Good morning.

The old saying 'if you have nothing good to say, then say nothing, often comes to mind when I write post's about Helium now. I struggle but do try to look at the positive side of it. This will not be one of those post's but my blog is about our journey in crypto and as we know, it is not all good all of the time. 

Going back to the beginning we were so excited about the project, once we had ordered our first few miners we printed A3 size maps of our areas we thought our miners could go, we plotted the optimum distances and then looked at people we knew in those areas that we thought could host. We learnt about signal to noise ratio, we calculated line of sight from our potential host locations, we ordered antenna and cable upgrades and that was before we learned about port forwarding.

We upgraded most of the host's routers (some were just ancient!) I even set up parental controls on friends routers because when the children were naughty the internet would be turned off which was no good for the miner, but once the parental control was set up all that needed to be done was turn off the children's devices but leave the internet on. ( I could have then started a business setting this up!)

We ordered more miner's and kept going........we were all in.

There was a bit of a struggle in the beginning finding host's as people thought we were mad but then the turning point was a meeting we had with a local internet provider, he wanted to know what we were doing as we had to configure all these new routers and they had to switch the new routers on to the network. As it was so competitive in the beginning we kept this a bit quiet but he had perfect locations and was happy to install for us. Win win, his towers were high for line of sight, it was perfect. He sent us email's with coordinates of his towers and we would pick the best ones using hotspotty for hours to get it right.

There were hardly any other miner's in our area at the time so we placed them to pick up our village or other cities that had a few miner's. When you're on a mountain you can reach a good distance. Helium did bring out a 100km limit but that did not affect us too much, then they reduced the amount of beacons, that did affect us but more and more miners were coming online, we even had another person with a miner in our village. I used to look at the explorer a lot to see new miners come online and if we would witness them. I was really active on Helium sites and would help people who did not know how to set them up, I would share what I knew on optimising set up's.

Things started to get really bad when Helium lied about their partners, we had realised that HIP's (Helium improvement proposal) were not worth voting on as the vote's would always go in Helium's favour as they had so much HNT (Patch called this a dictator DAO and I love that term) The spoofing/cheating was rife and Helium did nothing about it. There was also the Deeper network debacle where there were 10,000 deeper hotspots made that would only witness other deeper hotspots. The Nebra issues that are still ongoing with people that have paid and waited over a year only to still be waiting. (Helium still used Nebra as a manufacturer for 5G!)

Now after all of this we have a miner on the denylist. To say I am not happy is an understatement. I must have been on this list for a while before I even noticed (there is no excitement anymore, I hardly even look at the wallet as I know that my 8, David's 7 normally get 2HNT per day between us, our son only looks at his 2  a couple of times a month!) so I was really surprised when I saw that my hotspot has been 'shut down' by Helium for over 2 weeks. 

This miner is one that is in a village on a mountain, on an internet tower, it was never the greatest earner and it was one of our last one's to go in, over the first 10 days of January it had only earnt 1.39 HNT or at todays price  $4.01 or a whopping $0.40 per day. Also I have no idea when we would have ROIed but one from the same batch is 37 months away from ROI at the current price lol.

So I had to go to a site to lodge my appeal, even though that was not difficult as I had to log in with Discord (I hate Discord and don't have it so I had to use David's) then fill in a form with photographic evidence. I had to change my pictures from png to jpeg then convert to a link which worked when I put it in a browser but not on the site. David just looked at me like I had done it wrong so he was surprised when he redid it with the same result, so my evidence went through without the pictures. Then when I was calmer I tried again but could only submit it once. I have since read that they expect a video of your miner in situ, which I don't have, I just never drove to an internet tower on a mountain to video my miner plus now it is winter I would probably need a 4wd to get there.(Needless to say the earnings wouldn't even cover the costs of fuel to get there!)

The average time for these appeals seems to be about 4 weeks, if that is not approved then your miner is really just a brick. I guess that legit miners also don't get compensated for the loss of earnings during this time so that is another $12.00 down. The official information is that only 1% of the miners the network picks up as cheating are actually legit. As we know though what Helium says is not always the truth. It does seem a bit extreme that your miner can be deactivated and rendered useless for no reason whatsoever.

The whole guilty until proven innocent system needs to be improved as all Helium has managed to do is annoy the people who have gone to a lot of effort to help set up the network. There are many IOT miners who would not even consider getting the 5G one due to the way Helium has conducted itself and as much as I want to believe in it, when the trust is gone it's gone. I know we are supposed to leave emotions out of crypto but that can be extremely difficult at times. I see more and more miners dropping offline and wonder to myself what will be left of the 'people's network'.

I am grateful in a way as getting involved with Helium opened us up to a whole new world of crypto. It is a shame it is so bittersweet.

As always thank you for reading and please feel free to comment.