Helium pays miners in HNT, the cryptocurrency equivalent to ETH in Ethereum, for using radio waves to confirm that hotspots are indeed giving devices wireless coverage. Helium uses a new work algorithm called Proof of Coverage (POC). Helium miners confirm that wireless hotspots aren’t lying about their service by using radio waves to “interrogate” hotspots about their activity, much like Ethereum uses graphics cards to crunch cryptographic hash codes that provide the proof of work needed to validate transactions.
What factors affect the return of the miner
These are thoroughly covered in the Helium Improvement Proposals (HIP), particularly HIP15 and HIP17, which provide a thorough explanation of the rewards system. The following are some lists for them:
Transmitters
the more witnesses, the more the Transmitter earns.
Witness
Beyond a total of four witnesses, each additional witness earns less in that challenge. (Performs a random shuffling of all of the valid received witness receipts, then chooses up to 25 of those valid receipts to write to the chain.)
Transmit scale
The transmit scale is a multiplier (0-1.0) that is applied to your rewards and reflects the density of hotspots in that area. In general, we recommend users to keep the range between 0.8-1. On Helium Explorer, you can get started by checking out the transmit scale values for the hotspots that are located close to you.
How to Determine Profits
Mining profits for HNT are not as straightforward to calculate as those for Ethereum or other Proof of Work blockchains. When using HNT, your profits could be significantly different from one day to the next depending on the condition of the Helium network in your region.
In point of fact, users are unable to find multiple indicators to get very close estimates of their profits as they can with Ethereum. Users should, however, be able to get a good idea of the profitability of HNT mining in your region by looking at recent earnings from hotspots that are located close to their current location. Adding new hotspots in an area that is not very saturated with hotspots can result in an increase in the amount of HNT earned by both the new hotspots and the existing hotspots because both will be able to take part in challenges. The most lucrative hotspots almost always have a location that is more central because this allows them to serve as witnesses to a greater number of competitions.
Helium miners vary in cost depending on make, region, and provider. But most hotspots cost between $500-$700 dollars. If the performance of the miners remains the same, then the price of the miners will have a significant impact on the return period. Mining for helium can be a significant financial undertaking for an individual consumer. And despite the fact that users will amass HNT over time, mining Helium has the potential to become very profitable over time. This is because the utility of the network is expected to increase over time, which should drive up the value of the token.
Income comparison of different miners
For users, revenue is their most concerned topic. According to the real data on Helium explorer, we got the basic daily income of each miner. These basic benefits are affected by official POC efficiency, antenna performance, gateway computing power, device coverage at the location, and transmit scale. After calculation, the following is a comparison of the payback period and ROI of several common helium mining machines on the market.
From the table, we can see that several mining machines participating in the statistics can complete the return within one year, but the efficiency gap is large. The ROI of Dusun IoT’s indoor LoRaWAN gateway Hellium and Bobcat miner 300 is the most impressive, and it only takes 225 days and 242 days to complete the payback. The return period of Panther X takes a whole year. If the mining machine delivery period is very long, the return period of the purchaser’s funds will be greatly extended. From the perspective of consumer interests, it is crucial to choose a high-performance mining machine with a faster return on investment.
