This is really confusing and makes barely any sense to me.

However, the bit I do understand makes me wonder, if almost every member of BA joined, how much more would be the return rate?

Depends, some people have really crap hardware and others have really good hardware.

mrpijey: I joined the network and mined for a bit a month ago or so...I can rejoin it and mine again if you wish...

Well, the network is open and any sizable minings will go to the BA fund.

Okay, started mining. Using a AMD Radeon 6870

Is there a donation wallet I can transfer funds to? If I donate an amount >1pound (I think that's a pound sign, slap me if it isn't), can it be recgonized as a donation on the donation page?

Hmm, I'm very suspicious of this Bitcoin mining thing. It seems to me there is something illegal happening here. I think its either used to crack the mechanisms behind bitcoins (eg. bitcoins must require some validation to be authentic money, so if you are able to "guess" the correct data for a bitcoin, you have money), or it could be actually being paid for by someone trying to crack passwords (as suggested by someone else. I'll have to read about bitcoins, but in my opinion somethings not right here.

EDIT: so after reading I guess my first point is valid, but legal, as in you generate the codes, but thats what you are supposed to do. But what makes this worth money? Why would someone transfer real money into bitcoins? I really don't see how this could be legal, theres a scam happening somewhere along the line

And according to this site, I can make 0.00002769 bitcoins in 2 hours...

Well, our donations page isn't prepared for bitcoin donations, and even if you donated a pounds worth of bitcoins we wouldn't get a pound out of it due to changing exchange fees, transaction fees etc. Remember, we can't pay the server with bitcoins but with real money, which means we would need to exchange it to something usable first. I have yet to try this with my own bitcoins but once I do I will post a wallet to donate to.

*slap*

£ there you go...

It's not illegal. What makes it worth money is that people use it as money; you could ask the same question for the fiat currency that is the US Dollar. No one is using this to crack passwords; that's not even possible to force clients to do with the P2P way Bitcoin works.

According to various calculators and the fast-rising value of BitCoins, if I left my computer running for 24 hours mining bitcoins, I could generate the equiv of 75 pence.

@john11: That's because you have to use your GPU, not CPU

EDIT: BitCoins are booming at the time of this post, they went from 7.10 to 7.31 in less than a minute.
EDIT 2: A con about MtGox: in order to exchange Bitcoins for USD/GBP/EUR, you first must provide very sensitive information like AML documents

Yes, but why do people use it as money? I'm not saying that the idea is illegal, I just think there is a scam involved, which makes it illegal. Why did people start paying for bitcoins? What made it "worth" something?

The day you make it worth something is the day you start exchanging it for real money or real goods. Doesn't matter if it's bitcoin, linden dollars or a pair of goats. The method of generating your own money while using it to exchange it for other stuff caused it to be valuable, nothing odd about that. If you and your family for example decided that bottle caps are good as exchange (no, I have NOT been playing Fallout.... ) and people accept it as a currency then it's worth something.

Bitcoin isn't accepted as an international currency. Neither is Linden dollars or a numerous of other electronic currency. But if people accept it in trade exchanges then it's valuable to them. And apparently there are a few exchange services that trade with it, as well as sites and shops that accepts it as a legal tender. So the question here isn't why people use it as money, it's "but is it worth something?" . There was a time once when people didn't use money, and when the kings, queens, emperors and whatnot printed their own face onto a piece of metal then what made those pieces valuable?

The issue here isn't if bitcoin is legal or not, it's as legal as anything else when it comes to electronic currency, the issue is if we can use it to pay for BA. If we can then fine, we'll use it. Heck, if a pair of goats could easily fund BA then we'd probably accept those too .

sign me up, my computer is now fail safe.

It's worth money because people give you money in return.
There's no reason for it being illegal. It's not because it's used to pay drugs it becomes illegal, dollars are also used for that and they aren't illegal either.

How it works (might not be 100% correct). There's a so called block chain. This is a chain that consists of all transactions ever made. If I send some coins to BA then this transaction is added to the end of the chain. The chain in effect represents the history of all transactions ever made.
So if I download the chain I can view every coin that was ever transfered. This doesn't make it unsafe, cause it only says that x amount of coins are transfered from the wallet with address y to the wallet with address z. Nobody knows you own a certain wallet if you don't want to, and you can make as many wallets as you want. When you fire op your bitcoin client it syncs with the chain in the p2p network and checks all transactions after the last time it checked. If anything is transfered to a walled that you have it'll update your current balance.

Now you could say that anyone can add any transfers to the chain. That's why the chain is verified. This is where the hashes are used for. By cracking hashes the blockchain gets verified. The network is designed so that if you are the first to verify a block of the chain, you get a reward of 50 bitcoins.
From the moment when there are more than a certain amount of bitcoins in the world, the reward halves to 25. This keeps going on until the reward is 0 and there are 21million coins. I think from this point on the verification will relies on volunteers, but that's still far off.

Because these days requires lots of power to be the first to verify a block, there are pools. The power of contributors to a pool is joined together so the pool finds a lot of blocks. The 50coin reward is then shared among the contributors, minus a small fee for keeping the pool servers alive.
How may of the reward you get depends on how much you contribute to the pool.

Of course the electricity costs money, but it's not BA's responsibility that I pay $$$ for my mining.

EDIT: About the 0.00000415 BTC, this means that either nobody helped much (only for a very short time) or they are CPU mining.
A new radeon can do about 1 bitcoin in 24h I think, but I could be wrong.

Oh, and you should make notice about the test somewhere on the front page. No one is going to find it here

The fundamental problem is that the electricity costs more money than you manage to mine. Even with GPU mining.

It'd just make more sense for people to donate direct to BA.

It depends on how efficient your hardware is. A real mining rig costs less electricity than it produces in bitcoins.
Then again... If I'm at school I can mine the hell out of it, the school pays the electricity.

And if your a student you might only get into minor trouble

It's not like my laptop is going to draw kilowatts. Then again it's also not like my laptop is going to do hundreds of Mhash/s...

I thought you were talking about mining on the schools PCs...

You can do that too, but they usually are crappy. Core 2 Duo in my case with onboard graphics.

BTW, there's a new substitution, Litecoin. Anyone checked that?

It's exactly the same thing, but it uses your CPU instead of the GPU. Questionable as BitCoin, and its coins are less of value than BitCoins.

If there was an average of 15Mhash/s from every member (some will be 1Mh/s even below some will be several hundred Mh/s) would be 54.33Gh/s so assuming they are all runing straight for 24H not counting power cost that is 17.8898bitcoins per day which with exchange rate of 12.24USD is $218.971152 per day. So if a hash rate of about 1500Mh/s is maintained for a month then that is about $186USD which is little over the monthly server cost. So at an average of 15Mh/s per user so long as atleast 100 Members are mining at any given time that will pay for server cost.