Is the Bobcat miner 300 worth it in 2023?

Current HNT price

The price of HNT has gone down from all-time highs of around $55 to now $2.10 (Jan 12, 2023). So it's a question many wonders, will the Bobcat miner 300 even pay itself back?

The state of the Helium network

The price of HNT depends highly on what the LoRa network is used for. Nowadays, this network is used sparingly. Don't get me wrong. Some companies are building applications to take advantage of this network. It's just they take time to develop and bring to market.

Helium was the first company to make a decentralized wireless network with crypto. Does it mean it will be the only one? No, plenty of competitors are popping up daily, such as Chirp Wireless and XNET. Just because they were the first does not mean they will be "the" network. Helium have almost 1 million LoRa hotspots deployed. However, this number has come to nearly a complete halt. When we dig deeper into the numbers, we see that only around 450,000 are online. Half of the machines are not working or are offline, which could cause concern for some. Why is half of the network offline? I could assume people are unplugging their machines because running them is no longer worth the electricity cost.

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The Bobcat miner 300 price

Right now, the price of a Bobcat costs $429. The prices for these machines were around 1,000$ from resellers during the peak. But you could ROI quickly with them, even at the high cost. Today is a very different story. It does not make sense to pay such a high price for a machine like this. A good helium miner will earn around 50 cents a day in todays market. The ROI is approximately 858 days compared to a couple of months in the past. I have some bobcat 300s, and I paid $1000 each. I never had any issues with them; they are great machines. But they are not worth the current asking price of $429.

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What are the alternatives?

The best bang for buck Helium miner you can buy right now is the MerryIoT for 150$. Since they all work the same and will net you the same amount of HNT, it only makes sense to go after the lowest-priced ones to make your ROI quicker. I would avoid buying any used machine. For security's sake, these machines have no way to reset ownership. Sometimes people buy stolen devices by accident and end up with a useless machine. Only purchasing new machines solves this whole issue.

Closing thoughts

Even if the HNT price goes up. Why spend $429 on a miner that will earn the same as a 150$ machine? You could spend that extra money saved to upgrade the antenna to earn more than the Bobcat miner 300. As much as we love their brand and the excellent support they have. We have to be honest with ourselves here. We want to earn money. Picking the MerryIoT and a better antenna is a no-brainer.

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