Referring to the comments above: Hmm, I will argue that if I need to buy new hardware, it does require specialized equipment. Not only that, but I have to spend $1000 to maybe make $1 per day? Then, also lose some portion of that each time I make a transaction to use the coins. I'm new to crypto, but it seems like exchanges are using us miners' time and money, while they're the ones actually raking in the profits. That's not even taking into account all the energy being used. Maybe someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong, but it seems like a waste of my time so far (only been doing it for a week). I was led to believe I could pool a bunch of smaller machines (even RPis) and make some sort of teenie profit, but it doesn't appear to work that way. I'm certainly finding blocks and "contributing" to Monero, but I'm barely finding shares in order to get a payout (and then get penalized for "uncles"), which is apparently based on "luck" (I don't believe in luck in software, btw ;)) and has to happen in some small 6 hour window (p2pool) or else I get nothing for the blocks I did find. Someone must be making money, but like other "mining" efforts throughout history, it doesn't seem to be the miners (but at least we do get some and don't have to break our backs all day :))
BTW, also, thank you @jtgrassie for proving the accepted answer. Very helpful/informative for me
