I was never into BTC lottery miners, but I found one that I found interesting and I can easily repurpose into some other project. I was also thinking about getting a bunch of them for Christmas gifts pre-setup against a paper wallet.
Most people here have already probably heard about the Nerd Miner. It is a small device that uses extremely low power and provides extremely low hash rate for mining bitcoin. As far as I know, not a single Nerd Miner has successfully solved a block, but there has been a similar device that has. Solving a block right now nets 3.125 bitcoin reward or just shy of $200,000 USD.
Introducing the Heltec T-190
You can find this device on Amazon for about $30 or on Aliexpress for about $22, both include free shipping.
The T-190 is capable of mining bitcoin with a 119Kh/s hash rate. While this is pretty slow, it also only takes 0.59 watts while running and is almost 3x faster than most Nerd Miners.
The wattage jumps up to around 0.9 watts while the screen is on and the hash rate drops a bit. By default it will put the screen on stand by after 60 seconds.
When I got the device, it was on firmware 2.01, which is fairly old, so it does require an upgrade to get the maximum hash rate and some of the newer features. The device is super easy to update, just running a firmware update program in windows and waiting a few seconds.
It does include special software to monitor it, but if you run the latest version, it includes a web browser so you don't need it.
You can also easily monitor from the pool interface, and you can see here I'm seeing even better hash rates than advertised.
I've only been running it for about a day, but you can see the hash rate varies dramatically.
These devices are called Lottery Miners for a reason, the odds you win are slim to none. They are however fascinating devices and make really fun gifts. At 0.6 watts they take around $0.60 - $1.20 a year in power. You can think of it as buying a single lottery ticket each year for a chance to win ~$200,000.
They are not kidding when they call it a lottery miner.
Paired with a paper wallet, these make fantastic gifts for less than $30.
These paper wallets can be printed from https://bitcoinpaperwallet.io/, and you can even save the code locally and print them offline. A few years ago I printed a bunch of these with $100 on them for my family.
If you do a lot of these, you can get kits that include the software, bags, and hologram stickers or just pick up tamper proof stickers off Amazon.
Compared to the official Nerd Miner, this thing is a steal. The official Nerd Miner v3 is 78Kh/s and 1 watt for over $50.
I ordered 30 of these, and can probably upgrade them all to 3.02 within 1-2 hours.
Configuring them is really easy, you just use a phone or other device to connect to it's wifi hotspot, select your Wifi and enter a password and enter your Bitcoin address. It is all preconfigured to connect to Public Pool, one of the few pools that allow these low hash rate devices (with no fees no less!).
The great thing is if you get bored watching it fail to mine bitcoins, you can just repurpose it for any number of nerdy projects. It is a very popular ESP32 variant device with a nice 256k color TFT LCD screen, wifi, bluetooth, using super low power. I can think of 20 projects off the top of my head to use it for. For example, you can easily repurpose it to display the Hive price or even a couple of your favorite coins updating every one second.
Have fun!
