The $24 Lucky Miner USB: A Long Shot for Bitcoin Mining
Hardware/News

The $24 Lucky Miner USB: A Long Shot for Bitcoin Mining

A USB device marketed as a bitcoin mining lottery ticket offers astronomically low odds of success.

Never tell me the odds.

If you’ve ever thought, “I’d enter the national lottery, but the odds are just too good,” I have some news: you can now buy a high-tech kind of lottery ticket with lower odds of mining a bitcoin compared to winning your national lottery. Truly, we are living in the future.

Tom’s Hardware reports that the Lucky Miner SOLO-LV02 is a USB stick designed solely for the chance to mine some cryptocurrency. Priced at around $24 on AliExpress or $34 on Amazon, this device won’t get you rich but will certainly put you into a lottery of sorts.

Featuring a USB Type-C connector that consumes only one watt of power, once you’ve set it up and connected to a Wi-Fi network, it just needs a tiny power supply to keep trying to mine BTC in the background.

As things stand now, mining bitcoin using even specialized setups is quite a stretch. Currently, mining BTC is increasingly unprofitable, making this USB stick more like a wish or dream compacted into a small device. The current odds of generating a single BTC with it are about 210.7 trillion to one over the course of a year.

For comparison, most national lotteries offer odds near 300 million to one, making this USB stick’s chances astronomically worse.

The stick does come with a certain charm beyond its dismal mining profits, boasting a 1.9-inch color TFT display, which could be repurposed creatively, perhaps even to play Doom on it. In summary, you might want to skip mining and enjoy it as a quirky gaming project instead, while still buying a lottery ticket for fun.

Next article

AI Researchers Urge Comprehensive Safety Assessments Before Advancing Artificial Superintelligences

Newsletter

Get the most talked about stories directly in your inbox

Every week we share the most relevant news in tech, culture, and entertainment. Join our community.

Your privacy is important to us. We promise not to send you spam!