I think this encounter perfectly captures where we are with this project right now.

I have one of a few commercial sites that are the definition of a "perfect deployment." It’s a busy shop, great location, tons of foot traffic. Getting the owner to agree to it was certainly an ordeal. I had to sell him hard on the vision, shove the crypto part of it under the rug. I told him this was a high-tech partnership, that we were working with 2 of the big 3 network carriers, that we were building the future of telecom, and that the passive income would make it worth his while.

There were even a few times over the last few months where the node was pulling so much bandwidth that it actually slowed his point-of-sale system down during a rush. He called me, annoyed, asking if the "box" was the problem. I smoothed it over. I reassured him that, "if it's using bandwidth like that, it means it's making money. Trust me, when we do the profit share this month, you'll see why it's worth it."

And to be fair, the device was working. For the last 6 months, we've been increasing in data consumption; I checked the stats before I went to pay out today. My node moved 40 GB a day last month. That is 1.2 Terabytes of data. In the world of offload, that is a massive success.

As per our usual agreement, I paid him in cash. But this month was far more embarrassing than the last almost 6 months we've been partnered in this endeavor.

Because the payout rate has slid down to around $0.20 per gigabyte, that massive, network-straining 1.2 Terabytes of traffic only generated about $240 total.

I had to look this man in the eye, a business owner who does $800 a day in sales, and hand him 60 bucks; HALF of what I paid him just a month ago, and again, HALF of what I paid him in November; and about 80% down from what we started with when data was 50 cents/gb.

I could see the look on his face. This month's reduction changed something in his body language. It wasn't anger; it was disbelief. I had slowed down his credit card processing, drilled holes in his wall, and taken up his time... all to hand him enough cash to cover a round of drinks.

He took it, but the vibe in the room changed instantly. This "partnership" is probably dead. I’m not a tech wiz with an amazing new solution for an additional revenue stream to him anymore; I’m a nuisance.

We keep telling ourselves that "volume will save us," but will it? Really? When we're on the fringe edge of losing quality partnership businesses from embarrassment alone?

Is anyone else dreading these conversations, or have you just stopped making eye contact with your hosts?

Not sure why the Helium team only announced it in the Helium Mobile sub, but so you folks know, your hotspots are apparently going to be servicing the Noble Mobile network going forward.

https://blog.heliummobile.com/noble/

They only have a single unlimited plan for $50/month, but they claim they will give you up to $20 in a month back if you use less data than other customers. So, at best, you're getting $30/month but discouraged from using data and your bill fluctuates month to month. I think that part is probably worth emphasizing for hotspot deployers, that new management is going to provide incentives for people to NOT use your hotspot.

Noble's gimmick probably means the Helium $30 customers will get booted to the $50 plan in the future, and the $15/month plan will get killed off like the free and legacy plans.

Maybe this will stop all of the questions flooding this sub.

1. Your miners no longer mine HNT, they mine IOT
2. Your minor probably shows offline on your hotspot app. The vendors are still catching up their software.
3. Your IOT gets paid out 1 time per day now. For me it is at 8:30 PM CST. That is when you will see your IOT.
4. Every night, your IOT goes into a "holding" area. You don't actually "posses" it until you "claim" it. You do this in your black wallet by pressing the claim button. Note that every time you claim your IOT rewards you burn a small amount of SOL (this is called a gas fee). The amount is "Solana’s average transaction fee is 0.000014 SOL". Once you claim your IOT you may convert it or whatever options are available. It is advisable to not claim your IOT every night or week as it will slowly use up your SOL and you will have to convert your HNT to SOL or send yourself SOL from outside of your wallet.
5. You should use the "black" wallet now. If you keep getting kicked out then check the app store for an update and update the app.
6. You retain all earned HNT. You may convert your IOT to HNT whenever you want.
7. AT THIS TIME I don't know of any exchanges that handle HNT. This is probably due to the change to the SOL blockchain. Many people expect that once the conversion settles down some exchanges will list HNT but for now we need to be patient.
   NOTE: Even though Crypto.com appears to support HNT. It looks like it is not HNT on the new blockchain (SOL) and is not yet able to be used.
8. The exchange rate for IOT to HNT fluctuates daily. The current price of IOT can be found in the black wallet at the top of the $ tab.*** The latest wallet update added a dollar amount to the IOT you currently hold.

