the internet!

How is everyone doing? Every time I think of this place, I'm always surprised it's still around. I can't believe how much has changed in 7-8 years..

You should contact me. PM me for my ICQ or MSN. I can beat their prices, and have no problem shipping within the US.

How would one go about joining the mining pool and mining in general? Care to put together a small guide?

I don't think it's much more complicated than installing Bitcoin, finding a mining program (I think there are various programs that work better or worse on different hardware, or something like that), and then plugging in the info for the mining pool.

Or something like that.

I believe that GUIMiner is generally considered one of the easiest to get running. It's pre-configured for a number of well-known mining pools, you usually just need to sign up at one (perhaps join the Nexodyne mining team on DeepBit!) select the pool in GUIMiner, enter your username/password, and start it mining.

GUIMiner comes with a number of different mining back-ends, which ones your particular computer will support (and which of those mines fastest) depends very much on the hardware/OS you have. This may help: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Made a site that dispenses a small amount of Bitcoin to users (small enough as to hopefully be more than covered by revenue). It has a referral system.

http://oscry.com/

So, who actually kept their BTC?