BitMinter is a bitcoin mining pool that aims to make it easy for anyone to make bitcoins. It is one of the oldest pools. Since its opening in 2011, over 450000 people have registered accounts with it. In the earlier period, CPUs and GPUs were used for bitcoin mining. Now we need to have specialized Application Specific Integrated Circuits (in short ASIC) machines for bitcoin mining. The speed of these machines is given by their hash rate which is presently of the order of tera hashes/second or T H/s.
ASICs took over mining in 2013. Mining just one bitcoin with an ordinary PC would take quite lot of time. You will need a 1 TH/s or faster ASIC machine to start a small mining operation at your home.