The benefits are immense, decentralising the hash rate which is wildly centralised, learning how to mine, entering in a daily lottery to mine a block and opening your eyes to some of the coolest projects in our little Bitcoin world, Bitaxe, homestead mining, swimming pool heater - the list goes on. These days there are many small mining devices that will warm your room and allow you to mine silently - an open source Bitaxe, Futurebit Apollo 2, Canaan Avalon 3, on it goes