By now, you’ve probably heard about cryptocurrency and cryptomining, possibly because you too want to get a piece of that sweet, sweet speculative digital asset money.
If it were 2012, we’d be right there next to you, mining a couple of bitcoin or ethereum overnight on our laptops because it was an interesting project and you got a couple of neat digital tokens worth a couple of pennies out of it. No harm, no foul.
We are a long ways away from those halcyon days when cryptocurrencies were easy to mine on a smart phone because the blockchains they were based on had yet to sufficiently mature.
Now, mining just a single digital token takes enormous effort, and while people are willing to pay a lot of money for those tokens, the chances of you mining sufficient bitcoin or ethereum on your personal computer to justify the power expense are all but nonexistent.
A lot of apps offer to let you mine cryptocurrency while your computer is idle though, dangling the prospect of free money in front of you to get you to download their app.
Read the fine print, though – assuming the software…
