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 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.

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.