Which of these will take me more lifetimes?

[mootinator]

Solo mining a single block on a USB Block Erupter or validating the existing blockchain on a Raspberry Pi.

[fattypig]

Solo mining a single block on a USB Block Erupter or validating the existing blockchain on a Raspberry Pi.

My guess would be solo mining a single block on a USB Block Erupter

[BobMarley]

Validating the blockchain

[mootinator]

Turns out using 8.05 instead of whatever the ancient version was in the debian repo helps a lot. 

[hulk]

My wild guess would be validating the existing blockchain on a Raspberry Pi. Do you have an answer for your question?

[mootinator]

My wild guess would be validating the existing blockchain on a Raspberry Pi. Do you have an answer for your question?

The pi is at block height 194657 since 12 hours ago, is doing about 1 block/second now and has processed about 2.5GB. It should finish in about 43 hours at the current rate. It seemed to slow down a lot around block height 130000 with the old version.

So, I'm going to go with mining a block being likely to take longer by a few orders of magnitude =)