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Comment by jes5199 | Hacker News Reader

It's still really, really hard to obtain bitcoins. And until that changes, what good does it do to be able to spend them?

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I can't say I'd noticed. Admittedly it's not trivial, in that I don't know of anywhere you can just show up with a credit card and buy a bitcoin, but it's hardly rocket surgery to fund a MtGox account.

It's taken me the better part of a week to fund a MtGox account. 10 minutes to send bitcoin around the world. 5 days to complete a damn USD money transfer.

Urgh. In which case, you have my sympathies. It certainly wasn't that much of a hassle for me. Stick with it, I could certainly believe that MtGox is under a certain amount of strain right now.

That being said, they aren't the only option: other exchanges are cropping up, and bitcoin-otc is also available.

It's not hard, but it is very slow: create MtGox account; create Dwolla account; add your traditional checking account to Dwolla; initiate a xfer from checking -> Dwolla; wait (days) for xfer to complete; initiate Dwolla -> MtGox xfer (wait days); buy bitcoins with USD funds on MtGox.

I started that process purely for the fun of some small-time speculation, but the whole hassle of the process made me realize why Bitcoin is important.

It's still really, really hard to obtain bitcoins.

I'd drop at least one "really"; you just need a decent AMD GPU. The relatively wimpy one in my iMac can generate 0.1 BTC/day, which at current exchange rates is a few dollars. It would be easy to do 5x better than that with a PC tower, without going nuts with a dedicated mining rig.

It's getting easier in Canada at least; an exchange just started up at http://www.cavirtex.com -- With email Interac transfers, you can get funds in and out within an hour or two.

The site's still in beta, though, but the devs hang out (and are responsive!) in the Canadian bitcoin irc channel, #bitcoin-cad on freenode.

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