As the network grows the difficulty of finding a valid block also grows, this is good for the network because it makes it harder for an attacker to "rewrite history" and thus spend coins twice. The downside is that a casual user is not likely to find a block in less than a year. Even this isn't all bad though, if people could get coins easily they wouldn't have much incentive to offer goods and services for them.

The bad feeling of getting absolutely nothing can be alleviated by joining a mining pool. When a pool finds a block everyone who contributed gets a share according to how much they helped. Unless your computer is old you should be able to let bitcoin use only a few cores which should make it much more bearable.

Concerning setting up a shop: You do not need to run the p2p client. You can use a 'bank' like mybitcoin or mtgox. They will give you an address or addresses for your customers to send coins to. Then you can spend the coins from your account there to any address you wish, even to yourself if you decide to run your own client.

There are new options all the time, but some have gone down so I can't say for sure what is available and easiest right now. I use mtgox, bitcoinmarket and bitcoin-central. But all of those are 'markets' like you indicated you didn't want. Others can tell you about the various ways to buy better than I can.

I guess I just assumed that the reason he was disappointed about not getting any coins and having a slow computer was that he was generating.

Yes, shame on you 

Yes and no, some people will generate and then get bored and leave.This will influence the difficulty a little. Because this is a free market quite quickly specialisation of labour will happen (because it is more competitive) and we will have clusters of high end machines working on generation(this is where most of the networks block generation will come from in the future, but this is not a problem). This will happen for as long as it is profitable. Once the cost of electricity rises over the value of bitcoins generated then the mining will stop.

This will continue on and off forming an equilibrium that will trend upward slowly, following the value of bitcoin. Guided by the invisible hand. It is almost poetry.

You can also buy bitcoin from me: http://bitcoinmorpheus.tumblr.com/

I accept cash in the mail, check, and now paypal.

There's also a large list of exchangers at: http://www.bitcoin.org/trade

I can vouch for Mt Gox, Bitcoin 4 Cash, Bitcoin 2 Credit Card (though that doesn't help you right now), Coinpal, and Bitcoin Market.

Thanks for all the replies people.


So um... I thought that the network required a load of people to have the client running - nodes etc, and that the incentive to do this was that you get bitcoins for it. If the chances of this happening are vanishingly small, what's the incentive to have the client running?

I mean with Skype people keep it running (even though technically it's costing them) so they can be "online" and people can ring them up. I'm not sure there's a reason to keep a bitcoin client running other than altruism is there?

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I've got this sneaking suspish that there's some sort of epiphany out there - and it's something to do with "the best way of getting bitcoins is to sell something".

I mean ideally, the entire economic ecosystem should be self-contained, and not depend on exchanging back and forth with the fiat system at all... it's just that in my day to day life, there's still not a lot that I'd actually spend bitcoins on. But I'm one of those early-adopters who's doing it for political reasons.

That android-app thing on another thread could be a goer though... I can see a combination of that, and a shit-hitting-the-fan scenario (see Germany in the 1920s http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/01/20/a-better-way-to-make-money/ ) making this a necessity... but you don't want to be carrying a laptop around every time you want to make a transaction.

And it does kindof assume that the shit/fan scenario isn't so bad that it brings the whole network down.


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Ok - I'll have a go at setting something up on my site. Let you know when it's done.


[edit]

Mind you, that's being quite ethno-centric of me. A lot of the world is already experiencing the shit/fan scenario. Maybe a way to get real traction with this is to set something up with QPR codes for phones, and specifically nurture it in a country that already has 1000% inflation.

I have made a wiki page to try and fulfil this need.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Merchant_Howto

I'm going to be approaching a merchant about accepting bitcoins. Is there a simple widget to put on a webpage to generate an address and accept payment currently?  If not I'll probably be starting a bounty for one shortly as it is something that is kind of vital for wider adoption.