They handle it through open discussions and pull requests.
Not sure if they’ll succeed - it will be a cat-and-mouse game, but I like the open method.
I follow Helium sometime now and have found that there is a strong similarity between Helium and TTN/TTI. Here at TTN we discuss a lot but have no real influence on the path and development on TTN. We may add to code and suggest pull requests but TTI decides.That is similar with Helium. They talk a lot but in the end developers at Helium inc. decide and implement changes.
To be continued…
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@JDP yep they’re an SF startup with HQ in the Mission so it is quite possible that all those employees got a free gateway from work!
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A new twist? Helium & HNT now expanding into Cellular/5G & potentially WiFi 6 activity, in a deal with GigSky (US)
Is this potential further distraction from core LPWAN connectivity provision (and Crypto mining - many folk seemed to be more interested in cashing in on HNT vs the primary goal of providing coverage, but if it helps expand the market then whose to question or judge?!) or 
is this a potentially smart move with GW’s say mining to pay for their own backhaul costs, besides current proposition that it covers capital/deployment costs? 
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I was surprised to see the network density of Helium compared to TTN. The following picture says it all: (dark blue is TTN, Light blue is Helium)
Curious to see how this develops. If persistent over time, Helium is a serious candidate for IoT solutions with LoRaWAN especially in urban areas.
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Keep in mind thought that many of the people setting up a Helium gateway now are in for the mining (money) and probably have little or no affinity with the actual and intended functionality of the network. As the pay-outs are going to decrease, because the number of gateways increases, the value of HNT decreases and the #of available tokens decreases, a fair amount of gateways will be abandoned again. That is the pessimistic me. The optimistic me sees a lot of cheap Helium appear on eBay then
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Which can easily be converted into TTN gateways.
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The thing that most worry me is that the business model of Helium has made possible to deploy a fair good coverage LoRaWAN network (I don’t want to discuss now whether this business model is good or even fair), but not even with this huge amount of gateways they can find popular use cases (it seems that there is almost no traffic in the Helium network).
This could explain why the initial TTN’s aim of deploying a community network seems to be slowing down a bit: people is not interested in IoT or we are not able to explain its benefits properly.
I would like to see a more colaborative spirit in our community, with more experiences sharing that could engage more people into TTN.
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That is the problem already for a decade. I have no conclusive answer why IoT keeps hitting the glass ceiling.
That is true: Our town had 69 hotspots, 12 TTN gateways, and an unknown number of KPN gateways (I estimate less than TTN has) In a somewhat bigger area, I see 600 TTN devices, 3100 KPN devices and 60 Helium devices.
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Helium has a real problem with location spoofing, i.e. scammers setting up arrays of gateways that do not provide network coverage in the real world, but nevertheless earn above-average rewards. Helium’s Proof-of-Coverage fails miserably, and the best thing they have come up with, very recently, is a denylist: a list of known fraudulent hotspots, currently 25,000+ of them, or more than 5% of the network. In the region Hong Kong/Shenzhen, it is 37%, and i know for a fact that it is even higher because my end devices are not picked up. I’ve followed the discussions a bit on the Helium Discord channel and it is remarkable that none of these people actually is interested in providing and/or using the network to transport any real data. They all know the spoofing problem but as they are all invested in their HNT they keep it quiet hoping HNT will not crash, and the ‘growth’ can continue to feed the Ponzi scheme (people buying new hotspots/miners are financing the network rewards).
This is a map taken from Hotspotty, showing the Helium hotspots on the denylist, i.e. fake coverage provided by 1,291 spoofed locations in this region. That is at least half a million $ of scammer hardware that has never transported real data and probably never will.
What is beyond my understanding, is that the official Helium Explorer just continues to show these locations, while they are fully aware of the problem.
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My concern is what will happen when there is increased proliferation of devices (legal or fraudulent), broadcasting (typically 2.5 seconds worth of data each time at SF12 that have nothing to do with TTN?
But TTN users cannot just “ignore” non-TTN broadcast traffic: our gateways will by design just blindly forward the traffic to the network 
For example, take any large city and discover the staggering density of Helium network devices that are currently being deployed which are all eating up large chunks bandwidth in the veign (possibly naive?) attempt to make money rather than provide a communal IoT connection resource that we are happy to do with TTN.
Take for instance West London, around St. John’s Wood area: within a 3.75 km circle there are already 500 ‘helium’ hotspots! Even if a fraction of these hotspots are online and each beacon on average as little as every 8 hours (suspect for some it is more frequent than that due to fraudulent arrays 
) then one will expect to see several beacons per minute from a device(s) manifesting themselves on TTN as address 0100DA30.
Monitoring my own gateway in a relatively small conurbation with around 50 distinct nodes observed using address 0100DA30 these non-TTN devices are already the heaviest generators of LoRa traffic that I am forwarding to my ISP!
