Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive

If you use a mining pool then you won't make a profit on a laptop. However if you were solo mining on your laptop, then there is a very small chance that you could win seriously big moola.

The reason people join pools is to make money even if you never personally mine a coin. In a pool you just get paid for your effort. This is why joining a pool with consumer hardware will always lose.

In this case we aren't talking about pools!

There is two things that can happen when you solo mine - you either "lose it all" (all money spent on electricity down the drain) or "hit the jackpot," (1 full Bitcoin all for you!)

At that level with a small hash rate its gambling, you're throwing some amount of money at it at the very, very tiny chance of a big payout.

Say, for example, there's a 1/10000 chance any one person will mine a coin on consumer hardware per every $100 in electricity. So you're buying a $100 lottery ticket where the payout is $17,000.

Of course you "can't make money like that," the vast majority of people will lose money, just like the majority of lottery players will lose money.

I strongly recommend reading the Bitcoin white paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf It is not as nearly as long and complicated as you would think, if you know the basics (what's a hash, how do public keys and digital signatures work). I found it way clearer than all the explanation articles I've seen on the internet.