I have one of those USB sticks running on a Raspberry Pi, get right at 40Gh/s.  Yup odds are not good, but it also doesn't cost anything.

Congrats to whoever hit it.

 333MH/s, you can think of it as getting a single lottery ticket every 3 days.  I have a pair of Gridseed 5 chip units running slow so they don't generate too much heat. That gets me about 7Gh/s. That is like 7 lottery tickets every day.  Try not to estimate how long it will take on average to win. It isn't good. But there is a chance.

Thanks, I will try that.

Is there any way to specify the starting diff?

I am running old ASICs that get about 3.5Gh/s and it takes a couple of days to get a pair of shares over 10K.  I think you need 2 of them before it will adjust the diff down.

Yes I know accepted shares are just something to let me know it is working.

After it gets there, I think it adjusts the diff too low. It gets adjusted down to something like 3. Just getting it to 100 or so would allow an accepted share every few minutes.

Mark

Just playing with the numbers for bitcoin

Today the hashrate is 94.38 EH/s  Difficulty is 12.97T

Switching to engineering notation and digging out my sliderule.

94.38e18 hash rate gets us a hit every 10 minutes or 600 seconds.

94.38e18 * 600 = 56.6e21 hashs needed on average to hit solution

For those that do like to play the lottery, the odds of hitting the megamillions lottery is about 175 million to one.  So to get the same odds of hitting a block as hitting the lottery, you need:

56.6e21 / 175e06 = 323e12 hashes needed to get the same odds as buying one lottery ticket.

I have an old Gridseed 5 chip dual miner. I am running it very slow for various thermal issues, but I get about 3.5GH/s or 3.5e9 hashs per second.

323e12 / 3.5e9 = 92.3e3 seconds or 1.07 days.

So running the miner is the same as getting a lottery ticket every day. 

How long would I need to run on average to hit a block?

56.6e21 / 3.5e9 = 16.2e12 seconds or 512,000 years.

It shows the odds of hitting a lottery are really that bad.

Yes, I know hitting the lottery for millions of dollars is way more than hitting a block. Just looking at the odds of getting lucky.

I still buy lottery tickets on occasion.