Hello, I'm new and needing help with pooling on my Mac. To join in pooling do I first need to purchase asics, or can pooling be achieved registering with BitMinter? Please advise, mat
You do not need an ASIC to mine, but without one you will struggle with SHA based coins.
If you're looking to mine scrypt based coins, an ASIC isn't going to help as the current ones only mine SHA. You really need a decent GPU to mine scrypt coins.
You can mine either coin type using your CPU, although progress will be slow.
Suggest you checkout this guide...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9430.0Good luck