Tiny Bitcoin Miner Plays The Lottery

Usually when we think of Bitcoin miners, we imagine huge facilities of server racks doing nothing but essentially wasting energy, all for the chance that one of those computers amongst the rows will stumble upon the correct set of numbers to get rewarded with imaginary money. The idea being that the more computers, the more chances to win. But just buying one lottery ticket is the only thing technically required to win, at least in theory. And [Data Slayer] is putting this theory to the test with this Bitcoin miner built around a single Raspberry Pi.

This tiny Raspberry Pi Zero does get a little bit of support from an Ant Miner, a USB peripheral which is optimized to run the SHA256 hashing algorithm and solve the complex mathematical operations needed to “win” the round of Bitcoin mining. Typically a large number of these would be arrayed together to provide more chances at winning (or “earning”, to use the term generously) Bitcoin but there’s no reason other than extreme statistical improbability that a single one can’t work on its own. The only other thing needed to get this setup working is to give the Pi all of the configuration information it needs such as wallet information and pool information.

This type of miner isn’t novel by any means, and in fact it’s a style of mining cryptocurrency called “lottery mining” where contributing to a pool is omitted in favor of attempting to solve the entire block by pure random chance alone in the hopes that if it’s solved, the entire reward will be claimed by that device alone. In the case of this device, the current hash rate calculated when it was contributing to a pool means that when lottery mining, it has about a one-in-two-billion chance of winning. That’s essentially zero, which is basically the same chance of winning a lottery that pays out actual usable currency.

113 thoughts on “Tiny Bitcoin Miner Plays The Lottery

  1. The whole feel of the article write up projects a definite “bitcoin is a waste of energy and isn’t real money” which is fine for an opinion piece but not cool for real journalism. I wonder if the author of this opinion would just cast a wallet key containing 1 or more real bitcoins in the rubbish or cash it out for the definite “real money” it is actuallly worth. The only thing I agree with is the energy waste and how PoS like Ethereum would be a better system. I wish the best of luck to [Data Slayer] and I truly hope he wins the lottery :)

    1. I don’t even know about the energy waste. sure the energy is consumed….but in effect bitcoin has created a global energy market, which means you can set up a huge solar or wind farm, and sink the excess power into bitcoin mining, effectively decreasing the price of energy on the other side of the planet because your power will be free while others pay market rates and thus mine/consume less. When mining produces less money than selling to grid, you sell to grid. Crazy eh?

        1. He’s not rationalizing. That’s literally how it works. In addition to btc mining making global money (and the ‘hardest’ money humanity has ever created) the most secure network in human history, which is its main purpose, Bitcoin mining has huge positive side benefits to society as he aleksclark scratched the surface of pointing out. Bitcoin mining solves all sorts of energy related problems for society. Its pretty crazy how beneficial bitcoin is for society even outside of its main benefit of being the best money humanity has ever had. It really is such a perfect system. No doubt will go down as one of the most important inventions of the century, considering both energy and money are two major problems this century and bitcoin fixes one of those problems while vastly improving the other.

          1. I totally agree and lets not forget how much energy fiat consumes with all of the hundreds of thousands of buildings used for banking and printing! Energy is spent on nonsense all the live long day… 3.5% of global energy is spent on porn while something as important as bitcoin, which spends .05% to secure the network is criticized. No one talks about that. Bitcoin will come up on top just like the internet did…it’s just a matter of time and too bad for those who wait.

          2. You Bitcoiners really are a cultish lot.

            No, Bitcoin doesn’t solve any energy related problems. Bitcoin doesn’t transmit energy. If you mine Bitcoin off-grid with renewable energy, you haven’t lowered the carbon footprint of the energy grid, you’ve just mined Bitcoin.

            Money is purely a social construct. Bitcoin doesn’t represent the value of the energy used to mine it – because that energy isn’t somehow stored in the Bitcoin, it’s already been lost. Bitcoin can be used as currency if it is a socially accepted unit of account. Try reading a bit wider than the Mises Institute for your understanding of economics.

