In the early days of bitcoin anyone with a high end PC could hope to mine a few coins. Now there are server farms devoted to mining bitcoins. There is no way for the average person to create money anymore.
Ever since the invention of sticks and sand people have been able to do their own accounting. Now that we all have access to Excel, etc. we are OK with accounting without the need for block chains.
Block chains are some sort of Trojan Horse for something evil. Prices on the stock market are basically being set by computer algorithms. Now the stock of money will be set by algorithms. We're probably being set up for some sort of system where all financial transactions are based on algorithms beyond the comprehension of the average investor. This will probably lead to more and more people giving over their portfolios to brokers who will take all of the money from their clients and bet it on the opposite sides of all of the trades their bosses are making so that their bosses can be rich and give them great bonuses while the average investor, retirement funds, etc. are decimated.
Just a couple of links for you, out of hundreds:
https://minergate.com/calculator/cryptonote
There are a quite a number of exchanges where anyone can trade with very little to no fees and there are plenty of coins to mine, most only able to be mined with CPUs or GPUs, some even use 'proof of stake' instead of 'proof of work' concepts.
Blockchain technology will rewrite the world's financial infrastructure, if the current system of debt based fiat, managed by central authorities, doesn't collapse world economies beforehand. In fact, both are already doing so.