A technophopes story, part 2

As we are reading anything Helium related, we found out about new suppliers that have been authorised to sell the miners, a new brand called Sensecap. There are a few company’s selling them so we need to set up an account with all of them to even be in with a chance of buying one. There will be a sale on 1 day as there is very limited stock but one of the company’s say they take Visa, nice how easy is that. So we wait patiently for the day of the sale. The day arrives and we have laptops, phones and of course pen and paper at the ready, all I have to do is put the miners in the basket and click buy. I am normally quite good at that. There is a countdown on the screen until the site opens 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Go......

I get as far as inputting our address, the site crashes, David got slightly further he got to the payment screen (which is now most definitely not Visa). It is a bank transfer only but you need the address of the bank in South Africa to send the money too. The site crashes again. We send a Tweet......well not me I have no idea how to send a tweet! Has the order gone through? We don’t know so we wait, we try to phone to see if our order went through, no answer. We are watching the laptops, nothing. Then the news came that there were only 50 miners and they had gone in seconds! Thousands of people trying to buy them but this company only sold to the people in South Africa although no one knew that until after. They say they will have a sale for Europe customers in a couple of weeks. Wait and be patient.

The next sale

So the day comes again for another sale of miners, it was much the same as the last time, site crashes, payment details in site crashes, this time though the tweet pays off and our order has been manually processed. We finally have some miners that should arrive in weeks instead of months, just wait for an order confirmation. The fact that these miners are in stock is even more important now as the Bobcats we ordered earlier have now changed from 12- 20 weeks to 20+ weeks.

Now only a few days later there are more sales of Sensecaps from different suppliers, they say they have learnt from other sales where sites have crashed from thousands of people logging in to buy a limited amount of miners, even though the maximum number you can order is 3. They have set up a system where you buy a voucher first, you can only buy the voucher with HNT, you then go to another site to order which you can only do if you have a voucher and pay the balance with PayPal

Well we are ready to try this new way of buying miners. The day before we do a small test to buy some HNT, that works and does not take too long so again we buy more to make up the amount we need to buy the voucher, this takes a lot longer and it only just goes through by the next morning, the morning of the sale.

We are ready, we are going to try from both companies, both sales start at the same time, 1 company is Seeed, and 1 is Officini. We have laptops ready, phones ready and of course I have pen and paper!

As soon as 9 o’clock comes we click and we are in the queue for Seeed. We are number 0143 in line; we do the maths, if everyone orders the maximum of 3 there won’t be enough! They also tell you the waiting time is 50 minutes; we don’t take our eyes off the screen.

At the same time I am scrawling my name, address, country and a love heart on a piece of paper, while saying get the camera ready,’ quick take a picture’. I could see the look of confusion on David’s face but do not want to waste time explaining that the Italian site wants a photograph of a handwritten note emailed to them to be in with a chance of buying just one of their miners. They only have 100 so it is 1 per person

. Well the note has been emailed but we hear nothing. Back to Seeed, after more waiting we are in, we now have to buy the 3 vouchers. We have to scan the QR code that is on the phone, with the phone! Think, think, ok take a screenshot then scan that with the phone (note to self at that moment, I must get myself a modern phone!). You try to work fast knowing that time is against you yet again, but we have done it, we have 3 vouchers we must check at least 3 times that we do actually have them. Once you get the vouchers you have 4 hours to use them or you lose that money, so on to the next site to pay the balance.  It gets messy now.

The site crashes again and again, the 4 hour time limit is going down and down, we are nervous again, sweaty palms again, we keep trying, still crashing. We look at tweets, some have managed to pay, but the tweets are coming in faster than I can read them. People are asking for help, what should they do? There has been no official comment from the company, people are worried they are going to loose their money, the hours pass and we now have 1 hour left. Finally something from the company they say they are having a meeting and that their servers are busy. We have heard nothing from the Italian site so we are resigned to the fact that we won’t get that one.

Then some good news the 4 hour deadline for the vouchers to be used has been cancelled and they will honour all vouchers (huge sigh of relief from both of us) we are not panicking now so try again to pay, this time it actually goes through and we get a confirmation that we have paid. We have been at our laptops for 7 hours! We have done it though and these miners should be with us in weeks instead of months.

So we carry on with the rest of our day and a few hours later when checking Emails I see one that asks me to type a number into a box, I read it 3 times before I realise it is from Italy and my little drawing has paid off, so we put the number in the box and pay by visa in just minutes. We were elated that we had managed to get just 1 from the 100 they had and that it was the easiest one to pay for.

It is July, we have now placed orders and paid for 17 miners and we are expecting our first delivery in August (hopefully before the halving, but more about that later) we have taken a huge risk but we are 100% committed and now broke. We have put everything we have into this our savings, our contingency cash fund, the lot. We are normally I would say risk adverse; I wonder if we are having a mid life crisis while I count the change pot to see how much is in it.

Part 3 to follow..........................