- Yes.
- You pay in data credits which you get by converting HNT
- But it, check https://www.coinbase.com/how-to-buy/helium
So providing coverage but not being remunerated for it because you donāt have a miner costs!!!
Ouch!
TTN for the win! WRT costs of simple connectivity - lower GW costs, no data related charges 
@tomtobback If I recall when starting and not long back 1 HNT was ~$1 so 100k messages for 1HNT, now looking at HNT>$30 so >3Mu msgs for 1HNT, not expensive BUT cost per message (in HNT terms if not IRW $'s) falling >>faster than message traffic growth means =/= overall revenue growth meaning outside of mining activity network surely cant become self sustaining and economically viableā¦ once mining gets harder (GW denisty reducing value, energy costs rising, GW costs rising - not least due to shortages and panic FOMO bidding up price, reducing available tokens) and unless conversion to buy useful things IRW other than data charges then folk will loose interest esp if HNT price starts to fall significantly, and this scheme risks collapse? Its all about the mining and getting in quick, build a cache of tokens and then get out quick if you can trying to extract some value IRW hence all the fakes piling in both in the initial āgaming the systemā phase, before they re-architected system and added validations and locked down miner, and now with these new āgeo fakesāā¦ too little of this activity delivers real LoRaWAN network coverage relative to the amount of resources piling in (energy consumption, internet traffic/capacity and sucking up valuable semiconductors and GW systems perhaps better deployed elsewhereā¦?)
It will be a great opportunity by then to obtain these hotspots at no cost and convert them into normal LoRaWAN gateways for TTN!
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But in the meantime this fad consumption is exacerbating semi/IC shortage & driving up/propping up price of existing GWās and pushing out leadtimesā¦GW manufacturers and Conc Card providers (for self builds) are thinking 
why sell a GW to a TTN user for say $200 when I can sell basically same kit (ok with a bit of s/w licence and maybe an authentication part costing a few $cents) for $500, 600, 700 or whatever! 
Lots of cheap GWās 1 or 2 years from now doesnt really help usā¦
Light Hotspot will address this. Right now Hotspots on the network act as Full nodes (essentially they all have a copy of the blockchain stored on them and have to sync to it over a peer to peer network). This will change and the reduction in BOM will mean that all GW (inc TTN ones) can act as Light Hotspots on the network. This is a primary goal for Helium right now, both to aid in ramping up the already impressive coverage but further decentralise the project. A $200, readily-available Hotspot will expand the network by orders of magnitude.
Data Credits are a fixed price in USD - this was designed purposefully so that businesses using the network wouldnāt need to deal with crypto volatility. In fact they wouldnāt need to know anything about blockchain/crypto at all. They can simply buy Data Credits from Helium who will then āburnā the required amount of HNT to supply them with the DC. The more burning that happens the less HNT is in circulation, which then also creates market scarcity since there is a max supply of HNT that can exist.
The high PoC rates we see today is by design; it is an attempt to solve the cold start issue that TTN has seen; what incentive do you provide thousands of hosts to spin up a network, with no devices on it? Knowing it would take years, PoC was introduced to allow the network to stabilise (in location coverage terms) while the devices were spun up. Hotspots in high density areas earn less HNT.
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But can they āMineā - that is all that seems to be motivating some at the moment. Also I understand there are lots of legacy hotspots which, after the previous set of āsystem fixesā to stop folk gaming the system and before PoC introduced, can no longer mine - I guess leaving many early adopters out in the cold.
Or was it a concept to stop the abusive miners gaiming the system (genuinely asking as I dont know details or useā¦!), and how is that helping remove all the current Geo Fakes we have seen and discussed above (Note: I looked at coverage map for my local area - 1-5km range) a few days ago again and almost every one I looked at had a curiously co-incidental āfakeā altitude - 0m, 10, or 31m being very common!. Looking closer at some in my area (I live ~100m above MSL in an area where height above MSL ranges from 25-160m. If the altitude for a GW is above MSL then many are actually deep under ground (truely mining? 
or if altitude is above local ground level then there needs to be a flying object ~2-5x the height of some of the local housing somwhere in the air at those locations - and a visible check shows that is not the caseā¦or perhaps they have put them on drones that only fly when I am not there! 