            As for ‘the most secure network in human history’, the ‘security’ that Bitcoin mining provides only makes sense in the context of a permissionless ledger. Calling Bitcoin the most secure network in human history is tautological because most networks do not need to be fully permissionless and therefore do not need a method of permissionless security. It’s certainly not more secure from the perspective of the end user; it’s arguably less secure since if my Bitcoin wallet’s private key is stolen the consequences are worse than if my online banking login details or my debit/credit card details are stolen, and the only way to steal cash from me is to physically take it.

      1. The point is that crypto mining energy is wasted forever. Why not use excess power to actually produce something tangible. Something that actually lets you get your energy back. Be it in reusable form or processed commodity?

          1. No, that is a bad idea. If the work is useful for something other than securing the blockchain, you undermine the security of the blockchain, as someone may be incentivized by the other work, and use the same work to attack the chain at no cost. For instance, someone working at a pharmaceutical company renting supercomputer time to actually fold proteins for a drug his company is developing, could use that same work to double spend your coin in to oblivion.

        1. Cryptomining consumes energy (a huge lot of) that isn’t being used for goods production; it doesn’t contribute to creating jobs and keep the markets alive for everyone but a small group of investors who buy energy and mining equipment to make money that will be then invested in more energy and faster mining equipment, therefore also dictating the price of energy since they soon become the highest bidder.
          Energy prices skyrocketed because of the boom in mining, not because of Covid-19 or the Russian aggression in Ukraine.

          (Not trying to underestimate the effects of those two disasters in other contexts, just pointing out that energy – and some related goods – prices were already increasing before)

          1. Energy prices skyrocketed to kill the boom in crypto mining, not because of it IMO. Before the manufactured energy crisis you could easily turn a profit with a reasonably modern graphics card, all while securing an open and democratic reserve currency that can be used by anyone and was free of the disastrous (for the plebs) money printers that are robbing people every day.

          2. @Lrrr
            What profit are you talking about? Mined bitcoin is still a bitcoin.Do you mean profit in fiat? Why would that count if you are mining BTC? Why did not value of BTC go up if it was harder to get it?
            Could it be because it is not currency at all? After all, you can’t really buy much for BTC directly.

        2. It doesn’t produce something “tangible” but it does have value. The energy consumed drives the network that processes transactions. You’re not making a physical thing no, but you’re powering an economy. It’s the same as servers consuming energy to process your credit card transactions, bank transfers, stock trades, etc, except this one is publicly auditable and can’t be manipulated by bankers behind closed doors.

      2. Hello! The history behind this rationale (do power intensive thing in location A with cheap power and sell it to location B is just like generating cheap power in Location B) comes from the metal refining/recycling industry, especially Aluminum.

        However, aluminum is a lasting device with many uses. Bitcoin is wasted power which is used for scams, drugs, and money laundering.

          1. It doesn’t use the electrical capacity of a medium-sized country to do that though, and you at least get something physical to show for it.

            And nobody uses gold as a standard currency anymore, so your point is moot. It’s a product like anything else now. You might as well have said that digging up iron ore and melting it into bar-stock is wasteful by the same logic.

          2. “It doesn’t use the electrical capacity of a medium-sized country to do that though”

            World wide gold mining uses more energy than bitcoin mining, and the energy is much dirtier.

          3. “World wide gold mining uses more energy than bitcoin mining, and the energy is much dirtier.”

            More of that gold goes into making jewellery and electronics than making bullion and coins.

            Also if you’re comparing theoretical use cases your benchmark shouldn’t be Bitcoin’s energy use today, which is an arbitrary point in time, but what Bitcoin’s energy use would be if it actually achieved adoption as a global reserve currency to the exclusion of fiat currency.

