Helium mining update, 1 year in.

Helium mining update, 1 Year in.

By crypto newbie mom | A foray into crypto, A technophobes journey | 3 Aug 2022

Good morning

I have been thinking about this post for a long time, there were days when i thought i could not be objective and did not want to just be negative about our Helium project and how it is doing. It was almost a year ago when our first miners arrived, so it is time for an update. 

 Since i posted my diary of us setting up our network of Helium miners so much has happened or changed with the network. In my opinion, not a lot of changes instigated by Helium have been of any benefit to the hotspot owners.

NOVA LABS

Helium Inc., the corporate entity that we founded in 2013, has renamed to Nova Labs. With this name change, we aim to provide a clearer distinction between our corporate entity and the open-sourced Helium Network that is owned and operated by the people.

5G

When Helium announced that they were adding 5G to the network, they brought out new documentation detailing how they wanted to split the tokens you earn depending on whether you were  mining with the new 5G hotspots or the lorawan hotspots.

This documentation was completely above me and after reading it twice i was still none the wiser. It turns out i was not the only one, as when watching videos to try and understand if nobody could really put it into laymens terms as it was so complex.

Helium proposed for 5G miners to earn MOBILE tokens and lorawan miners to earn IOT tokens but the original HNT token will remain unchanged. These tokens will preserve their use and value even after the IOT and MOBILE tokens have been launched. This is due to happen in August this year.

MOBILE and IOT tokens can be swapped for HNT according to the holders’ preferences. Helium said that this would be similar to exchanging fiat currencies like the US dollar for gold. However, this process will not work for those who want to swap the HNT back for MOBILE and IOT.

Now, there was going to be a vote for these changes.

As the developers, validators and VC's have so many HNT ( votes are calculated on the HNT tokens you hold in your wallet!). That It seems to me  and many others (looking at comments on social media), to be a pointless exercise and many people i know do not even bother voting anymore.

As you can see below, the average HNT from the people wanting to pass the proposal is 2,437 HNT and the average for each vote against was 211 HNT. With over 11 times HNT on each wallet, its impossible to have a fair vote.

5G HOTSPOTS

The 5G-Ready Miner is the first omni-protocol miner for the Helium Network. It will mine HNT for providing LoRa® coverage, but is also expandable with a certified CBRS antenna (and later WiFi access points) to mine cellular traffic.

Mining MOBILE and providing 5G coverage requires a 5G Hotspot and one or more compatible CBRS Small Cell Radios. These components can be purchased as a bundle or separately. All 5G Hotspots must be online and registered in the SAS (Spectrum Access System) maintained by the FCC to earn MOBILE rewards.

LIGHT HOTSPOTS

So before all these changes were brought in there was a massive update to the system due to the fact that Helium had also brought out light hotspots (These would only transfer data packets, not the proof of coverage and witnessing that the full hotspots do). The update would remove the need for hotspots to store blockchain data and therefore be more efficient.

This update took at least a month and in that time there were many days of the blockchain being halted, many days of miners just going offline for days and very little to no rewards. It is also fair to say that the rewards have now not improved. Proof of coverage rewards are less frequent and the production of blocks was reduced to lessen  the load on the blockchain ( a skeptical person would say it does not get boosted back).

MULTI MINING

At the moment a few hotspot manufacturers are looking at introducing software for the helium miners in order for them to mine additional tokens/coins.(not the ones we have though!) So people may be able to earn tokens such as Pre search tokens or Mysterium as well as the new IOT token, although i have seen any new news on this option yet.

HOW HAS THIS EFFECTED US?

Well as with everything else, the price of HNT has dropped from its all time high of $55.22 in November and down to this years all time low of $6.59, we have seen some improvement and it now hovers between $8 -$9. As we are in a bear market, the token has followed bitcoins general trend.

There were times where our earnings from the hotspots barely covered the host fees and this was a very worrying time for us, none of our set ups are just 'in a window' they all have antenna upgrades, cable upgrades to LMR 400, some are on towers and one is on top of a 200 mtr mountain (we did put the effort in). We are aware that if this decline contiues we may have to make a decision on reducing the number of our Helium hosts. 

To try and reduce the losses and earn more tokens we started trading our HNT, buying low and selling high to gain a little, im not talking hundreds here though, we dabbled with just 15 HNT at a time. David has traded before so was more knowledgeable on the in's and out's, i had never traded before so i had yet again spent a lot of time researching. I do however follow the price action avidly so i was quite good (even if i do say so myself) at predicting the highs and lows for David to set up the buy and sells. (teamwork makes the dreamwork).

The price of HNT has risen a little at the moment so we are currently making a small profit month to month but we are down a good 50% on the amount of tokens we earned at the start of the project. (To be fair you could not buy a miner in Europe untill 6 months after the USA. This is also the case if we wanted to buy the 5G version, we will have to wait a further 6 months at least, by which time the rewards will have been reduced).

ROI

Have we made back our initial investment? Well the answer to this is NO. If we had still been receiving the same amount of HNT as we did when we started with, then a rough timeline for ROI would have been this September as it stands now it will be March if the amount of HNT we earn does not go down any more. I would like to think that the price of the token will go up in the future and therefore this senario will not look so bleak. I like to have in my head a worst case senario as well as a best case senario.

OveralI we are a little bit dissapointed in how things are going if i am honest, but we have a plan and we will have to wait and see how it plays out. We are HODLing at least  90% of our tokens and the rest have been used to invest in other projects. We have been very passionate about our little network of hotspots and it was really exciting watching it grow and hopefully it will all work out well.

We hope in the future that it will rise up like a Helium balloon!

So i am sorry to say we are not Helium millionaires yet lol but still working on it ..............

As always, thank you for reading and feel free to comment.

Have a great day.

Previously published on PublishOx