[moltuae]

Originally Posted by 1781cc

So I see that a lot of this is skewed towards bespoke gpu hardware but is there a way of putting an older laptop to use mining coins? Just ticking away slowly in the background? Doesn’t have to be something heavy.

I read recently you can mine monero using an app called salon on older pcs, or did I get that wrong? I’m crypto trading at the moment but wondered if I could put something I have laying around to use...

For older hardware, staking would probably be more practical/profitable. Staking requires very little performance, though sometimes you will need a reasonable amount of hard drive space. Staking is a bit like earning interest. Some coins will earn you staking rewards just by owning them, requiring no computing power at all, while others require you to keep the coins in an open wallet running 24/7. Some coins also have 'masternodes'. To become a masternode usually requires that you hold a large amount of coins but the rewards are much higher than regular staking. The reasoning behind staking is that by encouraging users to 'hodl' helps the coins grow in value and, for those that require an open wallet, the users act as nodes, helping to run the network by validating transactions and/or maintaining an up-to-date copy of the blockchain.

I earn staking rewards from a few coins that I own, such as NEO, Deep Onion and Linda Coin. With NEO you earn 'gas' just by owning NEO (no need to leave the wallet open) but the rewards are fairly small unless you own a huge amount of NEO. Deep Onion and Linda are both the 'open wallet' type, which I leave running 24/7 on an old PC. Again, not huge rewards but still worthwhile, especially if the PC is usualy switched on and running anyway. Linda coin is also a masternode coin but presently you need 30 million Lindas to run a masternode. However, the developers have recently announced that they will be lowering the masternode requirement to 2 million Lindas in a few months.