re: Which one of you made $10k last month mining Helium?

Oh I see, yeah the hex cooldown period not the data update period. Blog post about it says 1 hour, but my app says 15 minute cooldown. They also don't give a precise size of a hex, just that one hex is about 2 basketball courts and that 40 of them lined up is 1 mile. I guess Americans really will use any system but metric. That gives me anywhere between 130' and 200'. Maybe one "measure" is the long way (point to point) and the other is the short way (flat to flat)?

But taking the worst of all that, squaring a hex out to 200'x200', and going with 1 hour cooldown, that still gives more than 16,000 mapping opportunities per square mile per day on the low end. That's good for 400 users per square mile, so Miami proper could support maybe 20k subs and the greater metro area maybe 100k? Obviously people tend to cluster so there will be a lot of ineligible maps, but I have also way underestimated the total possible mapping opportunities. Assuming the cooldown is really 15 minutes and 40 hexes lined up is a mile, that's 40x40x96=153,600 mapping opportunities per square mile rather than 16k.

I think they'll tweak the numbers if people aren't happy.