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