For those that are interested, I’ve also analysed data for that densely populated area for a 24-hour period of beaconing in West London (actually, for the record, within 3.75 Km of lat=51.52304 long=-0.17050). In summary, I see 2341 beacons of 52 bytes in 24 hours (i.e., nearly 100 per hour, or 1.62 per minute).
But the analysis also shows that some of these hotspots are witnessing broadcasts from 50 Km distance: the band is inevitably going to be very busy!
Hopefully the density of these devices will make trying to generate revenue a fruitless task (on Helium network, the high density of nodes results in very low reward). If you are still interested, take a look at the Helium density here: https://explorer.helium.com/hotspots/hex/88195da487fffff
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Yes its a big issue - I had a recent exchange with the Mods where I was concerned that the number in one of my community areas - say 8-10km of High Wycombe in the Chiltern hills/Wye Valley/Thames valley area (Bourne End & Cookham community) with a sudden increase in Helium BSN’s from around 10-12 back in the summer then suddely through Nov/Dec to 40+ then >>100 by start of Jan…checking a few days ago it was back down to <30 with a lot of the Chinese fakes with spoofed GPS location having been taken down - suspect ~50% of remaining still fakes…
Would be a big issue but for the fact that most of these fakes and not actually there and hence not congesting local airwaves
Suspect a LOT of those are fakes but just havent been taken down yet
If that is real monitored TX’s vs estimates based on deployment then yes a potential issue but still manageable - raises challenges for the future if they continue to grow…
Given many fakes arent distributed around UK/EEA but are actually sat on shelves in Far East then hopefully real local impact less than may be feared, though god help anyone close to the locations of those datacenters/shelves in China…mind you a lot of the kit is EU868 based, hence the need to fake locations in EU868 Band area, so even if they are terminating RF vs broadcasting and masking locally it will be out of band for China and am sure the authorities over there (who dont seem to be fans of any crypto currencies!) wanted to shut them down they could catch enough concentrated leaked RF to find them
P.s. was about to knock on the door of one of my neighbours last week to see what their experience of Helium & Mining was as one appeared a few doors down just after new year, then it disappeared and realised it was one of the fakes!
p.p.s. we need to continue to educate potential end users and clients as to the Helium volatility as have seen cases where end user organisation prospects (companies, schools, councils, industrial estates, etc.) have been hypnotised by the prospect of deploying their own infrastructure to make money vs paying for kit and services and falling under the influence of “look there are only (say) 20 TTN GW’s in the area, where Helium have 80+ and therefore ‘it must be better/more popular/better coverage’, right?” type comments - no sir the TTN GW’s are real, 70+ of the HNT’s are fakes so coverage isnt ‘real’!..
Just 'cause H brand under their own name, and add some crypto fairy dust, fact is it’s LoRaWAN underlying and I only hope the fall out from this isnt the tainting of LoRaWAN as a technology or a solution - if I was a senior at the L-A https://lora-alliance.org/ I would be really concerned about this!
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Once consolation from all this is Miners unlikley to be used on cellular and in remote areas for some applications as we have discussed back haul data consumption and deployment on limited data plans many times across the forum - some debate around low traffic GW’s using 60-100MB/mo or others up at 150, 250, even 500MB/mo in high traffic locations…I read recently on one HNT GW site that they expect/see anywhere from 40-60 GB/mo! 
500k GW’s x 50GB/mo…puts all those Internet Cat video’s into context doesnt it!? 
“Cat into the chicken coop”
All thes fake mining sites, are there not parallels to something like Sigfox here, unsustainable networks will collapse.
Just a thought…
In the meantime most of the traffic of my Gateway Cologne East is caused by nodes with the DevAddr 0100DA30. They transmit 52 bytes with SF12.
imho all of this (unnecessary) traffic is send to TTS CE and discarded there using the valuable resources of the servers.
I am more concerned about the airtime waisted by the traffic.
My 2 cents; at some point in the future (it may take a few years) people will stop buying Helium miners and the ‘demand’ for HNT, driven by vendors having to buy $50 worth of HNT for the privilege of adding a hotspot to the blockchain (onboarding), will collapse. Data Credits (convertible from HNT) of 100,000 messages for $1 will not replace this demand, mining will become unprofitable, people will unplug their hotspots, and the traffic will disappear.
Oops, i looked into it a bit more, and it seems that the demand created by vendors is rather small compared to the target supply of 2.5 million new HNT ($70 million at today’s rate) per month, so that is not fueling the hype. As long as hungry investors are willing to buy into HNT, the airwaves will see more 0100DA30.
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I get the whole mining for HNT & providing a hotspot.
To clarify for my calcified brain:
- I can setup a non-mining gateway - do I have to pay (cash or HNT) to do so?
- I can use devices, but I most definitely do have to pay in HNT?
- If I can’t mine because I don’t want to or can’t get a miner, how do I get HNT to pay for my device traffic?
I think the second two are the main barriers and if I have to pay for #1, that sucks too.