GPU Mining

There are lots of options with GPU mining, you can run your own hashes directly on coins like Etherium or others, you can join services that claim to automatically get you the best profit based on current hash rates.
All in all there is a ton of crazy competition, you are burning enough electricity to heat your home in the winter, and for many of us its coming up to the hottest time of the year.
Hot weather will inevitably lead to hot claims on forums about what coin is hot right now (did I use the word hot enough?), who is pumping the most hashes on what modified water cooling and all that jazz.
Its getting so intense we are seeing reports of GPU manufacturers eyeing the GPU mining market for some special products.

We All Know CPU Mining Is Dead, Right?

Well no, you can still CPU mine and make a paltry couple of hundred hashes per second, which is about as useful as an ant fart in a hurricane. Its probably more economical to leave the CPU at idle, than burn another 50 Watts for no real chance of a return, which I suspect most people do.
But think about that for a second, you have this totally amazing bit of technology, sitting in the heart of your rig, trundling along at way below its peak capacity. You paid good money for that silicon, its an asset you are under-utilizing because there isnt a valuable way to use it.... what a shame.

The BIG Reveal, Not Quite

We are now at the point where I explain its not as simple as it seems. First we need to talk about value, then we can talk about return, then we will get to profit.
Value then, whats valuable? Is human life valuable, I think most people would agree it is. Human life free of diseases, even more so, I think most would agree (where the hell is he going with this?).
Well there is a way to extract value from your CPU and help to seek cures for diseases, its called BOINC; this deceptively bland webpage fronts one of the most amazing feats of the technological age; distributed computing. Take a huge problem, like trying to find a drug to cure AIDS, build a virtual model of the AIDS virus, build virtual models of every drug candidate that exists (of which there are millions) and simulate how each drug candidate interacts with the virus. OK that sounds easy, but even on modern supercomputers, its going to take years of processing, so if we are going to distribute this task, we are going to need a lot of computing power, I mean a serious SHIT TON of people willing to give their idle CPU time; now you see where Im going with this, right?
You have all this under-utilizied capacity, and someone needs capacity to try and cure AIDS, well what the hell are you waiting for? In fact there are often around 50 active projects on BOINC, doing all kinds of things beyond drug discovery, from mathematical proofs, particle physics, atsronomy, biology and many more.

Hold On, You Missed Out Return And Profit

OK sure, you are one of the goods guys, we know it. But you cant just be running your CPU, burning more electric, its damn hot in your house already!
Well thats where Gridcoin comes in, NOW THIS IS THE BIG REVEAL....

Gridcoin pays you for doing that scientific research on your spare CPU cycles, at worst it will get you some return, but right now its getting a lot of attention and the price is escalating and money is being made, so why are you missing out?

So lets crunch some numbers and see where we are at, I mine Gridcoin on a core i7-6700k @4.2 Ghz, an old i5 M-430 laptop, 2 x Raspberry Pis and 3 x Android phones (yeah you can use all kinds of kit). I make about 12 GRC a day, as Im writing this GRC = $0.08 so thats $0.97 per day. My electric costs $0.16/kWh and all my kit uses around 230Watts, oh and I only mine 12 hours a day, so thats:
0.23kW x 12h = 4.8kWh/day * $0.16 = $0.44 in costs
$0.97 - $0.44 = $0.53 profit per day

All this for 53 frikin cents a day? Well, its 53 cents + helping to do important scientific research + utilizing your assets to their maximum. But that is not all, Gridcoin also rewards on Proof of Stake, so you have staking rewards to add on top of any mining rewards too.

Closure

Its simple, sort out your karma and dedicate just 1 CPU core to doing BOINC work, part time, and you can hold your head high and say that not only did you get rich in the crypto boom, you helped people too. Or go all in, BOINC wont hurt your computers; on my kit Gridcoin wallet uses 3% CPU on my windows machine, but I usually run it on one of my Raspberry PIs! BOINC always sits at lowest prority, you can even game with it running in the background.

Gridcoin is one of the best use cases of cryptocurrency, its hard for anyone to argue that crypto isnt kind, when coins like this are doing the right stuff for humanity. Worried this doesnt have a future? BOINC has been around longer than Bitcoin, Gridcoin is in its 4th year (strong and stable), its at number 14 on coingeko by development and there is way more in the roadmap than it has acheived already, but this article is long enough, you already know what to do.