Fanatic = “a person with an obsessive interest in and enthusiasm for a particular activity”
Evangelist = “a person who seeks to convert others to the Christian faith, especially by public preaching”
Sponsor = “a person or organisation that pays for or contributes to the costs involved in staging a sporting or artistic event in return for advertising”
You choose!
Enthousiast sounds good to me. The other options don’t feel comfortable. But I’m not in Jeff’s league of gateway deployments.
Beyond issues with its miners and token system, Helium appears to have a more pressing problem: The company seems to be struggling to generate revenue from its network. Forbes found that over the past year, between June 2021 and August 2022, just $92,000 in revenue was generated from data moving across the network, according to Helium’s own numbers — a figure that starkly contrasts the $250 million the parent company has raised from investors. Instead, Helium generates the vast majority of its revenue — $53.3 million during the same time period — from people registering their new hotspots and authenticating other devices on the network.
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The crypto landscape is “littered with the bones of projects that have basically fallen by the wayside because the ultimate promise is not being met by fundamental economics returns,” Monsur Hussain, head of Financial Institutions Research at Fitch Ratings, told Forbes. For Helium’s network to become profitable, Hussain added, “You’d actually need to have the whole earth covered in a few feet of these devices to potentially consume enough data.”
I am really glad this conversation is still on ongoing as there is a lot to learn from the successes and failures of Helium and from investigating our biases and principles.
I still think it would be important for any communication network is to allow the users to assign a greater than zero economic value for the utility of the service and pay the gateway provider accordingly. The fundamental economic incentives and mechanisms have got humanity so far and most likely could benefit TTN when implemented correctly.
Blockchain seems the latest computer science solution to the problem but ultimately it is just a tool and can be used various ways. Helium has been an attempt to utilize and benefit from this technology however their priorities seem to have shifted to where most other alt coins have been converging as well.
Bitcoin with the Proof-of-Work system has been the pioneer of this technology while all the alt coins have moved to the contrarian federated Proof-of-Stake securities including Helium with its Proof-of-Coverage network.
Do you think that the utility and the potential for Proof-of-Work in communication networks continues to exist?
Do you think focusing more on Proof-of-Transmission and abandoning the game of staking and federations would follow first principles?
Rumor says you’ve just left that position?
At that height they’d get phenomenal proof-of-coverage …
Many people try the same peaks/approx locations - so good P.O.C then gets mitigated against by everyones Transmit Scale being dialed back due to congestion in the Hex’s and neighbourhood! 
Get the impression that the Helium Balloon inflation/deflation cycle now all but complete. From initial 1HNT/$US we are now back below $1.20 at levels not seen since Q420 
I am running two nodes : one on thethingsnetwork and another on Helium.
What I like in Helium is that it is extremely heap (but not free as TheThingsNetwork) and that there are some rewards. In my neighborhood a lot of users have been trying Helium and you have to be quite competitive to earn some HNK : the station has to be installed at the right place outdoor. Some user stop using Helium and hotstops are resold and bought by other user who install station on the righ spot. This is a quite profiting value chain as the market adapts continuously.
To make it simple : around 1 million stations have been sold. On the long run they will be installed somewhere. So IMHO this is game over for other networks. The good news is that it should be possible to link TheThingsNetwork to Helium.
as you seem to be taking the long view, who do you think is going to be paying your ‘rewards’ when manufacturers stop buying HNT to commission new devices because demand has collapsed? are you counting on actual traffic at $0.00001 per 24 bytes? that’s not looking too good, volume 84% down over the last 31d…
of the 990,122 hotspots sold, more than 500,000 are offline today, and i can see 2 main reasons for that:
The Helium bubble is just exploded (or is imploding) - what you want with a network with no pay-willing customers , a lot of cheaters and nearly no data traffic?
I have also a Helium & TTN gateway on one location - on TTN i have a small amount of real data traffic given - on Helium (except for 4 months until they changed their PoC process, ) i had a very small amount of frequent data traffic- but this was fake- there are simply no sensors deployed / connected at my location. In an Austrian , more rural location, i had 1 time in 11 months data traffic and then never ever anything -simply forget it . Helium is now rated by a lot of people to be a hardware selling scam project - and yes., they made their money by harvesting together with the miner producers the big margin for totaly overpriced hardware and also from the onboarding fee . This was IMO a functional , Madoff-like snowball principle…but now its over. Helium is loosing according their blockchain data day by day betwenn 400 - 1300 hotspot locations - this tendency is actually speeding up, because a direct competitor “Crankk” just started their Beta phase. And you see in the Helium discord some kind of panic, since Amazon was announcing their Lora based project . If the blockchain move to Solana will be a bumpy ride, then things will become interesting - the token value is actually knowing only one direction and if Nova /Helium F will mess it up, then the last persons (except the real , not so numerous fanatics) will loose any trust in this project
Addon: Helium founder races cars while the crypto startup is on collision course
Or more likely, link Helium to the Packet Forwarder that TTI run that can then peer to TTN/TTI. I have the feeling you’d know this if you appeared to be less of a Helium advocate and spent more time using TTN.
However you’ll see this suggested many times on the forum and the prime issue is who is going to provide rewards for Helium traffic.
I think the script-kiddies jumping on the Helium bandwagon to mine for crypto will turn off their gateway and put it in a drawer. Only a few will be bothered to sell. The very best solution for Helium would be to drop the mining BS, just use hard cash and pay a premium for gateways that provide coverage in the gaps - a combination of GPS and uplinks arriving between two or more gateways with unrelated owners on a cascading system would be a start.
In the long run they will end as landfill. 99.9% of people that spend money on Helium gateways were in it for the rewards and these days you spend more on the electricity bill for the gateway than you get out of it. Traffic doesn’t make you any money at all, there are no users anywhere in my coverage areas…
And if you want to deploy (beyond a handful of devices) you need to spend yet more money on console access because they started selling parts of their address pace to get some earnings once the pyramid started to collapse.
If you happen to have a use case running on Helium and you (still) have coverage there is nothing wrong, however make sure to check the coverage didn’t disappear over night… (where I live just 52% of the helium gateways are still online.)
Dear Friends,
I also noticed that 50% of gateways were down in my area.
Just a quick note that I purchased my Helium gateway for 130€ used. A lot of gateways are being resold. Still in Paris I can find a connection easily for objects. For example, I can track my car in case it is stolen.
I am quite confident that the only solution for Helium is to wide open their networks to traditional APs. This is what gateway-rs is all about.
Do you think it would be possible for an AP to be multi-vendor compatible, i.e. route Helium packets to Helium and TheThingsNetwork to TheThingsNetwork.
I like the wAP R8 because it only consumes 7W maximum as per spec. I will try to use it with Helium.
Kind regards,
Do you actually read any other posts or topics or search the forum?
Gateway multi-vendor is an existential impossibility - once someone makes it, it remains made by that vendor. And they are not access points because nothing logs in to them like WiFi.
In theory they could be connected to more than one network - covered in a discussion in the last few days.
But the simplest thing is routing - which appears two posts above yours.
Thank you for these information.
I am beginning to think that Helium is like trying to privatize part of LoRaWAN and selling it using a blockchain which can only lead to bankruptcy. You cannot sell something which is essentially free and in the case of Helium as long as there are no real end-users, this seems to be a Ponzi scheme. I was not aware that some of the Helium gateways were not actual gateways and they only spoof GPS and receive fake messages.
I will start from scratch reading a good book about LoRaWAN. I will probably end-up setting-up my gateway and application server.
