My laptop’s estimated time to find a Bitcoin block was around 8.6 billion years.

Yes, billion.

At that point, I had to admit that my mining strategy might need a few adjustments. 😄

But the experiment turned out to be much more valuable than I expected.

Not because I found a Bitcoin block.

I obviously didn't.

It was valuable because trying to mine Bitcoin with completely inadequate hardware eventually changed the question I was asking.

Instead of asking:

“What can I mine with this laptop?”

I started asking:

“What can I build with this laptop?”

And that turned out to be a much more interesting experiment.

I Built a Small CPU Miner

I wanted to understand mining beyond simply reading about hashrate, difficulty, shares and probability.

So I started experimenting.

Eventually, I built a small CPU mining application and connected it to a public pool.

It worked.

Again, not in the “I found a Bitcoin block” sense.

But the miner connected successfully, received work and even produced some accepted shares.

Seeing the first accepted share appear was strangely satisfying.

For a brief moment, your brain starts whispering:

Maybe...

Then mathematics enters the room.

With the hashrate available from an ordinary laptop, the estimated time required to find a Bitcoin block was approximately:

8.6 billion years.

The universe is about 13.8 billion years old.

So waiting patiently probably isn't a viable business strategy.

Then I Tried NiceHash

Next, I tried a more practical approach.

Instead of directly participating in the Bitcoin mining lottery, I experimented with mining through NiceHash.

Technically, that worked too.

My laptop performed computational work and generated a very small amount of value.

But it confirmed something that shouldn't surprise anyone:

An ordinary laptop is not a money printer.

The combination of limited hashrate, electricity costs and hardware constraints makes laptop mining a terrible strategy if your primary objective is making money.

But I don't consider the experiment a failure.

Quite the opposite.

Actually running miners, watching shares arrive and looking at network difficulty taught me much more than simply reading another article explaining why CPU mining Bitcoin isn't profitable.

And then something interesting happened.

Mining Became a Software Project

At some point, I stopped treating mining only as a way to earn coins.

I became interested in the software itself.

That eventually resulted in CPU Miner Lab, a small Windows application I developed for experimenting with CPU mining.

Instead of simply downloading another miner and running a command, I wanted to understand more of what was happening behind the scenes.

Different algorithms.

Threads.

Hashrate.

Pool communication.

Accepted shares.

Rejected shares.

Network difficulty.

The laptop still wasn't going to make me rich, but now it was teaching me something.

That distinction became increasingly important.

What If the Laptop Mines Something Else?

Not cryptocurrency.

Value.

Compared with an ASIC, an ordinary laptop is almost useless at SHA-256 hashing.

But that same laptop can do something an ASIC isn't designed to do.

It can write software.

It can automate repetitive tasks.

It can process information.

It can create digital products.

It can help solve somebody's problem.

And unlike Bitcoin mining, doing those things doesn't require competing against warehouses filled with thousands of specialized machines.

That realization changed the direction of my experiment.

I stopped obsessing over this question:

“Which coin should I mine?”

And started thinking about another:

“What could I build that somebody might actually find useful?”

From Mining to Building

That's when I started spending more time building small software projects.

One of them is MarginPilot.

MarginPilot is a Windows profit calculator I'm developing for online sellers.

The idea came from a very simple problem.

Once you include product cost, marketplace commission, shipping, taxes and other deductions, answering this question can become surprisingly annoying:

“How much money am I actually making from this sale?”

MarginPilot is my attempt to turn that calculation into a simple desktop tool.

Will people find it useful?

Will anyone pay for it?

I don't know yet.

And that's precisely why I'm building it.

It's another experiment.

But mining and e-commerce calculators aren't the only things this laptop has led me into.

Then I Fell Into the Nostr Rabbit Hole

Another experiment took me into Nostr.

I wanted to use Nostr applications without giving those applications direct access to my private key.

That eventually led me to build my own browser-based Nostr signer:

SkySigner.

What started as a relatively simple signing experiment became a much more interesting security problem.

Keeping the private key away from a website is only part of the problem.

Once a signer can sign events or decrypt messages on behalf of an application, another question appears:

What should that application actually be allowed to request?

That led me into NIP-07, NIP-44, encrypted messaging, event kinds, site permissions, temporary capabilities and the problem of approval fatigue.

I wrote about that experiment separately here:

I Built My Own Nostr Signer and Discovered a Different Security Problem

Interestingly, feedback on that experiment also started influencing the permission model I'm building into SkySigner.

So once again, something that began as:

“I need a tool that does this.”

turned into:

“I need to understand why this works this way.”

Three Projects, Three Completely Different Problems

At first glance, these projects don't have much in common.

CPU Miner Lab is about mining.

MarginPilot is about e-commerce profitability.

SkySigner is about Nostr, cryptographic signing and permission security.

But I've started noticing that they all follow essentially the same process:

Find a problem → Learn → Build → Test → Break → Fix → Improve

Sometimes the software works.

Sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes fixing one problem reveals a completely different problem.

And occasionally the experiment produces something genuinely useful.

That process has made me reconsider what the most valuable component inside my laptop actually is.

It probably isn't the CPU's hashrate.

It's the ability to turn an idea into something executable.

My New Mining Algorithm

So technically, my laptop is still mining.

With CPU Miner Lab, sometimes literally. 😄

But I'm increasingly interested in another algorithm:

Find a Problem → Learn → Build → Test → Break → Fix → Share → Sell

The difficulty is still high.

There are still no guaranteed rewards.

Things still crash.

Sometimes the bug is mine.

Sometimes it's a relay.

Sometimes I spend hours discovering that the problem was something completely different.

But at least the estimated time to reward might be slightly shorter than 8.6 billion years.

The 10,000 Sats Experiment

So I've given myself a much more realistic target:

Earn my first meaningful 10,000 sats by creating something useful.

No faucets.

No referral farming.

No cloud-mining promises.

No pretending an ordinary laptop can compete with an ASIC farm.

And no magical “passive income” formula.

Instead, I'm interested in software, small digital products, technical services, automation or anything else where useful work can eventually be exchanged for sats.

CPU Miner Lab taught me more about mining.

SkySigner is teaching me about Nostr, cryptography and permission design.

MarginPilot is testing a different question:

Can a small piece of software I build solve a real enough problem that somebody is willing to pay for it?

I don't know the answer yet.

That's what makes the experiment interesting.

And I'd genuinely like to hear from people who have already tried something similar.

If you had an ordinary laptop, no ASIC, no existing audience and wanted to honestly earn your first 10,000 sats, what would you build or offer?

Even better:

What have you actually tried that worked?

Maybe the most interesting form of Bitcoin mining isn't always searching for hashes.

Sometimes it's searching for a problem worth solving.

Also, click here to read my article, “I Built My Own Nostr Signer and Discovered a Different Security Problem.”