The original idea was for every single person out there to mine bitcoins on their own computers. Bitcoin screwed that up by allowing big corporations to push out the smaller players. Their big purpose built hardware increased mining difficulty to the point mere mortals need not even apply. Mining on GPUs? Nope, you need purpose built ASICs for this.

Monero is the only cryptocurrency today that's at least trying to implement the original "one CPU, one vote" vision but nobody really cares about it since number doesn't go up.