The Lucky Miner USB stick is a $24 Bitcoin lottery ticket, with 210.7 trillion-to-one odds of mining a BTC block in a year

If you like a gamble, there’s a fascinating little device called the Lucky Miner SOLO-LV02 now available via AliExpress for a modest $24 outlay. This thumb-sized USB-C connected device needs just 1W of power, access to your Wi-Fi, and a Bitcoin wallet. You set-and-forget it, then wait for the Bitcoins to roll in. However, the leisurely hashrate of the Lucky Miner means that you will indeed be lucky to squeeze any BTC out of it. CNX Software likened the diminutive device to “a lottery ticket for Bitcoin,” offering odds of 210.7 trillion-to-one of mining a single BTC block in a year.

Despite the outlandish odds of mining a Bitcoin block with the Lucky Miner SOLO-LV02, there’s still a chance, right? Yes, but the $24 device’s odds of striking lucky are akin to winning the traditional lottery several times in a row. A better bet might be something like the palm-sized Bitaxe, which famously earned a miner 6.25BTC — worth $206,000 — last year, for a hardware cost of ~$180. That 500 GH/s machine faced odds of around 2,667 to one to mine 1 BTC in a year of mining, so its owner was still very lucky. Commercial ASIC mining machines nowadays will offer hash rates in the hundreds of TH/s region, but also chew through 3kW or more and typically cost $3,000-$5,000 to purchase.

At the time of writing, 1 BTC = $104,000, and thus, successfully mining a Bitcoin block (3.125 BTC) would net you approximately $325,000.