As a little research project I've mined altcoins for a limited amount of time (three weeks) to test myself what I have read online about altcoin mining. My experience is as follows.
I mined Bitcoin, Litecoin and Vertcoin via the large pools and found it is basically useless unless unless you use ASICs mining rigs (which can cost you several hundreds or even thousands of Dollars) as otherwise you'll never get anywhere near the hash-rate required (currently you'll need at least 100Mhash/s, meaning 100 million hashes per second) to compete. This means mining with your desktop CPUs or GPU is an exercise in futility.
The story is a bit different for coins like Monero or Bitcoin Gold where you can actually earn some coins with your desktop GPU (your graphics card), but unless you have a GPU mining rig consisting of several mid- to high-end NVIDIA or RADEON cards, the process is slow and the costs for your power consumption will most likely eat up what you earn several times.
The most viable way for desktop users to earn some altcoins is by sharing their desktop's or server's processing power with scientific projects like SETI@Home, Einstein@Home or LHC@Home among many others. To participate is simple enough and consists of installing a sofware called BOINC and joining the Gridcoin pool. This way you'll get a compensation in Gridcoin (symbol GRC) for every computational tasks your desktop performs for the projects you registered for.
What's your experience in this field?
Using the computers I already have, I get ~$20 a month in Gridcoin. It's small but somehow satisfying, since all it costs is electricity. There is no baseline investment in hardware.
What surprised me at first is that mining with my CPUs was actually MORE efficient that GPU mining. This is because some of the scientific projects on Gridcoin are CPU only, which means you are only competing against other CPUs. If you have a Desktop with a nice i7 processor, that alone will take you a long way.
Not only that, but mining Gridcoin doubles as philanthropy (donation of processing power to science).
At least, this is my experience. Happy to hear about other people's experiments with mining altcoins.
Agree. I am primarily interested in the science projects and distributed/grid computing but I appreciate the idea behind Gridcoin which I find a nice token of appreciation, so to speak. So I have my machines doing some crunching - even with the older ones you can actually participate in these projects and earn some Gridcoin in the process.
You can also set it up on your (retired) phones for a little (but efficient) added value.
I really like the concept of using ready-made mass produced battery operated single board computers (smartphones) for distributed computation, but I do not have any retired smartphones in my circle yet.
The update from buttonphones to touchphones was delayed as much as possible due to their pool suitability. I missed the opportunity to use my previous smartphone, it failed violently. Last year the last buttonphone from my circle was decommissioned and given to me, so they are still holding up, but hopefully the batteries of first wave start dying soon and the update cycle begins.
I got 2 accident smartphones with a crack in the screen that made the screen unresponsive thus rendered them useless in what they are intended to do ("bricked"). So instead of throwing them away, I plugged a mouse in with a micro usb to standard usb adapter and set them up to BOINC 24/7 and placed them on a stone window sill, the touchscreen disperses heat nicely in the stone, so the battery never overheats and throttling is out of the question.
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