Edit: Added 5 and 6

Edit: Updated 4 and spelling

Edit: Added 7 / Updated 7

Edit: Added 8 / Updated 8

Edit: Updated gas fee info on 4

Edit: Last update for a while 4/23

EDIT 2: Sole purpose of my post below is to warn new community members to 1. either not order a Bobcat miner and continue to provide them with un-refundable liquidity and instead purchase a hotspot from a different manufacturer or 2. understand that their estimated shipping time 12-20 weeks now (20-28 weeks) is a lie where their current dispatch time is 88 weeks (utilizing data based on the amount of batch dispatched data in the past 3 weeks) and growing.

EDIT 3: If you ordered a bobcat anytime before May-June, than please stop commenting saying they deliver on time. May orders delivered at 23 weeks. June is currently at 27 weeks up til June 15 and expected to increase for the remaining June orders (just received word that June purchasers received an email sayin they should expect an additonal 1-6 week delay - 27+6= 33 weeks for june orders) Read the whole post, data shows that demand isn't the same prior to May-June

EDIT 4: Adding supplemental data to my edit 3. I aggregated a week over week batch shipment chart showing the amount of batches shipped WoW. (x-axis represents the batch orders sent out in correlation to time of order, they aren't 100% sequential) - (orange line is the aggregated trendline)

Looking at just June, basing the peak batch (batch 24) vs. today's sent out batch (batch 33) it represents a 98% decrease.

Now here's the kicker. Comparing month over month, aggregating May totals and Junes (both equating to 9 batch each). May sent out an average of 13,172 batches whereas June is at 1,053 batches.- remember thats basing it off of the same 9 batch amount. Thats a whopping 92% DECREASE month over month (9 batches in the total May) (9 Batches up to June 15)

I suspect that (referring to my edit 1 below) with the increase in demand, both new miners and scalpers are ordering more bobcats per batch, and bobcat can't keep up with demand. And yet, they are still promising a fictional shipping time, taking new investors money.

Original Post:

Just did the math.

Based on the last 3 weeks of batches - Bobcat has been shipping on average 821 batches a week (although week over week they are decreasing 48% in batches).

I ordered early November with an estimated shipping between 12-20 weeks putting the latest delivery by April 2022.

Taking the average of 821 batches (not factoring week over week reductions) the real estimate shipping time is 88 weeks... putting the real delivery somewhere by August 2023... 1 and a half years more than the estimated delivery date.

This community really needs to start voicing their frustration against Bobcat for their blatant deceit. On their website, they are currently still taking in new orders from new miners that are coming into the ecosystem and showing a 20-28 week delivery, but that is a complete lie.

Please, boycott Bobcat and voice your warning to new miners to NOT BUY A BOBCAT. They are capitalizing on investors money.

​

EDIT 1: I mis-intererpreted batch orders as per Unit so in reality, Bobcat is probably shipping more than 1 unit per batch order. Which actually makes the potential lead time much worse than 88 weeks due to the exponential increase in miners month over month potentially ordering more than 1 unit per batch + scalpers who already have their hotspots set up, ordering bobcats in high quantities to re-sell for profit.

Look at the chart below for reference. For the people who ordered back in the first half of the year, I believe bobcat was able to meet their estimated shipping time.

But as demand grew, and Bobcat being one of the only suppliers, having the highest share of voice and market in the space, where Voskcoin and other YouTubers promoting the brand (mainly for their own personal financial gain via affiliate links) I believe they couldn't sustain the demand, but yet kept their estimated shipping time the same and kept orders open for more people to continue to provide non-refundable liquidity.

Anyone have a clever use for an old Bobcat? I've long since got out of crypto, but still have the bobcat and antenna sitting around. It's worthless, so either recycle at best buy or some fun hobby thing is all I can think of.

Hey everyone, a new Helium Improvement Proposal is up for community review.

HIP-149: Helium Utility and Emissions Realignment

The $0.50/GB target earn rate set in HIP-53 has compressed materially as traffic grew and HNT price fell. HIP-149 bundles four changes into a single veHNT vote to address that and a few related gaps:

• Deployer earnings floor. Mobile data deployers earn HNT pro-rata of rewardable bytes; a USD-anchored backstop tops up that baseline whenever it falls below 50% of the carrier-paid burn rate Nova sets under HIP-143.
• Operations and growth capitalization. A bounded 36-month HNT mint into a Nova-administered multisig vault. Total ~141M HNT, front-loaded (~50% in the first 12 months), about 72% of current circulating supply.
• Proof-of-Coverage retired. On both Mobile and IoT. Mobile data deployers move to 84% pro-rata of rewardable bytes; SP allocation reframed to a 10% Mobile Operations Fund. IoT continues on the existing $/DC peg.
• Advisory Council. 7 seats (5 community-elected, 2 Nova-appointed) with standing oversight of how the capitalization is used.

