I mined a little in the early days, but it kept my CPU pinned into the red and frankly all the people online patting themselves on the back on the size of their mining operation were offputting. I'm interested in cryptocurrencies because of their potential to liberate the mass of people from financial bullying by governments and corporations, not as a speculative vehicle to easy riches.

This will seem pointlessly ideological to most people, but I'm struck by the fact that the bitcoin blockchain is held up as 'proof of work.' There's no work involved besides that to understand the system initially and any code contributions made to the source tree. The actual calculation is carried out by machine. So mining is basically a game for capitalists to invest in industrial hash table production. People who learn about it later and comprehend it in full but don't have any large sums of capital to invest in mining equipment or as a speculative investment don't really derive much benefit from it.

Don't get the idea that I consider it a bad thing because of this - its mere existence speaks to the fact that we've run out of accessible natural frontiers where the curious might stumble upon a fortune, and so we are forced to invent them.