Unless you’ve been completely removed from society over the past 10 years or so, you’ve likely heard about Bitcoin and other crypto currencies. While the technology behind them may beyond most peoples understanding and buying a single Bitcoin is likely too expensive for many people (as of today its over $56,000 USD = 1 BTC), you can still get in on the craze by mining. At the core of crypto currency is some really complicated math, mining is the process of having a computer perform some of those calculations. Usually this is done with entire farms of computers with high-end CPUs or GPUs. Regardless of your hardware you can still get in on the action by joining services that combine the actions of many users into smaller units of work.
While there are many providers out there, I’ve found that the client offered by CudoMiner is one of the easiest for most users to install and run on modest hardware running Windows, Linux or OS/X. After setup, you just have to leave your device powered and connected to the web to use the idle time to earn some money.
With the increase in remote workers and students over the past year, I’d expect that at least a few of those organizations have figured out that they can use the idle time on those devices for mining to increase their revenue stream.