 This video is sponsored by ORA. So if it wasn't apparent by my YouTube channel already, I'm quite the fan of finding little side hustles to, you know, keep me busy, make a little money on the side, whether this be, you know, this YouTube channel performing magic, freelance programming, and even things a little bit riskier like the topic of this video, mining crypto. This isn't a crypto channel. This isn't an investing channel. This is not me giving you financial advice as a disclaimer, but I thought this was a cool little story that I thought I would share with you all. There's just so many cool new projects in the space and it's constantly evolving and I took a chance on one and I guess you're gonna have to see how it worked out. Personally, when it comes to my own investing journey, I'd like to like to think that I'm pretty risk averse, you know, I've been dollar cost averaging into a market index fund since my freshman year of college. I've maxed out my Roth IRA the past couple years now that I'm active duty military and have access to a 401k that we call like the thrift savings plan. I've been putting money into that consistently as well. All this to say about 80 to 90% of my assets right now are in market or S&P index funds. So when I hear about cool new random projects, like the one I'm going to be talking about in this video, I really don't feel any regret putting a couple hundred dollars into it on the off chance that it might blow up. Obviously, when it comes to investing, especially in the crypto space, you really just you have to take money that you're completely and utterly willing to lose and in a lot of cases, especially when you're betting on small random projects that don't really have a chance, then it's probably not a good investment in the first place. You will lose that money. So just a word of warning on that note that when it comes to keeping my hard-earned money safe across, you know, all these different investment accounts, and when it comes to just keeping my own, you know, identity and passwords and everything secure online across any platform that I'm using, I turn to the sponsor of this video, ORA. Think about how many passwords you share for different platforms, accounts, Netflix, Hulu, you know, the average consumer actually has 90 different passwords and most of the times, as somebody who did their undergraduate thesis research on hacking passwords, most of the time, these are all the same passwords, if not slight variations adding a one or an asterisk on the end of a password. This leads you incredibly vulnerable to account access and then, you know, identity theft and fraud are not too far along that same road. And if you think it can't happen to you, Americans literally lost $56 billion in identity theft scams in 2020, so it totally can't. That's why I'm excited to partner with ORA who's sponsoring this video. ORA is identity theft protection, fraud monitoring, a VPN, password and management, and antivirus software all combined into one easy to use app. ORA monitors the dark web for your passwords, emails, social security numbers, and will send an alert to your phone and email. When it comes to things like fraud, every second matters, and ORA will notify you four times faster than their competitors. In addition to that, their VPN helps you stay anonymous online and on top of all that, their antivirus software will block malware and viruses before they infect your devices. All this is saying the current digital information age when security is so important, ORA really is that all-in-one package. Also, I don't know how I forgot to say this, but click the link in the description below for a free two-week trial. Not only do you get a great service, but it also supports the channel a ton. Thanks. Now, back to crypto mining. This story starts all the way back in April of 2021. At that time, I dipped my toes into the crypto markets. This was my senior year of college, and I'd obviously had, as a computer science major, had some experience with some cryptography security classes. I had a general idea of how Bitcoin mining worked and how the blockchain works and how incredibly inefficient and wasteful a proof-of-work type model is. And also just expensive if you wanted to build your own Bitcoin mining rig. You're investing thousands of dollars up front to buy a bunch of fancies GPUs in addition to paying enormous electricity bills. It's not something that I ever like reasonably considered. But then, you know, in my dark rabbit holes of YouTube, I stumbled upon this thing called Helium and the Helium Network. And it really sparked my interest because you could buy these Helium miners and calling them a miner is somewhat misleading because really, rather than mining a coin, you are playing a role in setting up another node in this worldwide network. And you're rewarded by witnessing other nodes on that network. So your rewards are all kind of dependent on how many other Helium miners per se are nearby you. And that distance matters because obviously you don't want to be too far, you don't want to be too close. And it's somewhat ambiguous and took a little bit of figuring out it's messing with the antenna and stuff to maximize your rewards. After some considerable research, you know, a couple days of watching YouTube videos and reading, you know, articles, I decided just to pull the trigger. At the time, there were a couple different models of miners to choose from. But I picked the one that supposedly had the shortest shipping times because there's, you know, a big backup with supply chain source shortages and chip shortages, things along those lines. So I chose the Bobcat miner. I think it was like $400 or something. But I had to end up paying like another $100 in Ethereum gas fees just because the network was so congested at that time. So at this point, I'm like, you know, $500, $600 in the whole after gas fees and shipping. And they say that it's going to take 16 to 20 weeks to get delivered. So I'm like four or five months, April, that's putting me at what, you know, August, September timeframe. Yeah, that was that was optimistic. I didn't actually end up getting the miner until January. And when I had originally ordered the miner, I had ordered it to my home, my childhood home in Virginia. And I live in LA now. So then I had to get it shipped out from my parents home. It was a whole mess. But here I will show it to you. I have it hooked up and it's been chugging along for the past couple months. If I can get this camera off the tripod. So I have it set up over here. Oh, underneath the beanbag right here. There it is. Hardwired up to my internet and ethernet connection. And you can see I have this really jinky wire that just kind of runs out the door. You can see that out the door, we actually have the antenna that opens up to, you know, my apartment courtyard and such. And that green light has been on for months now. And it's been chugging along, witnessing all the other miners in the area. They have a really cool app where it's literally takes minutes to set up the miner and get it going. And you can check the app every day to see the rewards you're making. So at the end of the day, after being $600 in the hole, having to wait an extra four or five months, how much is the miner actually making? So I definitely wanted to do another video if you guys are interested and how much I've made so far and more deeper thoughts on this subject matter. But it's not doing too hot, I'll be honest. I feel like at the time that I bought the miner, before the network was so congested with other people that had the same idea as me, you know, people were posting rewards of, you know, 20 to like 100, hundreds of dollars sometimes per day if they optimized their miner perfectly. But me being in LA, which was such a congested area in general, there's just a lot of other miners around me. So I've only, you know, been making dollar, a little over a dollar. Sometimes it's only like 40 cents a day. So right now we're nowhere near recouping my initial investment, but we're chugging along. Like I preface at the beginning of this video, this is very experimental and it's really just me seeing a cool project technology that I believe in and saying, hey, you know what, I'll try, I can try this out. I don't care if I never see this money again, on the off chance that this does become this huge, you know, internet of things network that they're making it up to be. But you know, with the markets being in such a downturn recently as well, it's, I'll be interesting to see where it shakes out. I'm definitely not to the point where I'm like going to sell my miner on eBay. I'm just going to let it sit and forget about it. I've also thought about installing it in a different area and maybe, you know, bringing it to my girlfriend's house, having her be mining for me. The other great thing is it literally uses like almost no electricity. Just because of the functions performing, it's not trying to solve a math equation and a hashing thousands of numbers every second, like a Bitcoin miner is and wasting a ton of electricity. It just kind of sits there and listens, which is cool. I know I've made a lot of videos in the tech space, but this isn't something that I necessarily talked about before. But you know, I love experimenting and sharing the stories with you all. So I'd love to hear what you think about this video. Let me know if you are also on the helium network mining away like I am. Definitely would love to make more videos within the same realm as the one I did today, whether it be talking about side hustles, finance, definitely don't want to become a crypto YouTube channel. This is more of just a one-off thing. But let me know what you guys thought in the comments below. Drop a like. It helps me and supports the channel a lot more than you think. And I'll see y'all next time.