I ended up purchasing a Helium hotspot miner last month, there's lots of different options for miners (some pay with crypto or some CC). I'll receive mine in October. They're really easy to setup, a plug and play. Wanted to share my research and experience so far:
Helium (currently ranked #67 coin market cap) is a project that is trying to fix wireless infrastructure using blockchain. I think it's a cool project and I'd be down to get cheap, strong, internet powered by blockchain technology someday.
They pay the miners to provide that wireless infrastructure via you're plugged in "longfi" router. It uses the same amount of electricity as a lightbulb. Your pay will depend on several factors:
Your miner will get paid based on how many "witnesses" it has. If your miner is in range, it can witness small, wireless devices like: dogcollar, electric scooter, smart watch. (Phones have too much bandwidth and cannot be witnessed). You have to share rewards with other miners in your radius (biggest factor in radius is elevation [height]) . If you're considering one, you should find where you are on the coverage map to see how many people you would be sharing with:
https://explorer.helium.com/coverage#2.2/39.83/-65.58
Best situation: You're in a congested area, with no coverage, high elevation (on top of a mountain living on the top floor of your apartment complex) to cover big radius
Worst situation: You're in an area with little traffic, with lots of coverage (Ex. You and Billy-bob are the only people that live in a 50 mile radius in a low elevation valley, and he's obsessed with crypto, has 3 miners.)
The miners have been out for awhile now and have had diminishing returns as more people are sharing rewards. I would recommend it if you are a good fit based on your location.
I'm a pretty good fit, there's only a few hotspot miners in my city, My house is on a corner lot of a neighborhood with my backyard literally being the high school, and my sideyard being a large park. I'm expecting to make 1HNT/day. ~10-11$ at this time.
Helium also has nodes that will secure the network. If you have enough HNT, you can run a node and get more rewards. I don't expect to ever get one, but you can contribute to a node (Share) and get some of their rewards. My passive income play is to successfully mine HNT, then delegate to a node and earn rewards from the mined HNT. It's compounding and will build on itself. There is a Helium halving scheduled for August 1st, (will be others in future) in theory your HNT would be inflating after this.
Everyone has their own strategies,
DYOR. This slow burn is MY kind of play.