This $24 Lucky Miner USB stick is a 210.7 trillion-to-one lottery ticket where the prize is a single BTC

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Bitcoin mining now just totes unprofitable, costing over $137,000 to mine just one BTC in the US and near $200,000 per coin in Germany
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This $24 Lucky Miner USB stick is a 210.7 trillion-to-one lottery ticket where the prize is a single BTC
Hope Corrigan
13 May 2025
Never tell me the odds.
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(Image credit: Lucky Miner)
"I'd enter the national lottery but the odds are just too good" – if this sounds like you, I've got good news. Now you can purchase a new high-tech kind of lottery ticket with even worse odds of mining a bitcoin than you do of winning your country's lottery. Truly we are living in a future, indeed.
Tom's Hardware explains that the Lucky Miner SOLO-LV02 is a USB stick that's only purpose is to have a chance at mining some crypto. The stick goes for about $24 USD on AliExpress or $34 on Amazon, or a couple of lotto tickets, and once delivered to your door is a dedicated crypto cracker.
The little dongle has a USB Type-C connection that draws a single watt of power to run. Once it's been set up and connected to Wi-Fi, then all you need to do is make sure it has that teeny tiny bit of power and forget about it. The Lucky Miner will continue to tick around in the background attempting to mine a BTC.
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Bitcoin mining now just totes unprofitable, costing over $137,000 to mine just one BTC in the US and near $200,000 per coin in Germany
You can win an MSI RTX 5080 in Taiwan if you collect nine dragon figurines given away with *checks notes* MSI RTX 50-series GPUs
Newegg Shuffle lottery system returns to give you a chance to buy in-demand RTX 50-series graphics hardware at full price
In the current state of things, mining bitcoin with even a purpose built rig is a pretty lofty dream. It's to the point now where mining BTC is simply beyond unprofitable, so for $24 you're basically buying a wish, dream, in a little USB stick. Thanks to the sluggish hashrate, you're looking at odds of about 210.7 trillion-to-one of mining a single BTC. That's over the course of a year left running.
The odds of winning most national lotteries are around 300 million to one. This makes your chances about one million times better than having a Lucky Miner produce a single BTC. It's almost convincing me to buy a lotto ticket.
The USB stick does have some charm to it beyond being very bad at mining crypto. It features a 1.9-inch colour TFT display which could be put to use with that basically unused likely ESP32 chip, like what's powering this funky 90s style PDA, to play Doom on, the old one of course, The Dark Ages probably needs something a bit heftier. It even has two buttons for controls, and that handy Type-C connector.
Forget mining, get the Lucky Miner for a fun gaming project and pick yourself up a lotto ticket on the side, you know, just in case.
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Hope Corrigan
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Hardware Writer
Hope’s been writing about games for about a decade, starting out way back when on the Australian Nintendo fan site . Since then, she’s talked far too much about games and tech for publications such as Techlife, Byteside, IGN, and GameSpot. Of course there’s also here at PC Gamer, where she gets to indulge her inner hardware nerd with news and reviews. You can usually find Hope fawning over some art, tech, or likely a wonderful combination of them both and where relevant she’ll share them with you here. When she’s not writing about the amazing creations of others, she’s working on what she hopes will one day be her own. You can find her fictional chill out ambient far future sci-fi radio show/album/listening experience podcast right here.
No, she’s not kidding.
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Bitcoin mining now just totes unprofitable, costing over $137,000 to mine just one BTC in the US and near $200,000 per coin in Germany
You can win an MSI RTX 5080 in Taiwan if you collect nine dragon figurines given away with *checks notes* MSI RTX 50-series GPUs
Newegg Shuffle lottery system returns to give you a chance to buy in-demand RTX 50-series graphics hardware at full price
One day the silicon in this $7000 Asus RTX 5090 will be worthless, but you'll still have a whole 6 grams of solid gold to make up for it
One redditor scored an Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPU with 3x the memory of a RTX 5090 for only twice the MSRP
Scientists have created a random number generator that's truly random—and no, that's not an easy thing to do at all
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