This is a fun little project, but a word of caution...

[artemm]

I'm just keeping my bitcoin activity to mining to fund my crunching effort and cashing out frequently. I could get into the dangers of prospective buying of bitcoins, but that should seem obvious.

What I'm talking about, is how this thing is a scammer's PARADISE. There are a million and one ways to get scammed via bitcoin and it'll especially hurt if you're using bitcoins converted from cash rather than mined. Here's a snippet from a thread elsewhere, it got pretty profane, so I'm not linking:

0. The scammer (pork_) recognizes that #bitcoin-otc has a very serious flaw and sets out to exploit it to make a quick 20BTC for free.
1. The scammer (pork_) advertises that he wants to buy BTC on the #bitcoin-otc channel, and tiner contacts him about a sale
2. The scammer (pork_) and tiner agree to the terms of the sale, and tiner gives him his PayPal address so pork_ can send the payment
3. This part is crucial: The scammer (pork_) now has a limited amount of time to find a buyer to complete the scam. To give himself some time, he says: "<pork_> ill be a few minutes"
4. The scammer now goes into the channel using a different nick (let's call it "h___"), and advertises that he wants to sell some BTC for cheap (to get a buyer quickly)
5. jacker224 contacts the scammer (h___) and offers to buy the BTC
6. The scammer (h___) tells jacker224 to send the money to tiner's paypal address, and jacker224 does so
7. The scammer (pork_) tells tiner that he sent the payment, when in actuality it was jacker224 who sent the payment
8. tiner verifies that he has received the money, and sends the BTC to the scammer (pork_). As far as tiner is concerned, the transaction was 100% legit.
9. The scammer (h___) leaves his conversation with jacker224 without ever sending him the BTC
10. jacker224 never receives the BTC, so he initiates a PayPal dispute with tiner, causing this whole argument to erupt.
11. The scammer sits back and watches jacker224 and tiner argue about which one of them was the scammer.

Don't let all of the excitement get your guard down. There's no way to track transactions and there's no recourse if you get scammed. That was $600.

Get in, pay for elec and new crunchers, get out. It's not a utopian currency yet.)

[Tom128]

I wouldn't let a penny of my money be touched on an IRC channel, those things are the worst sometimes.

I'm sticking 100% to places like TradeHill and Mt.Gox to avoid stuff like that.

[[XC] gomeler]

I agree in that I won't be dumping any money into BTC. I'm in this solely to mine BTC to pay for hardware.

[don_xvi]

I'm glad there's a dedicated btc forum now. So we can break out the conversation into things like this. There are tons of offers out there on the forums for how people are looking to buy BTC with PayPal and whatnot. BitCoin transactions are irreversible. You can screw it up by being scammed or by fat fingering something, or by having a problem with your wallet file.
I'm not telling people you've got to do like I do, but I agree, mine & sell. I'm not too much worrying about the market rate, I'm trying to keep selling one a day as long as my mining can keep up. I certainly don't understand forex markets to begin with, much less the fundamentals of this one, so I don't know when this thing might crash.