Mining bitcoin is basically the process of spamming a loop of incrementing a nonce and calculating SHA-256, until you hit a hash that's lower than a certain thr

Mining bitcoin is basically the process of spamming a loop of incrementing a nonce and calculating SHA-256, until you hit a hash that's lower than a certain threshold. In the beginning, people used general-purpose CPUs for this, but it's the sort of embarrassingly parallel problem that GPUs are great at, so GPU mining rapidly outstripped anything that a CPU could do. These days, even GPUs are outclassed by ASICs designed specifically for mining. The amount of bitcoin you'd get by mining with a CPU would be minute and, worse still, would actually be a net negative, once you factor in the power bill to keep that CPU running. The ASICs are just too power-efficient for anything else to compete.