...I could never get my head around the whole mining process
I really haven't a clue about mining to be honest (other than the hour or so months back spent reading up on it) and it all seems a huge waste of resources to me...I mean, whats the *!@king point of wasting so many cycles going round and round chasing the impossible in ever-increasing difficulty stages on the far side of an ever evolving tech curve which are set as means of controlling the currency and stopping it from eating itself?
...surely there is some other scientific use for all this processing power other than seeing who has the largest e-penis in the bitcoin world by crunching garble and wasting power.
Power - unless you're getting it cheap or free and have heavily invested in mining equipment you're pissing against the wind in the mining world it seems, that said, if you got this in your back garden my advice would be to start mining straight away! [Planet Mechanics (BBC)
http://youtu.be/2K-iG7i2Q1E