Let’s talk about Helium mining
Author’s note: if you’re already playing the Helium mining game, with hardware and any kind of financial interest, this piece is unlikely to tell you anything you don’t already know, so your time may be better spent on more esoteric, low-level content. Cheers!
The view from here
I’ve been following the recent growth of the Helium network and surrounding community a bit, and lurking in the Helium Discord server for a few weeks now. While there are a fair number of stories about cool use-cases for the Helium network (including aurora-studying weather balloons!), there is also a great deal of grief. Many (many) people are upset, in all of the vendor-specific channels, about delays in receiving orders and difficulties engaging with customer service. Interspersed among the impassioned tirades are technical questions or requests for help with the ordering process that often go unseen. When people are new to the server or fed up with feeling unheard, their anger spills over into other channels. It’s … a lot.
As for actually getting my hands on a miner? To make a long story short, I’ve all but given up on it, at least for now. Short of pursuing resales on eBay and paying a couple orders of magnitude more than list price (which is already well-inflated given the cost of the underlying hardware), it is exceptionally difficult to even place an order for hardware right now, let alone get it anytime soon. For something that interests me more for its technology than its potential for generating revenue, it just doesn’t seem worth joining the fraught machinations of preorder lotteries and waiting lists.
All that said, I’ve picked up a few things while lurking about, and thought I ought to share what I’ve learned. To be clear, I’m not invested in Helium hardware and own no HNT, so my observations are nothing more than those of a spectator.
After surveying the field for some time, here’s how things look from my 10,000-foot view.
Miners
There are a number of Helium miners currently on the market, and a few in development. Within the world of miners, there are a few distinctions in terms of what the hardware actually does for the network, and its potential for earning HNT in exchange.
Full miners
“Full” miners have explicit approval from Helium, and earn HNT rewards from proof-of-coverage, data transfer, and consensus group participation.
RAK Wireless (~450 USD, price no longer shown)
Sold exclusively through Cal-Chip, who is not taking orders.
Bobcat (429 USD)
Accepting orders, but only accepting payment via cryptocurrency.
Syncrobit (650 USD)
Accepting orders.
Nebra (300 GBP)
Nebra direct and Sparkfun are no longer accepting orders.
LongAP (726 EUR)
Orders closed.
Comparing any one manufacturer’s offering to the rest, there’s little evidence that the devices differ in any way beyond aesthetics, price, and largely-superficial hardware implementation details that have no meaningful effect on what the device does, or how. (One exception may be the FreedomFi miner — more on this later.)
Light hotspots
“Approved” light hotspots earn HNT rewards from proof-of-coverage and data transfer, but cannot participate in consensus groups.
Kerlink (449 USD)
Also sold by Cal-Chip, who is taking orders.
There are a number of non-”approved” light hotspots that won’t currently earn any HNT (except from data transfer, maybe¹, though earnings from data transfer alone are exceptionally small right now), with current prices similar to the full miners above. For these, and all Helium hardware, assume many weeks to many months of delay between order and delivery.
Special use-case miners
FreedomFi (500 USD estimated)
A combined FreedomFi/5G hotspot solution with an onboard Helium miner (though 5G coverage requires separate radio equipment, generally not targeted at consumers, and the cost varies widely). It’s not yet on sale, and I believe it may only earn HNT through data transfer, and not proof-of-coverage or consensus groups. FreedomFi is a bit cagey about this on their website, though, so more research is warranted.
Do-it-yourself miners (…?)
Once upon a time, there was a limited opportunity to participate in an alpha program for DIY miner hardware that would be eligible to earn HNT. Out of a claimed overabundance of concern for security, this program was quickly suspended with only a small number of builders having been given the cryptographic blessing necessary to earn HNT. For the rest of us, this means that DIY hotspots will only provide coverage for the network, and not earn HNT.
If you don’t care about earning HNT and just want to experiment with Helium and LoRaWAN, you can still build your own Helium packet forwarder with a Raspberry Pi, a LoRa hat, antenna, and the fittings to get everything working together. The hats might be suffering from similar fulfillment delays due to the common hardware between them and miners, though.
A note on network stability
When I originally wrote the Discord messages which became the basis of this piece, I reported:
As for the Helium network itself, it’s not in the best of shape right now. Widespread syncing issues across miners, connection problems, impact to HNT earnings, etc. Not a lot of “official” information available about it right now, but reports from impacted users are copious.
This was true as of ten days ago, but may no longer be the case, as Helium’s core developers have been working to stabilize the network in the face of unexpected growth. Nevertheless, the network is experiencing some growing pains, now that word has truly got out on the income-generating potential of Helium mining. As a result, the out-of-the-box experience may vary widely from “Hey, it works!” to “Why isn’t it syncing!?”
The future of Helium mining
The Helium network, by virtue of its “Helium Improvement Proposal” system, is always evolving. While it may be characterized today by a troubled hardware rollout and scaling difficulties, change is on the horizon that will — Helium hopes — not only bring stability to the network, but will also reshape the dynamics of mining and how HNT rewards are earned, and by whom.
Validators
Currently, one of the ways “full” Helium hotspots earn HNT is through participation in consensus groups, which accounts for the bulk of computation required by the network and its blockchain.
Helium’s long-term plan is to move this work off of the individual miners and onto dedicated validators—largely cloud-hosted compute instances (à la AWS’ EC2) running validator-specific Helium software. Once this transition is complete, “full” hotspots will no longer participate in consensus groups, and will therefore earn the same amount of HNT as “approved” light hotspots do now.
Running a validator requires staking the network with 10,000 HNT. (At time of writing, HNT is trading at about 13 USD.) This nontrivial up-front financial commitment, combined with Helium’s strong advice against running validators on home networks, effectively takes validators off the table for home hobbyists like myself².
“The Halving”
Commonly expressed in the community are concerns over the coming “halving” of HNT issuance. August 1st will bring the first “halving” (or “halvening” — consistent terminology is hard), at which point the amount of HNT globally issued by the network will be cut in half. This will have necessary impacts on mining rewards.
As you might imagine, there is some consternation in the community over what all this means for those who have invested in full hotspot hardware (especially those with hardware on order but not yet delivered), and for those who are contemplating “getting into the game” but haven’t yet put real money into it.
Caveat emptor
Lastly, a plea for caution: with demand for Helium miners being fever-pitch right now, there are a lot of scammers out there trying to capitalize on people’s desperation. Be careful, especially if the required payment method is cryptocurrency — it’s a red flag in itself and leaves you no way to get your money back if the deal turns out to be a scam.
[1]: Investigating the HNT earning details of non-”approved” light hotspots happened toward the end of my research, and it was at this point that I started to go a little cross-eyed. If you’ve got the scoop on this, please feel free to let me know and I’ll add a correction.
[2]: I love Linux and exploring emerging technologies, and work in the cloud for a living, but no amount of nerd cred is worth 130,000 of my real, actual, snack-buying dollars (not that I have that kind of money laying around anyway). That said, because validators will soon be doing the work that accounts for a nontrivial portion of the HNT generation of present miners, there is serious potential for financial gain, and the staking requirement may therefore be a small price to pay for some.
