What's the deal with mining

Do you need to have super expensive rigs for this? I’ve just got a laptop, so I’m stuck just watching. Is there any other way to get involved?

Cause you are competing against other miners for blocks. Those with more computing power will get more hashrate and get majority of the blocks. You can't mine Bitcoin with a laptop anymore. You'll need some sort of mining setup with ASICs and then you can join a pool to contribute your hashrate and get a percentage of rewards.

Expensive computers will now pay off in mining for many years, so it is more profitable for you to study the equipment rental market and try to make money on it. Mining on processors and video cards is now practically dead, unless you are interested in a payback of 4-5 years. Sometimes there are new coins, but I either mined very little of them or sold them early, afraid that the price would fall too much, so I would not count on such a result, unless you are a developer of a new coin. If you want to mine, then study ASICs.

You learned about mining very late. Previously, bitcoin was mined on processors, then it was mined on video cards, and more than 1 year ago the first ASICs appeared, which made bitcoin mining on computers unprofitable. Unfortunately, bitcoin mining is impossible with a computer or laptop.

What laptop specifications do you have? According to nicehash Nicehash - Profitability Calculator , if you mine using an RTX-3050, for example, you can earn around 0.00000137 BTC or around $0.15/day. And that does not include electricity costs, maintenance costs, plus the longer the mining becomes more difficult, or even the performance of your device decreases, so I suggest that it is better not to do this mining. Therefore, I answered that it is still possible to mine through the pool provided such as nicehash, while solo mining on Bitcoin I think is no longer possible (cmiiw). However, we must realize that it is no longer as profitable as it used to be. If you want to see how much income your device can generate, you can try checking the Nicehash site.

buy a beagle. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5521746.0 point it to viabtc.com and forget about it

You are asking the same question. To mine in today's mining ecosystem you need ASICs, not one, not ten but multiple. Enough to make a cumulative hashpower comparable to the existing players in the market. Dont bank on the fact that you might hit a block sometime in the future. If you are determined to mine to make money it is big investment to get those ASICs, PSUs, a workforce and location to run them and maintain them. In other words, it is almost an industrial scale not hobbyist.

Sorry to ask, is equipments market place still a thing? Are there people still renting hashing power in 2025? To be more clear on this is there any data around to show how many people are into this? I will also like to know if this is even profitable because the last time I tried something like this was on Nicehash marketplace and it's been years, is there anyone still doing this? My takeaway on this right now until proven that I am wrong is, it's near impossible for those running the marketplace to be in profit themselves, even the customer like people who are renting the hash powers too. Pls correct me if you think I am wrong on this because I've been far too away from renting hash rates.

Rental hash from NiceHash et al is still a VERY big thing. If you check -ck's solo pool the other day someone was throwing 1EH of rental at it.

That's because a lot of people learn about the Bitcoin mining benefits, which leads to a huge competition in the space, and only people with the best computing power will be able to mine profitably. Thats why operating Bitcoin mining with computer's graphics card and central processing unit will only lead to wasting of time, and energy unless you wanted to mine some shitcoin at the early stage. If there is also much competition in the mining rig factory creation, the price of the miners would have been different. In the meantime, use Whattomine to calculate the profitability of the coin you can mine.

Mining calculator for PC or video card has long lost its meaning, because the payback is very high. Mining calculators have not learned to calculate the profit for renting rigs with powerful video cards. And new models of ASICs are unfortunately no longer suitable for home use due to high energy consumption.

Mining on a laptop and receiving rewards in bitcoin is possible now, but the profit will be very small. In this topic you can find links to services where you can receive rewards for mining in bitcoins and other coins.

As I highlighted - the (tiny) rewards are paid in BTC BUT you will be mining a very low value altcoin with the proceeds converted to BTC. Since around 2014 Bitcoin is impossible to mine with anything other than an ASIC-based miner. If you are good with that then continue your questions in the altcoin areas.