Brand new to this - trying to understand it as we speak.
I'm testing the water running Asteroid to mine litecoin and altcoins on OSX on my imac.
It's working, but very slow - clearly I need GPU rigs if I'm serious about trying this.

I'm really just trying to understand the whole economy/ecology of bitcoin/altcoins better and this seems like a good place to start.

3.1GHz Intel Core i5, 12GB Memory, graphics AMD Radeon HD 6970M 1024MB