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

"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 will get for 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.

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 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. Doom: The Dark Ages probably needs something a bit heftier. It even has two buttons for controls, and that handy Type-C connector.

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Hope’s been writing about games for about a decade, starting out way back when on the Australian Nintendo fan site Vooks.net. 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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