re: BitCoins - Who here has used them or has stock?

In order to keep them from flooding the market the guy who invented them made them a little hard to get. The minning is actually your computer solving complex computing problems and the reward is that you get compensated in coins.

To actually mine them by yourself though is hard since they are pretty rare. People form groups and put all of their PC power to mine them together and split the pot when they hit it. There are only so many coins to be mined per block and after that block is done the difficulty increases (harder problems to solve)

Minning them is actually done with high dollar video cards as they are not CPU reliant.

Look up bitcoin minning rigs to see the stuff people have built.

There will only ever be like 20 million bitcoins produced but you can own like .00000001 bitcoin just like change from a dollar.

Best I can summarize it without typing a novel here.