ATM there is really nothing, I really hope some smart guys can come out with something that is really CPU based. Or else we are totally controlled by those big mining companies.
Sorry, but this is simply not true. Certainly XMR is quite profitable mining with a good GPU now that the price has jumped like 50%, but even before that, when it was at around $8 at the time of this comment, it was still reasonably profitable. Here are my stats to prove it:
-i7-2600k hashes 210/s
-i7-4790k hashes 310/s
-i7-6800k hashes 360/s
So, a total of 880 H/s using a total wattage of about 120. That is a daily profit of about $1.50 at current rates, but was close to $1 a day before the current rise in price, so XMR has been profitable to mine via higher end CPUs for quite a while.
Now, of course, there is a big kicker here... this "profitability" is based on existing CPUs in existing systems. Meaning, you already have the system running and aren't using your CPU for anything else, so you wanna try a bit of mining to make $. In this scenario, you most certainly can make a bit of profit as I have shown above. However, if you are talking about justifying the purchase of a brand new higher end CPU like a 6800k at full price vs say a g4400 or something like that, then it really probably won't ever ROI for you, or at least not for a very long time, inless XMR really goes through the roof. If you assume $400 for that 6800k, it would take close to 2 years to ROI fully at current rates. But, I think most people are asking this based on PCs they already have, so those are very good candidates for CPU mining XMR.