            In that case (which isn’t going to happen BTW, but for the sake of argument) you’d be looking at 1 BTC being worth at least 100 times its current market price. Also if Bitcoin ever became that politically important there’s the risk of interested parties trying to attack the blockchain for reasons other than pure profit, and being willing to do it at a loss, making it even more expensive to protect the blockchain.

            Even in a scenario where Bitcoin doesn’t succeed in displacing fiat currency but its use grows alongside it (which also isn’t going to happen BTW, adoption is thankfully going backwards) you would still be looking at Bitcoin mining using many times more energy than today.

        1. How is that different than the US dollar or euro? USD’s value is backed by nothing except the status of the US and it’s significant military power. The amount of oil and blood that stains every dollar is a testament to the power that went into ” producing ” it.

          A lot of grid energy and literal fossil fuel goes into securing the value of the US dollar and that value does not even stick to it, it has to be traded for something scarce like real estate or used to create business for it to retain its value through time. Should we not make an even stronger critique on how fiat money works?

          Bitcoin’s utility and effectiveness as money is that it is independent of the nation state, trustless, finite, scarce, and secure. Using energy to provide this value (namely the capability of a global monetary base layer), is a tradeoff we were already making but in a more violent, centralized way.

          “Crypto” as a market of speculative coin trading is a waste. Bitcoin on the other hand is sound, hard money. The more energy backing it, the harder it is for any large actor like a nation state to co-opt or destroy it. It has all the game-theoretic properties a rational actor would want to create a more equitable world.

          That is it’s use.

          1. Bitcoin’s utility and effectiveness as money is almost zero. What can you buy for BTC directly anyway? I mean without BTC->USD->*stuff* middleman?
            And try to compare amount of transactions in fiat sector (bank-to-bank and payment cards). I did that for ledger size. Results are catastrophic and lead to centralisation.
            Anyway, do you keep full and up-to-date blockchain or do you use middle man?

            But bitcoin is not backed by energy. Or can you exchange your BTC for energy (destroy BTC to get the energy back)?
            It’s just a wasted energy.

        2. It’s essentially minting money it has no more or less value than you place on it. The us dollar is backed by what exactly? Nothing tangible ergo bit mining is just making another way to pay.

          1. Bombs. Big Bombs. Really Big Bombs. Seal Team Six. And the one the matters…

            75+ years of unimpeachable historical evidence supporting the widely know, unconfirmed, undenied, unacknowledged,
            strongly suggested, recently declassified, unredacted, openly mocked, vaguely implied, statement of fact.

            When it comes to the sources, methods, techniques, and technologies that drive capabilities of the United States you should assume that anything you know about is at least fifty years old. Take comfort knowing or strongly consider that there is a long, long list of things you don’t even know, you don’t know.

      1. I don’t think cashing out is the end game. If dollars become worthless, what would one cash out to? All major world currencies are being hyper inflated and will all crash eventually. Maybe BTC is the end game, or one of them. A means of exchange that is not controlled by a central government is very attractive.

          1. All commodities have a set price against some currency be it pound, euro, pesos or whatever is convenient in their region. Americans should not forget there is a whole world beyond their borders so it’s not always usd. That price equivalence is so that commodities can be bought and sold otherwise how would you buy/sell anything. Go to the grocery store and the rice doesn’t have a price tag. Does that make the rice imaginary or worthless. I understand that you think bitcoin is worthless to you but some of us buy and sell it and even mine it and then all going well even cash out at a profit in our local currency. Then use that money to buy rice. If only it had a price tag…

        1. “A means of exchange that is not controlled by a central government is very attractive.”

          Only to ancaps, literally nobody else has an issue with currency being backed by the government rather than private entities.

          1. Barely anyone is actually using Bitcoin in Argentina, evad. Black market USD is still a much more popular escape from the peso. And even those who do have Bitcoin are holding it like an asset rather than using it as a currency for the exchange of goods and services.

        2. I couldn’t agree more! The sooner responsibility for ‘money’ is taken out of the hands of inept or corrupt governments the better. Bitcoin is the beautiful application of anarchy for the greater good.

