Does the program I downloaded (bitcoin-qt) mine bitcoins? Possible Duplicate:
  How can I start mining Bitcoin?  




Nothing ever says how to actually mine bitcoins, except to join a pool. I don't want to do that. All I really know is that each block has an equation associated with it, and whoever solves it gets the coins. I assume that the miner is trying to solve the equation, and I also assume that this just means running the bitcoin client and hoping your computer can generate a block. If bitcoin qt (from the website) doesn't mine bitcoins, what does?
Yes, but not efficiently. In fact, CPU's are so bad at mining bitcoin that the option was removed from the user interface. However, the code is still there (though mostly as a reference implementation), and you can go to Help > Debug Window > Console and type in "setgenerate true" to turn it on.  Type "setgenerate false" to stop.

You can also give bitcoin the option -gen at the command line.