I dont own any, but casually watch from afar... pretty crazy ride in the last few months: bitcoinity.org/markets recently became $1B market and is sort of out of its infancy but still a mess... Anyone dabble here?
way too complicated and technical for a worldwide matket.
How long does mining usually take? months? Obviously it depends on your computer power, but give me an example I guess.
In the early days you could do it by yourself, but when I got around to it that wasn't possible even back then. Nowadays you almost have to join a mining pool. Which is basically a group of thousands of miners joining together and with their own algorithm break up the blocks and send them out to the various computers that will computer their section of the mining block. Then you get a share of the block based on how much you helped mine that block.
For example one of the pools I am in just completed a block in 1.5 hours. There were 11,690,028 shares in that block so you take that and divide 25 by 11.6 million and get 0.00000213857 bitcoins per share you had.
So if you did it by yourself it would take a year haha