          1. LOL.

            Yeah dude, those crypto tech bros are the most honest upstanding dudes you ever find.

            Just ask, they tell you so while spending your money on cars & cocaine.

        3. I agree. Bitcoin’s true value is it is independent from the whims of a government or dictator. How many currencies have been devalued or eliminated, wiping out people’s savings. BTC value is it is decentralized and no one actor can control it. Only a fool wouldn’t keep .1 BTC in reserve. The arachic fiscal markets are on their last legs. A new tech is taking over. The Blockchain. Just give it a few more years. BTC worst case scenario will become digital art. The first ever digital currency. With a limited supply, one BTC could easily hit 100k.

          1. So you own NFTs too? Governments and dictators can use crypto as an anonymous and decentralized way to skirt sanctions. Crypto helps the bad actors more than it can help the victims. You must realize that. If everyone can use it, those with power will abuse it. Having some money does not guarentee an escape. People would leave broke if they could. This sort of fake virtue signaling is what causes people to detest crypto guys. Dude, you care more about the potential to make money off faux ‘digital art’ in a few years than you do about helping people. Read your comment if you don’t believe me. But whatever, that’s you.
            The people with the most money will have the most bitcoin. They will not mine, they will just buy and everyone will sell to them at a premium. If those in power really viewed crypto as a threat, they would just buy as much as possible and either shelve it or mess with it so much between themselves that it becomes orchestrated volatile.
            The first true test of crypto was the pandemic. Yeah, you didn’t lose half your money, bet.

    2. Mining Crypto is not an energy waste. In fact where I m we use waste energy for mining. We only use the overt energy that will be lost anyway. When towns need more power they turn down some miners to have the power for them. It is a big win for the townspeople to have revenue from the extra power there don’t need. The proof of stack like the cloud service that a problem for the environment because they can’t be turn off the event if the power is at is limited. I this day of age cloud services are the ones that use the most power. That includes the online login for software like Adobe or Microsoft. not only these facilities are power-hungry but all the extra web traffic that they make is big. If you do not use a computer in local mode and use cloud stuff don’t talk that you’re making a good choice for the energy department.

        1. You know that energy is neither created nor destroyed, right? In any case, whoever wants to generate or buy electricity should be free to do so without interference. You can do whatever you want with YOUR ENERGY.

          1. Energy available to do useful work most certainly is destroyed. Infact, in any closed system more of it MUST be destroyed than created. That’s why perpetual motion machines are deemed impossible. This is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. You can search “Gibbs Energy” for more details.

            But no, discovering and claiming over a few hundred years all of the fossile fuels available on earth which stored energy from sunlight for millions of years to build up, should not entitle the companies or people of a few generations to use them up at rates far faster than the rates they have been produced at.
            Companies that try to do so should not be free from interference, but should be systematically boycotted against.

        2. The energy used for mining usually isn’t in a place where it can be used for anything else. We have megawatts of wind power, but no industry. We burn off the excess mining and use the waste heat to sustain greenhouses. It’s difficult to productively use intermittent power.

        3. Like what? Intermittent excess energy is only going to get worse as we increasingly switch to renewable energy. You can store some of it in batteries or other energy storage systems, but the rest has no value and no use, and in fact, often generates *negative* grid prices; as thus wind turbines get feathered, solar panels turned off, because there is no demand, no “tangible something” to do with that energy, you would need to pay someome to actually use the energy to maintain grid stability. Mining allows you to generate money from that energy, energy that would otherwise either be wasted or not produced. Just like selling energy that you stored in a battery.

          1. “You can store some of it in batteries or other energy storage systems, but the rest”

            You’ve just skipped over the answer there. The answer is to increase our storage capacity, particularly the storage capacity of the energy grid itself. That will allow us to decarbonise more quickly.

            Incentivising renewable energy producers to do something with their energy that does not reduce energy use elsewhere in the economy does not help us decarbonise.