Yep saw same with TTN = once the $250 barrier broken a few years back it got alot easier, and once $150 and now even $100 was achieved it got fasterā¦
And how is density measured? By crow flight or by actual on the ground coverage? Urban environments need much higher densities to ensure coverage (per e.g. Osaka-Hato model et al) vs rural areas - so if lots of people have miners in city towerblocks and offices providing the coverage but are then physically close and dense do they earn less than a farmer watching his flock!? Sounds like some users may get penalisedā¦or if not in range of other witnesses may miss out on reward even if providing much needed coverageā¦
ā¦simple really just stick with TTN and deliver community benefit rather than follow the crypto fad and have to fight other people greed?
You sound very well informed, scarily succinct, if you have a particular standing in the Helium community or are an actual employee, it would be good to be transparent about your role or position.
Mr. mainman has been with us for nearly 2 years but this was his 1st post - and IP suggests local to us in UK?
But yes I too would love to hear (and hopefully understand) more if he/she can help educate us all and aid sharing and education. Apart from the blockchain/crypto stuff many of the problems of GW & device deployment for either network will be common issues (e.g. RF propagation and range, ensuring meet legal limits, avoiding (mutual) interferece etcā¦). @Mainman?
@Jeff-UK Light Hotspots will still Mine. They just wonāt have to process blockchain blocks in order to do so. Instead they will send their PoC results to the ācloudā (Validators - another entity on the network) who then verifies the PoC receipts.
I think you are referring to the deny list. The community can request that fraudulent hotspots be removed from the reward pooling if they are suspected of cheating. Are you aware of how Proof of coverage works? Essentially if you have distant cluster (say in the desert of China) then you can replicate that to a degree but fiddling with the antennas. There are telltale signs of this in the PoC Receipts and, sometimes just by looking at asserted locations. They are a bit ātoo perfectā. Honestly though, they get a lot of attention for the HNT they āstealā.
The altitudes you describe are input into the hotspot app (preselected āroughā heights that you pick from). I think the height and sensitivity info is used to help ensure broadcasting stays within local required limits, but I could be wrong.
Hotspot density is multi-variate. There are resolutions of hexagons super-imposed on each other. Your ādensityā is a sum of these resolutions and how many other hotspots occupy those buckets with you. For example, someone in the same building as me is adding very little to the network that Iām not (redundancy excluded) but someone 300m is tolerable. We have grades of bins made up using the H3 index map from Uber. The hexagons you see on explorer.helium.com are one of these resolutions.
Typically agriculture deployments enjoy almost perfect density ratings given the flexibility to deploy at exact distances required.
Helium has grown to 550,000 hotspots in 2 years. You could say the simple approach is better, but I think itās clear at least that incentivization helps. I donāt know how long TTN has been running (since 2014?) - but I donāt know that it even got close to that number. You may not agree that crypto is here to say, but thatās ok. The people who do are the ones deploying hotspots, and optimizing their coverage, for gains.
Honestly I appreciate that this is a TTN forum, and people will have their baked-in opinions, and I get that. But I hope you can see the goal here is the same. A lot of helium community folks have great respect for TTN. Iām not here to belittle, only try and help explain what is admittedly a complex, though elegant, solution.
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From what context? Enthusiast, hardware distributor, Helium staffer?
Iāve no doubt the information is correct, but who is it coming from?
ā¦and we are here to learn!
After 4 years with TTN (started in 2015ā¦I watched from the side from late 2015 and ordered 1st gw specifically for TTN use late 2017, joined forum early 2018), and now in my 10th year working with LoRa it still educates and surprises meā¦ either with new iterations and evolutions be that L-A specs, new vendor silicon and platforms or people cooking up new use cases and applications; bolting on blockchain & crypto beings another large scale use case.
