The Lucky Miner Solo Miner LV07 is electronic waste / maybe a scam

Numerous devices for solo mining are currently being sold, including, for example, the “modern” Lucky Miner LV07 with a hash rate of 1 TH/s. This miner is said to contain two ASIC chips from Bitmain.

I have been working in IT and the blockchain sector for a very long time and naturally wanted to get myself a small solo miner. A hashrate of 1 TH/s seemed sufficient to me, as the chance of block rewards would then be around 1:13798 per year.

After numerous tests, however, I have come to the conclusion that many of these devices – especially the Lucky Miners – will almost never receive a block reward. In my opinion, many of these devices are simply junk and nothing more than a scam.

Why will the Lucky Miner almost never receive a block reward?

Miners try to find a block with a matching hash value. The matching hash value is determined by the current difficulty of the network and is constantly adjusted. The aim of the network is to find a block with a matching hash value only every 10 minutes.

The current difficulty level of the Bitcoin network is 101646843652790 or 101.65 T (the T has nothing in common with the hash rate).

For a normal pool with FPPS, a pool difficulty of 256000 or 500000 is usually set.

This pool difficulty level informs a miner that it should only transmit the result found (hash value for a block) to the pool in the form of a “share” if the difficulty level is above 256000 or 500000. In this way, the pool attempts to reduce the network load between the pool and the miners and to update the hashrate more frequently.

However, a result or a “share” with a difficulty level of e.g. 1000000 can never achieve a block reward, because the difficulty level is below that of the entire network (here 101646843652790).

Lucky Miner and similar devices are often operated on so-called “low-difficulty pools” with a pool difficulty of only 10000. This is because the Lucky Miner produces extremely low or poor results. If the difficulty level were very high, it would take half an eternity for the hashrate to update and users would be “confused”, to put it mildly.

I have tested my Lucky Miner LV07 extensively in standard mode.

Here we see a “Nonce Difficulty” of just 2648.

Even after 15 hours, not a single result or “share” with a difficulty of more than 256000 has been found. Instead, we only achieve results between 400 and 4000, and in rare exceptional cases even over 10000 or over 50000.

For comparison: The Avalon Nano 3 had a result of 118000 after just 2 minutes, a result of 3933419 after 18 minutes and a result of 40080283 after 46 minutes.

Compared to the required level of difficulty of the network, the performance of the Lucky Miner is completely meaningless.

To put it another way, we might have been able to find a block with it 10 years ago, but nowadays that is almost impossible.

Also very amusing: even in a pool with a difficulty of at least 256000, the Lucky Miner shows that it has found 1 share directly after a restart, which is not true.

The calculated chances based on the hashrate(!) are also wrong, because the chips simply deliver extremely poor results, endlessly far below the average.

This is either due to the firmware, defective chips or perhaps they are not even genuine ASIC chips from Bitmain(?). In any case, the device in this state is not much more than scrap in my opinion.

I also searched the internet for screenshots and the same bad results were there. I would be very happy to hear about your results in the comments.

For comparison, I tested real ASIC miners, including the Antminer T21, S21 Pro, S21 and S19 Pro.

Avalon Nano 3 after 25 minutes in low mode with 2 TH/s in connection with a normal pool with a pool start difficulty of 256000:

In addition, I also tested the Canaan Avalon Nano 3 Solo Miner as a promising replacement.

I would like to extrapolate and compare the results in a table:

Here we can see very clearly that the Avalon Nano 3 works correctly, whereas the Lucky Miner LV07 does not.

I would also like to add to the pool difficulty that if the miner does not find a share with 256k for a long time, the pool lowers the difficulty from time to time to 128k, 64k (and even then the Lucky Miner has not found a suitable result).

In the end, a comparison with other ASIC miners confirms that there is something wrong with the Lucky Miner LV07.

In the graphic below we see that after about a day a “best share” with a difficulty of 95702139 was found. Which is an acceptable normal value for a SHA256 ASIC miner.

Fortunately, the Canaan Avalon Nano 3 seems to be a very good alternative, as this miner at least achieves normal results and therefore offers a realistic chance of being “lucky” and finding a “winning block”.