Helium Miner results suffer from bitcoin slide; how to cash out?

My analysis last week assumed the $HNT price at $18 after five years, but this week it's gone in the wrong direction, right now $13.72. 

Also it looks like I might have done better with a Bobcat Miner ... I will probably get another one in a few weeks and see if that's true or not.

As for cashing out ... I found it a little confusing; there's a "wallet" in your Helium mobile app that shows 0 dollars (plus your $HNT holding in tiny type) until you sign up with another crypto service like Crypto.com or Coinbase.

Here's a YouTube video that explains it pretty well, I thought:

The helium price has ticked down a bit more: $13.62, so right now my $HNT stake is worth $7.93. Whee!

Daylight Savings Time: how to handle it from here

 Miracle of miracles: the Sunshine Protection Act passed the U.S. Senate! Unanimously! 

So it should sail through the house and be on Joe Biden's desk for his signature any day now, right?

Not so fast ... all of a sudden a bunch of whiny sleep experts and others have come out saying things like:

• "We've evolved to be synchronized with daylight, so we should really be focusing on staying on Standard Time, not Daylight Time!"
• Melatonin only works when it's getting dark, so this will mess up sleep!
• "Little children will have to go to school in the dark in the winter! This is baaaad!"

So to keep us from missing the opportunity to get this done ... I propose the Light Up All the Little Kids Waiting for the Bus rider for this bill. Since the last time we tried this (Nixon administration), there have emerged a bunch of cheap LED headbands:

This one is $19.99 from Amazon ...

Let's allocate enough money ($100 million?) to get one of this for any little child who wants one.

OK? Let's not miss this opportunity!

Week 2: Miner gets to work!

My Helium miner started producing a trickle of the $HNT token it produces. So far I've made 0.41 $HNT, which is worth $7.22 at the current $HNT price of $17.62.

This shows one factor to consider: $HNT was about $24 when I started looking at this about a month ago, which would have made my little snippet worth $9.84.

Oh well; looks like $HNT pretty closely tracks Bitcoin, which is down with the rest of the stock market over the next month.

How far away is my breakeven point? Clearly this can't be predicted with any precision, as the $HNT price could go anywhere at any time. So I'm going to just assume $18. I've been generating $HNT for a week now (the miner was "syncing" for a few days until then.

So if the mining rig cost $585 and it makes $7.38 per week, that makes the breakeven point 79+ weeks away.

Let's go out 5 years with the same assumptions:

7.38 x 52.5 x 5 = $1937.250.

That's $1352 or so when subtracting out the capital cost. Not bad!

Also:

•  I'm neglecting Internet and electricity cost ... both are tiny.
• I'm assuming the hardware is reliable enough to run without a glitch for 5+ years

Next week I'll figure out how to convert the $HNT into real $$$ and move them from my virtual wallet to my real wallet  and will post the details here! See you then.

Week 1: Helium Miner installed and syncing

 I received the Helium network miner yesterday and got it installed (see below).

The helium network map looks pretty saturated with hotspot nodes:

But in my (new) neighborhood, not so much; there are my new one and two more visible.

I may be able to get more range by moving my miner up ... we do live near the bottom of a pretty steep hill, which may be blocking some signals, I guess ...

Payments are determined by the number of nodes you can reach and how capable/powerful those nodes are. So I am motivated to increase my node's visibility on the network if I can do that without too much trouble.

Helium apparently uses '3 words' addressing ... my node's ID is quite festive:

                            Bubbly Beige Ant

Helium is based on blockchain technology, which is the basic idea behind bitcoin. My node is still "syncing" with the blockchain so hasn't started earning money yet.

Anonymity reigns ... I of course had to give my name and address for shipment and payment of the miner, but Helium doesn't ask for any of that to register you on its network. It has a 12-word password scheme that's generated when you log in that's like a Bitcoin password but more easily readable. Make sure you keep a record of it!

And make sure that your local node is up and listening before you assume it's registered. I goofed on this to start with ... it connects with your phone via bluetooth to start, but bluetooth is only active for the first 10 minutes it's up. So I had to press the pairing button to wake it up and then I got the node set up as Bubbly Beige Ant.

So: still down the $587.87 capital cost of this box, plus a smidgen of electricity.

More next week!

Crypto mining that's socially useful ... and can make a bit of money too!

I recently read a book on the background and the highly dysfunctional team behind Ethereum, one of the leading crypto "coins":

 

Some of the principals behind this coin made boatloads of money. I missed the whole crypto investment thing until I bought $5 worth of Ethereum and $5 worth of bitcoin several months ago via the Webull app. My account is up 52% from inception in early 2021 ... but current value is $222.06: not a life-changing amount.

The New York Times had an article a couple of months ago about a socially useful application of crypto mining. 

I recently moved into a more densely populated area that it seemed to make sense for me to try this, so this week I took the first step of buying the equipment. It was $587.87 and will be here soon.

I'll update the blog every week on my results on this project; watch this space!