I still don't get the logic that you need heavy equipment to mine any cryptocurrency. I understand that Bitcoin has become too difficult to mine for an average Joe but even Bitcoin was minable with a simple laptop in it's early stages.
Why would that not be repeatable with less established cryptocurrencies when the difficulty level is still pretty low?
Hi, the simple answer to your last question, is, that it is repeatable, however
The trick you are missing, is that when Bitcoin came out, it was pretty much unheard of, and was only mineable initially on a cpu, and i think for its first 6 weeks, there were less than 10 people worldwide mining it, and even after that the numbers increased very slowly. It took many weeks (months i think) before some one wrote a gpu miner, and that lasted for nearly 2 years.
It was only when the value was heading towards 10 cents that people started to take note. Finally when it hit $1 people started to think about the possibility of making ASICS, i think it was about $50 before they came out. (i could be miles off, it was a long time ago)
I seem to remember this played out over nearly 2 years.
Jump to today, and not even day 1, but second 1, huge numbers of people are sat there with dedicated rigs, and ASICS ready to mine
any new coin. This is mainly due to new coins being talked about on here for days if not weeks before launch. Most coins even have launch dates and quite often the ability to "test mine" first, this all leads to a huge rush, day 1
That's why the entry level is now so high...on all new coins
My advice, don't ask which coin to mine on here, simply because, if you get a response, then so do the other 1000 lurkers...try the altcoins ann / mining pages, but try page 10 onwards, cos no one reads that far, if you are lucky you may spot something others have overlooked.
Failing that use block explorers to find older coins which are much easier to mine. The rewards per block will be lower, the value per coin will be much lower, but it will enable you to get into mining as a
hobby, and who knows sometimes the older coins get revamped and become worth quite a bit.
To be honest, until you decide to change from hobby miner to for-profit-miner, i would actually stay away from here initially (just too many threads), join a few exchanges, like yobit, novaexchange, etc (dont all diss me just yet), and look at the coinsinfo section of each exchange. You are bound to find some low difficulty coin that you can at least start to play with. Just don't expect to earn anything.
Once you're into it, you'll soon suss out how to find better coins, and also have a much better idea what hardware you might need to buy. For example AMD R9 270 is a great little card for all sorts of mining (great to learn on, 2nd hand a few £££) BUT it uses a huge amount of power compared to new cards.
Another tip if you just want to learn, there are loads of old bitcoin miners 10-50GH/s for literally a couple of £££ on ebay. Again you'll earn nothing, but you'll learn.
Failing that, join the masses and use either minergate or nicehash, they get dissed a lot cos they take most of your earnings, but they have been around for years, so someone likes em.
Hope this helps a little, 1 last thing....remember...have fun...
Good luck