This is funny, bitcoins are starting to look like some sort of pyramid scheme, everyone is running these miners but nobody is actually spending them.

They're also backed with real services:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

I count probably around a 100 on that page.

The fools aren't the ones who were first to buy ... they are the ones who are last to buy.

Maybe what I said earlier was wrong. I guess a bitcoin is like a share of a stock. Someone initially said something along the lines of "I have 10000 bitcoins, and I will sell them for a dollar each," and so they made $10000 for nothing (because the earliest blocks were much easier to make). But the difference between a bitcoin and a stock share is that you don't really own anything with a bitcoin unless other people are willing to pay you for them.

Is there a graph somewhere of the value of a bitcoin versus time? That might be interesting to see, especially whether they are being devalued as more blocks are discovered.

There's a graph on Mt Gox. https://mtgox.com/trade/history

AFAIK, a stock is more or less a pretend stake in the company. The value comes from your ability to sell it (and to some extent, maybe having a say in how the company operates, but the majority of votes always seem to be owned by the monopoly guy anyway). The stock is only valuable because other people consider it valuable; presumably rich people that want a say in how the company operates, and smaller fish trying to make money off of those rich people competing for a bigger say.

Sure, but not all value is. If you own stock, you own a stake in buildings, equipment, inventory, customer base, so on... If you own a bitcoin, well, good for you.

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If you had bought in by October of last year, you could have made 10x your money back in February. I wonder what precipitated the large jump in perceived value over the last quarter and a half?

[EDIT]

A fool and his money are soon partying.
FTFY

That last quote is indeed interesting. I think it is a very smart principle.
But reading the white paper^[1] I get the feeling that in theory all transaction data could be distributed, inevitably creating 'orphans' (for certain transactions are not known to some part of the system), but in practical ideal situations ALL transaction history (albeit compressed) exist on ALL nodes.
I can picture this leading to some inefficiencies, which would be fixed by either building a large verification-dedicated network of probably one owner (which de facto would create a centralized system^[2]); or more blatantly 'fixing' the problem by refactoring into a centralizzed system; keeping the stories about a "free alternative form of currency".

The University of Texas just bought nearly 1.0x10^9 US dollars worth of gold bullion, quite possibly prompting other money managers to do the same. TFA states that there's 100 times as much "money" as there is gold in the world.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/golden-tipping-point-university-texas-takes-delivery-1-billion-physical-gold

The shit's gonna hit the fan now.

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Well, if the price of gold is anu indication, you may soon find that bitcoins will soar in value as the US dollar collapses. People exchange their soon to be worthless cash for gold for a reason.

http://www.virtapay.com/