In my quest to find one or more cryptocurrencies that can be mined with a decent/modern/current CPU, I have come across Banano, which is a meme coin based on Nano and is all about the banana references. Case in point: the wallet is called "Kalium", which is the old/original name for Potassium, of which bananas are a rich source (as noted on the Banano website). Given that bananas (specifically Cavendish desert bananas) are one of my favourite fruits and the Banano miner rewards those who participate in the folding@home project (a worthwhile cause), I could not pass up the opportunity to both earn some crypto to (hopefully) keep me well-stocked in, well, bananas and do my good deeds for the global population for the month.

At the time of writing, I have set up the FaH client (downloaded from the miner's page), put it on "full speed" and "when I'm working", then left it to do its thing. While each task is given X many days to complete, my new laptop's CPU is powerful enough to complete the task in approximately that many hours. It does mean that I can't do much else with the machine like that. However, the "medium" setting is a good compromise. Currently, I'm running the FaH client, Debian on Windows Subsystem for GNU/Linux (WSL), BlueStacks 5 (for the wallet) and the NetBox browser while writing this. At time of writing, it'll take my machine about four hours to complete some Alzheimer's research/simulation, having previously worked on COVID 19 for about eight hours. (It needs to complete at least two tasks for me to earn BAN, Banano's currency.) I'm not sure how much I'll get, but earning crypto for contributing towards the greater good in one of the easiest "mining" processes I have yet to find is definitely A Good Thing, IMO.

For more scrumptious banana facts, I refer you to the surprisingly lengthy (pun intended) Wikipedia article.

Banana power to the banana people! And now, for something completely different ...