Is mining possible with Bitcoin Core?

Hey everyone, I might be asking something that's been brought up before, but I couldn't find it anywhere. I just set up Bitcoin Core to be a full node (just doing my part), and I'm curious if I can mine as well. Not looking to cash in, just want to support the Bitcoin network. I came across this command, setgenerate true (1), but it doesn’t seem to work. Any suggestions? And please, no advice about buying fancy mining rigs. I’m really just here to help out the network. Appreciate it!

If you don't buy specialized hardware you don't help the network, you just "burn" electricity (which you'll probably have to pay).

Okay, thanks!

Running the full node is helpful. You do not need to mine to help.

Here is a tutorial on how to set up bitcoin core to be a full node: https://academy.aax.com/en/a-step-by-step-guide-to-setting-up-a-full-node-on-the-bitcoin-network/ . This helps the network a lot. Also you can think about becoming a lightning channel to even earn some Bitcoin without the need of wasting large amounts of power.

I already run the full node, I just wanted to know if I can mine too. I will search about lightning channel. Ty. Too technical for me to understand the difference, thank you for your info!

Mining BTC no longer supports CPU and GPU. You can only mine BTC with ASIC units that support sha256 algo. It means you don't need to compare them. If you don't want to buy an ASIC machine, running a full node is enough to help the network by validating transactions and blocks. Or you can try a USB ASIC miner like newpac price is around $25/$50 and it's not power-hungry like Antminer.

If you are trying to find out *why* ASIC's are so much faster the simple answer is: Because a CPU/GPU it a general purpose device they spend a lot of clock cycles just moving data around inside their registers as they execute the various math code operations including however many cycles the OS running the PC consumes. Data input and output is just a tiny part of the time being spent. ASIC's don't do they that, they pipeline the data through hard-coded logic elements. When new work is presented to the chip 1-2 clock cycles are all that is needed to load the work into the pipeline and from there it is 1 cycle to read in new data AND output the result from previous calculation then 1 cycle for process the hash function for a whopping total of only 2 clock cycles needed for each increment of the work presented to the chips. Throw in the fact that even the ancient S1 had 256 cores in each chip and the reason for their speed should be obvious. These days a miner chip will have over 4k cores in it sooo...

Thank guys for explanations!