Still canāt help but wonder what the world might be like if those 500k GWās were just added to TTN and the wider community and stopped miningā¦ doing what we want I.e. delivering LoRaWAN coverage but without the 40-60GB per gw traffic overhead, excess energy use mining and communicating and lower cost more readily accessible GWās without prices being pumped up by greed, over engineering and additional licensing costs?! Maybe Iām just a naive idealist in this situation
We are all fellow travels when it comes to IoT & LPWAN and given the TTI core team invited a Helium presentation at the last big TT Conference it seems all are officially welcome even if we do not support or encourage Helium use directly on the forumā¦many are still curious and I know of many with feet in both campsā¦I think the respect is mutual - at least for those intent on driving coverage for coverages sake even if not necessarily for the people just intent on exploiting and making a fast buck, possibly at the expense of others or by cheating
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Paywallā¦
There is a massive difference between the Helium sales pitch (as indeed naively copied in the NYT) and reality. The Helium network is all about mining, and invaded with scammers who are part of the community and able to exercise their voting right according to their HNT holdings. The denylist has around 30k known fake hotspots (= at least 5% of the 570k network), and it is a complete can of worms with 370+ issues waiting to be processed, depending on human arbitration in a zero-trust anonymous network called the blockchain. Unfortunately any mistakes cannot be rolled back, because, you know, blockchain. The blockchain is slowing the system down (8hr outage last week) and the network is planning to move to ālight hotspotsā with the blockchain only residing in validators, who have to stake 10k HNT (around USD 250k today). What kind of players does this attract? btw HNT is down 10% today.
If i find some time, iāll try writing a script for the blockchain API to extract how many data packets are actually sent over the 570k hotspot network, that would be interesting. Maybe @mainman has some info to share on this? I must admit, the Helium Console is a slick web interface for device management, obviously a lot of money has been thrown at it. Just hard to understand why keeping the network free of scammers has not been a priority.
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Yes - The Web3 Index - Helium has some data on device spend. Worth checking out. A lot of the chain issues stem from running full nodes on the hotspots themselves. As you mention, a lot of this goes away when light hotspots enter the mix, thankfully. The high cost of a validator prevents sybil attacks, but there are some interesting proposals coming up to allow wireless protocols to exist as DAOās and essentially govern themselves (i.e. set their own validator and proof of work ārulesā). Nothing is set in stone with Helium and practically every facet is being optimised. The blockchain outages donāt tend to impact device data, because there are state channels that just settle up when the outage is over.
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Just to add to that, Actility, Senet and X-Telia now roam on the network. One would imagine if the coverage is there (and itās growing at the rate of 80,000 hotspots a month) that helium coverage would supersede native coverage pretty quickly and we should see rise of a bunch more MVNO types launching networks through helium.
Thanks @mainman that web3index is really interesting, and aptly named ādemand-sideā, saves me some work. About $9k over the last 30 days, that is $300 per day on average, so maybe up to 30M messages per day (1 DC = $.00001 per 24 bytes, so probably less than 30M messages). That means, on average, a Helium hotspot handles 50 messages per day. My guess is that 20% of the Helium hotspots are seeing 80% of the traffic, let me look into that.
Just to compare with TTN (as that is the name of this thread), 44M messages per day with 20k gateways, is on average 2k message per gateway per day, thatās a factor of 40 (but probably closer to 100 if the average Helium packet would be 50 bytes).
I think that says more about the mechanism around TTN gateway deployment; they are often set up for immediate purposeful use, from opposed to a āspeculative useā. Still, the numbers on heliumās side are encouraging, despite the networkās young age.
It seems that this concept of ābuild it and they will comeā makes so much sense that it did not take long for Helium to get copied. Hereās the MXC Foundation building a āFree Smart City IoT Network on Web 3.0ā by selling multi-token miners. Now if we could just figure out a way to connect a device to their global LPWAN network of 22k gateways.