If you want to mine coins yourself with your own machine, there's basically 3 things you need to do. Get a wallet, download a miner, and find a pool to connect it to. Once you have those 3 things, you get them all sync'd up and run the miner. Use the pool as your dashboard to monitor your progress, and have your mined coins addressed and transferred to your wallet. There are many wallets, and miners, and pools. Figuring out which coin you want to mine will help filter the options down. I used to use guiminer, slushpool and blockchain.info wallet. I quickly found out I wouldn't be making any progress on a laptop, so I quit that and went in another direction. I got into cloud mining with Hashflare and Crypterra, and bought Ripple itself on the Binance exchange. Mining can be profitable if you have a good machine to do it with. Mostly you just need a good GPU and an efficient power supply. There's not a whole lot else that matters on the machine end. Personally I think it's also fun, so I mine a new alt coin with my laptop just because I enjoy it and its early enough in the coin's life that I can get a few on my laptop while I'm at work or sleeping. It's probably costing me more electricity than it's worth right now, but I'm going to hold them for years and hope they become the next big thing. Who knows.
Hope this helps.
