Since there is no slavery in the world [that we live in,] everything that we do is done by free will. Why mining of Bitcoins would require a special mention?
In the early years there was no profit in mining. Two pizzas were purchased for 10.000 Bitcoin.
Those pizzas were purchased, regardless of the profit in mining, for the real value of Bitcoin as the pizza vendor perceived it to be at that time. I bet that the pizza maker did not even know what was the "profit in mining," just as when you buy an apple from me for $1 I do not ask how hard you had to work to earn that dollar.
Early there were no cookie cutter mining rigs. It took a lot of effort to assimilate the knowledge to run a rig proficiently from scratch.
I'm afraid you have it backward. Early on the mining rigs were just a PC with a program. Compare to the GPU setups of last year, and to the custom ASIC miners that cost a fortune. It did not become "easier" to mine - it became harder, much harder, because as the network grew in size the hash rate had to be kept constant, at one block per ten minutes on average. Thus, each miner has to share this loot with all other miners.
Anywhere in the world if you need to send $1000.00 to someone they will receive $1000.00 minus perhaps a few pennies. Moving money through banks or a wire service will cost you a large percentage.
First of all, here is a link to some discussion about this. I had most of my response written before Google gave me this very recent news article.
Then, I am not sure why moving the money abroad is such a popular example in the Bitcoin world. Very few people need to do it impromptu. Most people do not send money abroad because they and their relatives live in the same country. Some other people have relatives abroad, but wire transfer is one of not quite common ways to help them out. There are easier ways. And, finally, businessmen who operate in multiple countries have bank accounts in all of them, and the transfers are done by the banks. (One couldn't do it otherwise anyhow; imagine IBM walking into a US bank to withdraw $10M to pay salary to their Malaysian workers :-)
Most of the money rotates inside the country; we get paid, and then we spend most of it within a pay period. This is "the killer application" of any payment system - to be able to effortlessly pay for gas, for utilities, for rent, for food... and existing banking systems are nearly ideal for that. I haven't written checks in ages, since "Bill Pay" service - an electronic one - is free at Wells Fargo. I rarely use cash, unless at a flea market, or when crossing a bridge once in a blue moon. This is what matters - and Bitcoin is lacking in this regard.
But even if we look at the foreign transfers... what are my options here? Say, I want to send $3,000 to Germany.
a) I go to the bank and execute a wire transfer. This is a very safe method, where the money will not disappear into the vacuum of open space if anything goes wrong. I had one case when I wired money to another country, on request of a relative's friend, but the account there was closed. Guess what, I got all the money back. It's reliable. How expensive is that? About $30 or $40 last time I checked. Flat fee, regardless of how much you send. That would be about 1% of the $3K that I wanted to send. Time to do this: about 15 minutes, as you are guaranteed to pass by your bank every single day.
b) I can buy Bitcoins, send them to the recipient, and ask the recipient to cash them back to USD. How much will that cost? Let's count. First, there is the spread. Today you can buy bitcoins for anything from $490 to $447, and to sell them for anything from $447 to $402. Naturally, you'd want to buy and sell for exactly $447, but that is not always easy: there may be only a few coins available at that price. If you need more than one... tough; talk to more expensive sellers and less expensive buyers. In our example, you need $3K. That would be BTC 6.711. If you buy for $457 and sell for $437 your loss on the spread alone is $134. This is already far more than I'd need to spend at my bank, with insurance and all. But you may be more lucky and you can minimize the loss here. Will the recipient be equally interested in saving your money? If he is a business, he will sell the BTC at whatever going rate it is at this very moment, and if he gets less USD than you need... do not guess, I will tell you - he will request more money from you.
On top of that you will be hit by the exchange fees; by the transfer fees; and by the labor that goes into all this Forex stuff. You cannot do it all in 15 minutes! This labor not only costs money, it is also risky. To begin with, someone can make a honest mistake. But it is also possible that you will never see your money again. It is also a lengthy process. Mt. Gox, in their better days, required a long time to have the trading account set up; you had to transfer US funds into their bank ahead of time. We are very quickly running out of 15 minutes!
As an executive summary: if your life does not revolve around various, complicated ways to lose your money, just go to the bank, pay the man, and have your money sent the right way.
The Bitcoin network is supported and secured by the worlds most powerful supercomputer, it is valuable to me
That is actually the truest statement about Bitcoin, even though most of the hashing power is provided by single purpose machines, like ASIC miners. Still, if they can be used for something good, why not? The catch here is that all this computing power costs real money to buy and to run. Miners hope to get rich off of their BTC activities. Will they be likewise rich on protein folding? If not... too bad.
Bitcoins are divisible to 100.000.000.00 places and more if need be. Anyone who wants Bitcoin can get it, and if you don’t want it you need do nothing.
This is also correct; but it is orthogonal to the discussion. The question here is much simpler: "Should the society embrace Bitcoins as they are?" My answer to that is "No. The technology is promising, but it's nowhere ready. Go back to the drawing board. Come back when, for example, you have a solution for waving something in front of the terminal and having your coffee paid for at that very instant." This is the level of simplicity that we have today, and it would be unreasonably optimistic to think that people will want to do copy and paste of unreadable gibberish that is Bitcoin addresses.
The last purchase I made from Overstock using bitcoin, I decided to see how much was going toward "fees (i.e., transfer fees)". So I took the amount and converted it to the price of btc at the time. It came out exactly equal to the price in dollars. And again, the transaction took less than 1 sec. to complete.
More than the entire current market value of Btc in existance.
I am certain your world view is going to be crushed in the not to distant future.