I'm a little lazy and while I did some reading on the forum, I wanted to get my specific questions answered.

I guess I want to start getting Bitcoins. I have none right now. I've been aware of them since shortly after they came to exist, but thought they were a scam back then (and still sort of do, but they're still around so fuck me, right?).

For mining, I was thinking cloud mining was a good option, but according to this forum, it isn't, but for shits and grins, what are the best, legitimate cloud mining sites?

And in order to mine coins for myself, what would I need? I have an i7 quad core processor so I'm pretty sure I have the necessary CPU power.