How do USB miners actually work for Bitcoin?

When I first saw that pic, I thought it was some wallet. But turns out it’s mining hardware? How does it actually work?

Yeah, USB miners are still a thing. Just plug them into a USB port, fire up the mining software like cgminer, and boom, you’re mining. But honestly, they're not great performance-wise. Most never pay for themselves.

That looks like an ASICminer Block Erupter, not the newpac. There are a few USB miners like Block Erupter, Newpac, Compac F, and Antminer U1. But I think only Newpac and Compac F are still on sale. If you want to get into USB mining, check out the GekkoScience NewPac thread for more info.

You forgot Sidehack's other sticks! The original Compac and the TwoPac with S3 chips. Compac had one chip, TwoPac had, surprise, two chips. And yeah, that’s definitely a Block Erupter. They were decent back in the day, but now they’re super inefficient. The best one now is Sidehack’s Compac-F, which does over 300GHs on under 15 watts.

It worked pretty well, like 333Mhash at just 2.5 watts. My GPU rig was doing 500Mhash at 385 watts. I still have 74 of them, but honestly, I should've just kept the Bitcoin I spent on them.