What is a Bitcoin lottery miner?

The real thing

Bitcoin miners compete to add the next block to the blockchain, and the winner receives the block subsidy (3.125 BTC since April 2024) plus transaction fees. Industrial miners run huge farms and share rewards through pools. A lottery miner is the opposite: a tiny, cheap, low-power device, often a few dozen dollars, that mines alone. If, by luck, it finds a valid block, the owner gets the entire reward. Otherwise, it earns nothing.

Hobbyists call this "lottery mining" because the maths is a lottery: a small, steady cost, an extremely small chance each day, and a very large prize. The community around devices such as the Bitaxe and the NerdMiner is open-source, friendly and mostly in it for the tinkering and the long-shot hope.

How the device works

1. 1You buy or build a small miner: an ESP32-based NerdMiner or an ASIC-based Bitaxe.
2. 2You connect it to your Wi-Fi and configure a solo mining pool and your own Bitcoin address.
3. 3The device hashes continuously, sending any valid share to the pool.
4. 4If one of its hashes meets the network's target, the pool submits the block and pays the reward to your address.

The device never needs your wallet's recovery phrase. It needs only a receiving address.

The odds in one sentence

Your chance of finding a block is your hashrate divided by the whole network's hashrate, roughly 960 exahashes per second today. A device doing about 1 TH/s has around a 1 in 6.7 million chance each day, and a NerdMiner has odds many thousands of times worse. Our Bitcoin lottery miner odds calculator shows your own numbers from the live network figure.

What it costs

A NerdMiner draws about a watt, while a Bitaxe draws roughly 12 to 20 watts. At $0.15 per kWh, a Bitaxe costs about $20 to $25 a year in electricity, plus the purchase price. The cost is the ticket price, and the expected income from a small device is below it.

The scams that use the name

If it sounds like free money, it is a scam. See our guide to crypto lottery scams and red flags.

• Phone apps that claim to "mine Bitcoin" on your phone and pay out rewards. Real mining needs dedicated hardware.
• Websites asking you to deposit crypto into a "lottery mining pool" with guaranteed returns.
• "Bitcoin lottery miner" software promising to find old wallets with balances.
• Cloud mining contracts with fixed daily profits.
• Anyone asking for your recovery phrase.

Lottery mining vs a normal lottery

Both are lotteries. In a normal lottery, your ticket costs a fixed amount per draw, and the prize pool is funded by other players. In lottery mining, the prize is a newly created reward funded by the Bitcoin protocol, and your cost is electricity, paid continuously. See the full complete guide to Bitcoin lottery mining for the numbers and the comparison with a weekly draw.

Example: what an owner sees on the dashboard

After setting up a Bitaxe on a solo pool, the owner sees a hashrate near 1 TH/s, a "best share" number that records the closest the device has come to a valid block so far, and a count of accepted shares. Best share values look impressive, but they are far from the block threshold. The owner watches the "best difficulty" rise slowly over months, like a high score. The dashboard is fun, and it is not a progress bar: a block is either found or it is not.

Is it for you?

1. 1You like hardware, firmware and open-source projects.
2. 2You can afford a small recurring cost and the hardware.
3. 3You understand that the expected result is nothing.
4. 4You will keep your recovery phrase offline and away from the device.