Quote from: blickbox on October 19, 2017, 12:06:18 PM

I don't understand the purpose of these mini-miners (USB dongles etc). The metals on the circuit boards are probably worth more than it's possible to mine, so profit is obviously not the purpose? What am I missing? Are people really putting these to work for $1 a year, and losses in electricity?

There are several purposes for such a mining device:

Some of these usbminers were once profitable (albeit, this is no longer the case)
They make great learning tools
They can be used for testing, for example when you're developing new pool software
They can be used as lotto mining devices (altough the odds of hitting a block are really low)
They can be used to insta-mine a new altcoin
They can be used as a conversation starter, for example: if one of your friends sees a comaq's flashing light and asks what that's for, you can start a conversation about bitcoin
They do quite well on some testnets, not bitcoin's testnet specifically, but other ones