            Bitcoin mining is like a black hole that you can just dump more and more energy into for the exact same result, because of the difficulty adjustment. This has given you the illusion that it is a useful thing to do with excess intermittent energy.

            But there are other things you can do with excess intermittent energy that DO lower energy use elsewhere. Hydrogen production, for example. Or to heat hot water (while electricity is not the most efficient way to do this, it’s still a net positive if the electricity was going to go to waste anyway).

            Or even, if you want to use the energy for on-site computation, you just need to find a use-case that allows for the computation to be intermittent, and Bitcoin is not the only such use case.

            “Mining allows you to generate money from that energy”

            Only so long as society deems that Bitcoin has value. You’re making a circular argument there, though. Society should deem Bitcoin valuable because it can be mined with excess renewable energy, which is a good thing because society deems Bitcoin valuable. No, money is just a social construct, we can create money just by speaking it into existence, there is no need for it to be an energy intensive process.

          2. > we can create money just by speaking it into existence

            Indeed. Which is a blessing and a curse. At some point in time, someone will decide to solve economic problems by speaking more money in existence than is good for us. That’s why people invest in gold as a hedge. Bitcoin is digital gold.

    3. Humanity (and all life) is an exercise of “essentially wasting energy” if you’re cynical enough. Is crypto a good use of resources? I’d tend to say no (generally), but I also don’t like these unexamined dismissals based on very little thought or flexibility of thought.
      What is a good use of energy? What does one maximize? I hope the response isn’t just a modern pseudo-religious tenet. It’s a harder question than that. Any answer without force of will behind it should be ignored.

      1. You sound like the sort of guy who scoffs at trees for growing. Just a modest observation. More to the point: I like to write. I like creating and believing my work will live on long past my death. I like being able to surprise myself with a really good piece or story and then wondering where the hell did it come from? To me, for a number of reasons, that is a good use of energy. I try to maximize my writing as much as possible while balancing my marriage, my job, friendships and other aspects of life. It’s fulfilling for me and I love doing it, even though it is incredibly challenging and you need to make necessary sacrifices. You sometimes need to sacrifice bits of your life to breathe life into your works. It’s really quite simple; only you can dictate what constitutes a good use of your energy. An internet question is really pointless. You could say I’m an idiot for writing, as if I have any chance of becoming a world famous author or basking in the glory of literary immortality. Yeah, sure, but for me, I’ll spend my life trying and, even if I don’t get to that particular level, the effort spent, the person I have become because of that effort, will have been worth it. I have the ability to make the people in my life happy. Every life should start with that. That’s a really good use of your energy until you find a better one.

    4. Crypto currency isn’t real MONEY. This is fact. You cannot use it anywhere. It isn’t recognized as legal tender. Go to any retail setting in the world and ask them if they take bitcoin.. so few places take bitcoin it’s funny how anyone would question the legitimacy of the journalism here. Crypto right now is a speculative investment vehicle that novice investors are trying to push. Pump it all you want, Crypto is garbage as long as it isn’t accepted everywhere!!!

      1. Somehow your comment prompted a though: how many retail settings you could walk in these days and pay with gold or even cash money that is legal tender (in some other country)? Just the fact that some crypto currency isn’t accepted _everywhere_ does not necessarily make it garbage.

    1. At the moment the payout is 6.25BTC, or around $170k, in a year it’s halved, not sure when the next one is. They don’t use a pool, so atm they have a 1 in 2b chance of getting the whole $170k. Unless I’m misunderstanding, there is a new block being calculated every 10 minutes, or 6 times an hour. That gives
      1-(1-1/2000000000)^(24*6*365*400)
      Or around 1% chance of winning over 400 years (the first part is doing 1 minus 1 over 2b to get the chance of not winning – to get a bigger fraction, otherwise it all overflows and results in a zero chance – then the result of the exponentiation is subtracted from 1 again to get the chance of winning).

      So pretty much a waste of resources.