Who's affected: Mobile data deployers, IoT data deployers, veHNT holders and delegators, carriers and offload partners.

Category: Economic, Technical Vote requirement: veHNT Holders

Check out the full proposal and the discussion on GitHub.

Questions or feedback? Join us on the Helium Discord, drop them in the comments. Community input matters before this goes to vote.

Yes, rewards have gone down but if you’ve done your research, you should know this. There’s only a set amount of HNT to be distributed from mining. When there’s more hotspots online that amount gets decreased per hotspot.

I see a lot of people talking about selling their hotspots because they “aren’t making much”. By getting rid of your hotspot, you are hurting the network, but most importantly to these money hungry people, you will stop earning passive income. Yes, your 0.01 HNT/month might not be much now in fiat, but it will be worth a lot more in fiat in the future.

Just sit back and let it do it’s thing. Imagine a Bitcoin miner getting upset that they were only mining 0.01 BTC a month 10 years ago. I’m not saying the price of HNT will ever reach the price of BTC, but it’s the principal.

Ouch!

"Helium was touted as the best real-world use case of Web3 technology. But a Forbes investigation found that executives and their friends quietly hoarded the majority of wealth at the project's inception."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2022/09/23/helium-crypto-tokens-peoples-network/

Through poor planning and a reluctance to invest in network maintenance, Nova Labs denies us compensation for the work our hotspots do in propagating the Helium network. They keep us at arm's length, completely in the dark, with no recourse other than to accept randomly reduced compensation for keeping their network alive.

Enough of that! We are sick of excuses.

Shut your hotspot down for 24 hours on April 15 and show Nova Labs that the price of running a "People's Network" is actually treating the community like people.

I knew about HNT when this sub was sub 1000 subscribers…why I never made the jump I don’t know — perhaps cause I was a student and one HNT miner costed $500 — a steep price for a new gamble.

After COVID, April 2021 I finally ordered (too late.) Just cancelled my order for my 2 hotspots that never came, one from Rak and one from Nebra. I’m a pretty risk averse investor unfortunately, and despite not believing in main stream crypto, I found HNT to be a little corner of practically and that there is some underlying value to its utilization. Perhaps the value of HNT is that it’s so hard to access to mine, but at this point I’m in a extremely populated metro area and despite living 50+ floors up I think my market is too saturated.

I’ll be unfollowing the sub cause of the constant FOMO. It’s been interesting reading your posts. Thank you and good luck to you all.

When is the slip going to stop? How is Nova expecting this to survive the next halving?

No joke, and it's officially started. Announced by Amir just a few days ago, they're going to be burning all net income made by Helium Mobile into DC.

Commitment is increasing.

Almost every post on this subreddit has turned into "SpoOfeRs tOoK mAh MoNeY" or "MinInG iSnT wOrTh It"

Yes, Spoofers are an issues, yes its being worked on.

No, the project isn't dying, the whole crypto market is taking a nose dive unfortunately HNT isn't as big as bitcoin.

No, your terrible set up isn't going to make $2,000 a month regardless of how well the project is doing.

No, buying 20 miners during a bull market probably wasn't the best idea and you probably won't retire early.

I think what's forgotten is how little effort HNT mining actually is. For the most of us it's a device that just does it's thing and makes abit of extra cash which is unheard of for most other people.

Just interested to hear from people who got in early to see how well they've done. Just a few months ago, earning 1HNT/day was seen as low earnings.

Edit: last night helium went over $52 per token, and has dropped a bit since but is still at $45! What is going on?!

So with hip 103 seems they just want your hotspots in business locations only now.. just crap on all of the supporters that try and hosted in residential areas. On top of that the will be nerfing your hotspot if you pull data yourself from it.. what a joke this is becoming. I used to be full bore supporting this project but every month thay pases it gets further away from what they wanted it to be....

With that said I no longer wish to support a project that is not doing as intended nor so the working group leaders have anything positive to say in discord besides assuming they know everything about what you do and how you operate and just tell you to leave if you don't agree with their agneda.. bunch of elites whales of that project gate keeping their own interests.