Using Upwork contractors to find locations for Helium and Cluutch data analysis
tl;dr: it's a slow grind
Finding a commercial location for Helium install
In the past year, the number of miners on Helium has grown from about 20,000 to over 775,000. That has massively reduced the profitability of PoC for any given miner. Combined with the fact that data transfers on the network still haven’t taken off, I’ve been sitting on a handful of Helium miners I have amassed until I can find prime locations.
Cellphone/radio towers and commercial real estate are attractive options. To date, I’ve spent over 5 months trying to land a cell tower to place a miner on. Some of the challenges have included:
Major players like American Tower and SBA Communications are pricing themselves out of the business. Initial quotes have ranged from $500 - $850 / month.
Owners, site managers, and installers must be coordinated, and each are slow to respond.
Insurance is an issue. Unless you are a big player, you aren’t going to be able to afford a $20k+ policy to cover installation. You must find sites that will take on the liability of installation and your business must remain arms length away.
Commercial roofs:
Databases like CoStar with contact information for commercial property are expensive. You need to find a friend with the hookup.
Property managers are skeptical of crypto tech and usually want a kickback in order to facilitate a deal with the owner.
City centers with the tallest buildings are now seeing extremely diluted earnings. There are limited options with high elevation outside main cities.
I’ve currently identified some independent tower operators quoting around $1 per foot of elevation per month. Fingers crossed it works out this time.
Data analysis for weed prices
The Cluutch ETL is on autopilot at this point. Everyday, every listing on weedmaps.com is uploaded to Google Cloud Storage as CSVs. Functions then automatically parse the daily file and insert about 400k new entries into BigQuery. Finally materialized views parse the listings to extract information about the strain, category, aroma, and other qualitative attributes.
It has been way more challenging than I expected to find someone on Upwork to generate meaningful insights from the data for $100 - $200. Originally, I was hoping someone would be able to both generate one or two basic charts and write a short blog post. But at that price point, contractors haven’t been able to write SQL to extract the necessary data. I have now updated the job post to focus on data analysis only and I’ve increased the budget.
Devil Fruit: Blunt Facts #5
Minted a new NFT. The code had to be updated to handle cases where there is no price information available about a strain. This is the case for ‘devil fruit’ which only has 6 listings and no prices corresponding to any.
Here is the before and after.