  2. Well all money is imaginary, but do you prefer:

    Imaginary value of pieces of paper that can be printed almost arbitrarily, has huge energy cost to make, has huge energy cost to secure, has huge energy cost to schlep around in armored trucks that have horrendous gas mileage, has huge energy cost in supporting infrastructure.

    Imaginary value of 21,000,000 mathematically unique units that can be subdivided as required, that has huge energy cost to secure and make which is all in one, which also pays for transferring it when required, includes it’s own base infrastructure, and further infrastructure for access/use/POS can have very modest energy cost, i.e. smartphone, tablet, laptop.

    Where the energy cost to support the former per 50 million people is about the same as that to support the latter per 8 Billion + people.

      1. No.

        That is current physical money usage, not historic, which was way worse when everyone had to cash their check weekly or get a cash pay packet. Don’t forget that you can use your eBanking as you like, and claim green props, but it’s still gonna trigger a truck driving round with physical cash at some point, deposits have to be covered by a minimum amount of physical representations of legal tender.

    1. >”Where the energy cost to support the former per 50 million people is about the same as that to support the latter per 8 Billion + people.”

      I disagree, you can’t claim Bitcoin is for 8 billion people because Bitcoin is not being used by the majority of people or in the majority of transactions. If it were, the value per coin (and therefore the amount of energy spent mining it) would be several orders of magnitude larger.

      A better comparison would be the comparison of gold’s energy cost to bitcoin.

      1. Yes, but it’s the first mainstream cryptocurrency. Honestly I hate all the speculation and trading, it has really destracted from cryptos use as a mechanism of exchange.

          1. Useful; permissionless, international payments. Both very small and large. (Believe it or not there are completely legal cases here not served by any other means)

            Technical; completely decentralized, trustless, immutable ledger. This is the breakthrough that bitcoin’s inventors solved. It’s pretty cool

    2. Printed arbitrarily vs subdivided as required means the same thing… or, in other words, there is no difference between the two. 21,000,000 is just crypto talk for infinite. 1 bitcoin works the same way as 21,000,000 bitcoins with your rationale.

      Honestly, if crypto were widespread and used as the majority, I honestly doubt you would have an energy argument to make. The concept of money is imaginary but the money itself is not imaginary. I don’t have the numbers on me right now, but I’m pretty sure spending cash money has a lower energy output than anything related to crypto. Also, you do need wifi or some other service to access this immutable network, correct? Generally, a system requiring more variables to function ends up becoming a cumbersome and easily replaceable system.

      It’s always curious to me why individuals on the internet who obviously do not care about people care so much about energy consumption? The former system represents energy being directed by countless individuals. You’re forgetting there are plenty of people behind all that energy. You make it sound like it’s all a naive system of waste rather than our reality built after years of trial and error. Like the concept of crypto is anything new. Like it’s not a 70s idea repackaged and sold to people born after the 70s. Come on. Crypto = arcade tokens. A tiny niche of people with a privileged interest. ⁷⁷⁷⁵³⁸⁵⁹-⁰ⁿ⁰ⁿ⁶¹

  3. It feels like the critics here are missing the beauty of this approach:

    Take an RPi, a miner dongle, a small battery and a small solar panel, put near a window/out in the garden, and have it randomly try 24×7 ‘forever’.

    Once you get past the cost of the hardware, it’s like a free life-time supply of bitcoin lottery tickets…

    These could make nice, geeky holiday presents for friends – off-grid lottery miners, couple them with a sufficiently geeky display on the HDMI port and you could have a real conversation piece!

      1. Yep it’s cool if presented as a lottery.

        Nobody yet pointed out that
        “Mining” is actually writing a page of the ledger, the Bitcoin chain, with embedded a set of requested transaction to settle, as validated from the nodes.
        To “mine” you have to run your full node.
        Who first gets the right to submit his compiled block is rewarded with 4-yearly halving q.ty of new bitcoins, plus the transaction fees set by the people transacting.

