
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.