We've all heard about Bitcoins (BTC) and all wish we had bought a few hundred 2 years ago so we could retire today but who knew...
We'll its too late to get in the bitcoin game due to the difficultiy of mining one being super high but thankfully 60+ alternate crypto currencies have sprung up and thanks to sites like www.cryptsy.com you can now trade those alternate currencies for BTC.
want to know what to mine? you can check out http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency or http://www.coinarmy.com/
Punch in the numbers for your SHA256/scrypt cracking ability and get an idea what to mine to make the most $$$ the fastest. so if you can do 300 KH/s (average cheap GPU)
in 166 days you can make one Bitcoin (BTC) mining Netcoins and exchanging them at current rate where it would take more like 2000 days to make a Bitcoin.
OMG its raining money! sort of.
anyway its neat. seems like a good reason to set up a build a hash cracker, write it off for security stuff, and have it mining when its not busy converting hashes into plaintext.
Couple articles on it:
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/beyond-bitcoin-a-guide-to-the-most-promising-cryptocurrencies
http://www.zdnet.com/a-crypto-currency-primer-bitcoin-vs-litecoin-7000024301/
http://alunacrypto.blogspot.ca/2013/12/a-new-wave-of-2nd-generation.html
Solo Mining vs Pools
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/11471/what-are-the-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-pooled-mining
http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=mining_pools_vs_solo_mining
Hardware comparison to get an idea what numbers to put into those crunchers.
https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison
You can even buy a 6 graphic card motherboard for mining, stock trading or making everyone (well your geek homies) jealous
happy cracking/mining
P.S.
From a hacker shit perspective... i cant image the mining pool software is very good. its probably worth taking a look at it. :-)