Helium miners

[tandeminvest]

Curious others thoughts on helium and helium miners.

I have my overall healthy cynicism for crypto, certainly feel that there are many fools chasing the dream of quimillions and most will loose most of not all that was invested. That being said, I do think that crypto is here to stay and certain "coins" will survive in the long run. How/what you exchange them for is up for debate, and the financial regulation on them will continue to make things quite complcated.

Regarding the Helium network, at least this token, and "miner" has a purpose, other than proving to friends how much money you can spend on a PC/GPU, or blow on past generation ASICs.

It seems to be an actual miner with a functional purpose, as opposed to a big swinging dick game.

What are other's thoughts? Good, bad or otherwise?

I am talking specifically about the mining piece, not trading on the "currency" itself, although one would think there should be a natural appreciation in the currency as the network develops and more users utilize the capacity.

Happy to entertain conspiracy theories, but unless you are hiding behind multiple P2P proxies, VPNs, and have no "smart" TVs, or cell phones in your house/on your compound I think the privacy argument is relatively moot with proper network configuration.

[Robotron2k84]

Helium really isn’t crypto and really isn’t an investment. It’s a token and use-based payment system based on how much traffic goes through your device. The people using the network buy tokens (helium) with other currency to access your device and you get those tokens based on the amount of traffic you host. You then convert the tokens into some other currency.

The goals of the network are somewhat nebulous and some have hinted that this is a Chinese front to wire up a parallel surveillance network inside of the US that is off-grid of the main internet.

The hotspots only come from China and are not open-source.

Generally, though, if crypto is here to stay, then we have a serious problem of thermodynamic proportions. The amount of energy required to compute, mine and commit to block chains increases geometrically every few months.

At the current rate of adoption, crypto would consume all the produced electricity on Earth by 2040.

[edgerly779]

My son has several scattered around and has done well. I am in a stock that is involved with that and have done well. They were 400 bucks and get right away now 1k and wait months.

[tandeminvest]

edgerly779:

Would be interested to know your son's earnings. Obviously it's location and antenna dependent but it seems to be working fairly well for some folks.

I am hosting quite a few for someone who bought them early on, but only receiving 30% of the HNT earning, still not bad for doing very little.

That being said I was just offered a large batch of SenseCaps for around $950 each. Debating if I pull the trigger, to your point they are essentially going for $1000 if you can get them directly or $1200 via others. Sounds like current pricing on primers!

[tandeminvest]

Helium is a bit different, in my view.

It can be traded like Bitcoin, or you can "mine" it like bitcoin, as in "create" your own rather than just buy/sell/hold.

It's different in that unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum the mining is not based on "proof of work", which is creating much of the power consumption and heat issues you mention at the bottom of your post.

Not all crypto wastes power or hard drive space.

Security concerns aside (which apply to almost any device in your home network) at least Helium actually provides some use.

Inside the Helium miner is a common off the shelf "computer" a RaspberryPi, with a card for the Lorawan protocol. The operating system is Linux, and the software, drivers, for the Lorwan are widely available - outside of the Helium network.

The Lorwan standard is actually quite interesting and is being used for industrial device monitoring to fleet vehicle tracking and management.

Helium, and other commercial networks allow business users to extract data from these devices on a wide area bases, without having to have their own extensive network.

Clearly a healthy dose of scrutiny is due of all this tech, but the fact that we are posting on this bb unfortunately means we have succumb to the overlords of folks that make our networking devices. We have very little control or visibility in to what lies inside the chips in our routers, modems, connected tvs, and cell phones.

[crufflers]

Curious others thoughts on helium and helium miners.

My thoughts are that if you order one, you may never receive it.

[tandeminvest]

My thoughts are that if you order one, you may never receive it.

[crufflers]

Mine should be here any day... two or three. At this point I can't even remember how many.

[tandeminvest]

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[tandeminvest]

[crufflers]

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CALCHIP RAKS if I recall correctly. I have aged a lot since I ordered.

[crufflers]

Celebrate for XRP @ 1.26 and BTC over 65k tonight.

[deerdeerdeer]

Best crypto coin to mine on the side?

I was wondering what is the best software and what is the best crypto coin to mine on the side?

[crufflers]

Probably Ethereum

https://whattomine.com/

Whether you pool mine directly with something like T-rex miner via Ethermine, or convert hash power mining Eth and get paid in BTC with Nicehash Quickminer. Pick what you like best. If you look at whatomine, the top TWO are Ethereum ETHASH and NICEHASH ETHASH.
Nice Has been listed at 96% or so of what you make on a direct miner.

I would say that in REALITY especially for a new miner, NICEHASH can ACTUALLY be significantly more profitable since the newish Quickminer is safer, stable, and also does the memory overclock very well for you. OPTIMIZE on efficient or medium and chances are that's putting your GPU on track to mine faster than you could do it yourself in Afterburner. IMHO. Now if you absolutely want to pile up Ethereum (not Bitcoin), pick a dedicated miner exe and pool.

If you want to mess around with various coin that you cannot directly mine... UNMINEABLE is really fun. Always use T-rex or similar and setup a bat file for the coin you want. I "mine" XRP, SHIB, DOGE, etc... with UNMINEABLE sometimes. Basically it will pay you for your hashpower in whatever coin you mine via the UNMINEABLE pool. Probably the lowest profit approach, but fun and sometimes if you pick something volatile AF like SHIB it is very profitable depending on timing - like you mine $50 worth and then two weeks later it is worth $600, hahah.

[tandeminvest]

I like Ethereum the best other than Helium, which is limited by needing multiple geographically diverse locations. That being said, even at $1k for the Helium miner I think the ROI is quicker than building an Ethereum rig. You can always do both and since Helium is such low power you can set it and forget it without hoping Ethereum will payoff in the short term.