October 2021

October was interesting.  I was able to get the last 3 Nebra units installed, bringing my fleet size to 16.  Had to add in some shipping costs, a drive to New Hampshire and a drive to Nashville.  Also had to buy an antenna for the Belmont location which is still underperforming despite it's location.  Spent more time digging in to antennas to figure out what kinds there are and what would be most useful to me.  It's seems like the attitude is the bigger the better and to mount it to the roof.  But if my host is in an apartment and doesn't want some awkwardly huge bar sitting in their window, what are some more discreet options?  I'll be ordering some with this month's earnings to try and tune up the reach of the hotspots in their various locations.  

A few announcements of cities starting to adopt the helium network and use it to their advantage came out, bolstering confidence in the token a bit, which was nice.  I think Oklahoma City and San Jose stuck out because they are utilizing the network in different ways, but show the flexibility of the network.  

Total mined this month was 52.64160165.  I sold 41.23 for an average of $28.34, totalling $1171.58.  I say average because this happened over 4 sales because I mis-read my excel and then had to recalculate, then I selected USDT instead of USD on accident, resulting in me having to re-exchange... but the biggest fee was actually Binance's Bitcoin transfer fee.  So, I flipped a portion of the earnings to BTC thinking it would be faster and cheaper because BTC's transfer fees are so low everywhere, and moving USD out takes a week; sometimes longer.  But Binance has a special kind of 'transaction fee' for Bitcoin which was just a total dick punch when I saw it after the fact.  In total exchange fees, paid $33.06, which is dumb.  $30.37 of it was just the BTC transfer, so... no more trasnfering BTC from Binance.  That's just a crazy amount.  

Witnesses made up 64% of earnings, Challengers made up 10.45%, Beacons (PoC) made up 25.44% and Packet Transfers still make up 0%.  But Packet Transfers are growing.  I started tracking that in July and this is what I've seen so far:

Jul - .00000248

Aug - .0000762 (up 3073.39%)

Sept - .00015498 (up 203.33%)

Oct - .00047942 (up 309.34%)

I'm excited to see this grow since this will represent the steady state of the business as the Proof of Coverage rewards continue to halve every few years, as well as being reduced by being split between more and more devices coming online.  With the vote last October to cap the token supply & implement the halving process, HNT's value at the time was $1.18, which we were all very happy about.  There was a lot of talk in the forums (I don't participate, I just read the discord) about introducing the scacity model of Bitcoin to the Helium tokenomics, most for, some against, but ultimately, it seems to be paying off.  As the network grows, the reduction in rewards is getting outpaced by the scarcity of the token, and in turn it's value to exchange traders.  

On that, here's where we sat at midmonth:

What isn't reflected in this, because I pull the data on the 17th of each month, is the Dish Network partnership announcement which blew the token value up to $50.  I'm sure that will get reflected in the November numbers.  

I'm still in the hole in terms of money invested into this business model, but I'm starting to gain ground.  I still find about 6 of my 16 units at any one time is underperforming, which is why I started researching the antenna data to try and give them a bump, but with 10 more Bobcat units ordered, I'm inside the delivery window now for 3 I ordered over summer.  

Goonies Never Say Die.