The short answer to this seems to be", "No, use an ASIC or make a loss." However, after doing some research on various Web pages (not cited here, naughty me), the consensus seems to be that ...
- while there are some cryptocurrencies designed to be ASIC-resistance, human ingenuity can't be beaten and ASICS have been developed for them.
- if you are going to mine without an ASIC, your best option is a bank of many GPUs (in which case, you should mine Monero or Ravencoin).
- if you're going to use a CPU to mine, you're probably wasting your time and electricity. However, you might break even with Electroneum and Ravencoin on a tenth generation or later CPU.
Having bought myself a new computer (despite my strong desire not to spend money if possible), because my old one is on its last legs (hard drive failure imminent and becoming non-responsive if the screen dims/switches off), I am hoping that some new metal is sufficient to earn me a little crypto. While it's unfortunately not going to be enough to replace the income from a conventional job as a corporate slave, I'm looking to subsidise my income so that I don't have to find a job that's too stressful or requires my attention full-time.
To that end, I have also made a list of a number of active Cryptocurrency faucets that I intend to investigate in order to create a comparison matrix and rank in terms of profitability and decide if they're worth milking. So far, I've found three and, between them, earned about $0.01 USD (which is definitely not worthwhile as I need to earn about $6-8 USD a day to keep afloat). However, I have a list of over forty faucets I've yet to try, so perhaps I'll have better results/earnings with the others (either individually or in combination). Once I've gathered my findings and completed the comparison, I'll publish my findings.
