But again, not an expert. Just the articles I've read and people I know who mine bitcoin say you can't profit that way.
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.
That said there is absolutely no need to be such a jerk about it.
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.