Crypto mining is fun if you want to earn but don't want to invest, if you are unsure about its value and validity, well, just mine, earn and remove those doubts. Bitcoin is a bit hard and expensive to mine when you factor in electricity and equipment cost, and is recommended for those serious miners who can invest in the latter. Mining is a task that can take time to yield any benefits, how much time, depends on your system. When I started, my intentions were to mine bitcoin, but after learning that I was nowhere near the mining gear required to mine the crypto giant. After a lengthy research, I concluded that cryptonight cryptocurrencies would meet my laptop specs. Cryptonight can be mined with a laptops' cpu and even faster if cryptonight-lite were chosen. Cryptonights are resistant to application-specific integrated circuit or ASIC, a hardware that dominates bitcoin mining industry, but because of its market specific advantage, cryptonight and its open-source community made the coins ASIC resistance and update the algorithm whenever necessary.
Cryptonights use the cpu cache to run the hashing algorithm since it is built into the cpu and therefore faster than ram memory, however, an adequate amount of ram is required to support the high processing of the cpu. Multiple cpus' and multi threads would also be an asset, and also advance encryption standard new instructions or AES-NI which is built into the cpu and aids in encryption, would be an added bonus. Cpu cache of 2mb are required by cryptonights, 1mb for cryptonight-light and 4mb for cryptonight-heavy, and therefore the appropriate miner should be considered based on the outlined criteria. I use and favors jce miner and my other choice would be xmrig, they are good miners that I have used but because I do not have AES-NI, I found that jce miner worked better, although it has a fixed high donation level as opposed to xmrig. There are several good miners that I intend to experiment with but haven't gotten around to as yet and would encourage their developers to keep up the good work. On a final note, I have found that I get better results when the difficulty is fixed, most pools allow this by adding '+' immediately after the wallet with the desired difficulty that corresponds to the port number. Happy mining.
