Most of all the negative positions can be summed up by people saying your Macbook or laptop will overheat and ruin your hardware and even if it lasts for awhile your hashrate will be so low it won't even cover the cost of your electricity.
but
The main point of initially mining altcoins should be for you to better learn how cryptocurrencies and the technology surrounding them work. I'm an entrepreneur and eventually want to turn a profit as well and the first key to doing this is understanding and learning.
My Altcoin Mining Experiment:
I mined the following altcoins using my CPU +/- my GPU using pool mining. I excluded the mining fees of the pools from the results below. The following represents the amount of each coin I mined in 24 hours and its worth in USD.
My laptop: Lenovo Ideapad 700 - 15.6" FHD Laptop (Intel Core i7, 16 GB RAM, 1TB HDD + 128 GB SSD, NVIDIA GeForce GTX950M, Windows 10)
Monero XMR: Miner used: I used the open source Cryptonote AMD GPU miner for Windows.
Monero (XMR) is a decentralised open-source cryptocurrency forked from Bytecoin in April 2014. The coin's fundamental feature is privacy - it aims to be a digital medium of exchange with untraceable payments, unlinkable transactions and resistance to blockchain analysis. This is achieved thanks to a proof-of-work algorithm called CryptoNight, developed by the CryptoNote project. CryptoNote uses so-called "ring signatures", a sophisticated scheme that demands several different public keys from a group of users for verification. As such, the exact person behind a Monero transaction is not known; this results in considerable increase of privacy compared to Bitcoin and its forks.
Amount mined in 24 hours: 0.0028
Monero price on the 27th of June, 2017: 43.40 USD
Bytecoin BCN: Miner used: I used Minergate’s mining software
Bytecoin (BCN) is a decentralised, anonymous cryptocurrency written from scratch and launched in July 2012. Its concept is based on the CryptoNote technology which focuses on privacy and anonymity of transactions. It comes with a number of unique features, such as ring signatures to make payments untraceable, an exchange protocol to make transactions unlinkable, and several others. Some other interesting features of the cryptocurrency include "egalitarian" proof-of-work mechanism and an analysis-resistant blockchain. Bytecoin is designed to be easily mined on an average personal computer while being resistant to mining with specialised ASIC hardware. The Bytecoin software is available in two variants - as a Bytecoin reference client that uses a command-line interface to manage transactions and to mine coins, or a Bytecoin wallet with an easy-to-use an intuitive graphical user interface.
Amount mined in 24 hours: 1,522 BCN
Bytecoin price on the 27th of June, 2017: 0.002332 USD
Fantomcoin FCN:
Miner used: The fantomcoin qt wallet.
Amount mined in 24 hours: 0.005 FCN
Fantomcoin price on the 27th of June, 2017: 0.087161 USD
DigitalNote XDN:
Miner used: Minergate’s mining software.
DigitalNote (XDN) is a decentralised, open-source cryptocurrency launched as "duckNote" in May 2014 and renamed to DarkNote in September 2014 and again to DigitalNote in June 2015. It was originally forked from Bytecoin. DigitalNote's main focus is on privacy and anonymity of transactions; this is achieved thanks to a technology called CryptoNote. CryptoNote's two main features are "ring signatures" (where several users sign a payment message, making it impossible to determine who exactly received the payment) and "unlinkable transactions" (thanks to automatic generation of unique single-use private keys). Besides serving as a payment network, DigitalNote also provides an ability to send encrypted messages to anyone in the world.
Amount mined in 24 hours: 166.1 XDN
DigitalNote price on the 27th of June, 2017: 0.002855 USD