        It’s way far from mining let’s say gold.

        You don’t mine gold to sustain the gold standard, you mine gold to inflate the supply in your favor with no contribution to the system. There’s no need for more gold in the system, except if it’s yours.

        If people won’t validate transactions “mining” instead, i won’t be able to transact bitcoins.
        Or I could and should validate them with my Pi, sure.
        I won’t need it nor do it until there are petahashes of stuff working at Niagara falls or wherever.

        Want to “stop Bitcoin”?
        The best thing you can do for real, is to un-learn anything you know or think to, of it.

  4. All the talk of district heating I’m surprised that no one has put crypto mining + district heating together as a positive use case. Before the manufactured energy crisis I could mine crypto, turn a profit on all the electricity consumed, and heat my home without needing to use any gas! Win win

    1. Because using electricity for heating is inefficient. Using heat pumps is much better.
      In many cases converting gas to electricity to power heat pumps will get you more heat than burning the gas directly.
      (and in summer you can switch the direction to get cooling … though that wastes electricity)

      1. “In many cases converting gas to electricity to power heat pumps will get you more heat than burning the gas directly”
        That seems unpossible. Unless I’m misreading it and somehow and burning (is there any other practical way extracting energy from gas like fuel cells or something ??) to make electricity then using that as a heat source is possible with, really struggling here, negative efficiency?

        1. Nope, it’s totally real. Heat pumps can reach ~300% efficiency in ideal circumstances. It sounds counterintuitive, but it’ll begin to make sense when you consider that a heat pump doesn’t create heat, like burning fuel does. Rather, it moves heat. It harvests what heat energy there is in the cold outdoors, and moves it inside.

        2. The concise explanation is that the thermal worth of big temperature differences is more than of tiny temperature differences, so with two machines you can exploit that. All thermal machines operate between a hot side and a cold side. So if you use one machine to power the other machine, then if the first machine has a bigger temperature difference (like between a blue-hot gas flame and the winter air) but the other machine has a small temperature difference (like between the same air and the warm inside of a house) then the second machine has a very easy job and it can more than make up for the losses in the first machine.

  5. Given the odds in lotteries are worse than 1/(numbers of tickets sold) because multiple winners have to share only one prize money the logic of the Bitcoin lottery miner makes probably quite a good bit of entertainment. Lottery odds are much worse than they appear. After all entertainment is the only thing the majority of Lottery Ticket buyers get in return for their investment.

    1. There are lotteries with a 1/million chance (instead of 1/billion) of winning 6.5BTC (current block reward) in secondary prizes. Factoring in number of daily draws, power, hardware, and ticket costs, they end up being about the same.

  6. Given the odds in lotteries are worse than 1/(numbers of tickets sold) because multiple winners have to share only one prize money the logic of the Bitcoin lottery miner makes probably quite a good bit of entertainment. Lottery odds are much worse than they appear. After all entertainment is the only thing the majority of Lottery Ticket buyers get in return for their investment.

  7. I want to tile my house in PV cells that incorporate an ASIC on the back for crypto calculations, that also has a WiFi radio. When the house batteries and or load don’t need all of the currently available power it crunches bitcoin blocks.

      1. That is a general issue with PV cells unless they are floating on water, but you can also have active cooling as it is not wasted energy if it is surplus energy in the first place.

    1. I hope you’ll either continue dropping updates here or kindly link to another site/blog/forum/etc. where you are/will.

      Also, completely unrelated but if you happen to be named Scott and/or of Scottish heritage, points awarded for handle choice (no need to confirm either way, just wanted to put that out into the ether)

  8. Waste of time. Title is deceiving like there was a new use. BitCoin Lottery mining is a waste of time until it isn’t, but your odds of hitting it are so astronomical that you may as well play the real lottery!!! While it uses little power you are basically running calculations making the algorithm more difficult by the second and you will get nothing more time that you get anything. This article seems to have just been copied from something 15 years old already!!!

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