Isn't mining bitcoins sort of a snake oil investment of your time?
To mine fast enough to make more than you could get from interest in a savings account you'll be spending more on electricity than you make. That's by design, and it's hardly a secret. If bitcoins grew on trees they wouldn't be worth anything. I'm not sold on bitcoin either, but if crypto-currency is workable at all it can't be possible to easily generate as many as you want. Given an oracle machine for generating bitcoins, you wouldn't have that problem. You'd get however many of the ~21million maximum bitcoins that hadn't been mined yet, and either be very rich in currency you can't easily spend or kill the bitcoin economy, depending on how much you've caused the exchange rate to fall and how the bitcoin ecosystem reacts to the trickle of new coins stopping.