A pyrrhic victory in a single (though long enough) battle isn’t the same as a won war.
Yes indeed
Do you think TTN could implement a truly decentralized network focused on Proof-of-Work and uninflated TDOA based Proof-of-Coverage without becoming a shitcoin the way Helium seems to be?
We did explore this idea and had a working POC. Please see this post for reasons why this doesn’t work; Helium Network Comparative Discussion - #115 by johan
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However having an economic model where you may get a share of the value people attribute and willing to pay for a service does not go against having no expectation to make any money from it, or does it?
Shouldn’t a free economy mechanism help grow the network where people pay if they want to and pay as much as they are willing to?
I would think the strength of TTN is the culture of delivering value first and solving the technical problems leading to it. And a distributed network may well be just another technical problem without any necessary compromises.
Would the solution proposed then allow for having another attempt?
There doesn’t seem to be an effectual demand for The Network. If one really needs to connect 10-1000 nodes at his site, it costs almost nothing to buy a couple of gateways, rent a couple of VPSes, and set up your own private network. Chirpstack is that what really prevents TTN and others growth, not Helium.
I don’t think Chirpstack prevents TTN & others growth - whilst Chirpstack is a pretty solid offering, you have to manage the infrastructure yourself, which for high reliability configurations is a non-trivial task. Which means you either have a contractor on call or staff member to pay to look after it all - which then needs someone to step in when they are on holiday or ill or leave.
Whereas with the commercial offerings you delegate all of that to specialists who can offer a much more robust configuration with their expertise and you only have to pay for a share of the hardware & staffing.
I’m not aware of a lack of growth in the LoRaWAN market place, just the huge red-herring distraction that Helium brings to the party which does make some commercial discussions more complicated than they need to be.
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I think I see the point you are making but shouldn’t there be a middle ground between people setting up a private network vs having to buy into a shitcoin ecosystem to be able to access greater return on investment?
For example, I would like to extend the network on several islands across South East Asia to start an IoT based service. How could I make the gateways available to other use cases and have the ability to be compensated as demand grows?
For example, I would like to extend the network on several islands across South East Asia to start an IoT based service. How could I make the gateways available to other use cases and have the ability to be compensated as demand grows?
- You can use a private instance of The Things Stack (open source if you prefer that) and connect it to the Packet Broker or use it for LoRaWAN Roaming. Then you can contact the other network providers whose data you are forwarding to setup some form of data-sharing agreement where you get compensated for forwarding their data.
- You can optionally filter packets on your gateway so that only your traffic is forwarded and update that filter if someone wants to use your gateways for their traffic, thereby once again entering into some agreement with you.
Both these methods require a bit more work than a plug-and-play blockchain-based solution, but at least in this case, you and your “customers” define bilateral rules and not a third party.
having to buy into a shitcoin ecosystem to be able to access greater return on investment?
Since I worked on the above-mentioned TTN Wavelets experiment some time ago, in my opinion, the compensation for forwarding LoRaWAN traffic is minimal and the bad economics is one of the reasons why we dropped that idea.
In our Wavelets experiment, we tried to see if application users (the ones whose data the gateway forwards) would be willing to compensate gateway owners for traffic. This made sense in the days where gateways were 1000s of dollars. Today, you can setup a private LoRaWAN network with 4-5 very low cost gateways and don’t have to worry about compensation/coverage etc.
The reason I think why a lot of early Helium adopters made a profit is due to the nature of cryptocurrencies. If you basically print your own money and the internet hype-train pumps up the value such that you get fiat money in exchange for this made up currency, it’s possible to get high returns.
However, that is unsustainable by definition and if no one on the demand side of the equation is willing to pay for the massive supply of coverage, the whole idea starts to collapse.
My personal advice to you is to not focus on compensation for coverage since that model doesn’t scale that well unless you’re one of the few nation-wide operators who did this early in the LoRaWAN ecosystem.
BTW as a side note
whilst Chirpstack is a pretty solid offering,
From what I understand, the reason why users use with ChirpStack is that it’s easy to use. I do agree that’s setting one up is super easy. When compared to our retired TTN v2 this was really true. Setting up a TTN v2 private server was really hell.
However, we have made massive improvements in the usability with TTS v3 so I’d recommend giving the TTS open source deployment a go 
and give us feedback on what’s not so easy to do.
I don’t think Chirpstack prevents TTN & others growth -
I do agree. In addition to the above argument, if you have a ChirpStack deployment, you can easily connect it to the Packet Broker and access the rest of the The Things Ecosystem.
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At 0.0000001$/packet, a gw owner earns almost nothing. At 0.1$/packet, that gw owners has almost no other’s traffic (and so earns almost nothing), as for almost any more or less massive deployment it is cheaper to install a private network, especially taking into account that there’s no any guarantee regarding coverage etc. with TTN or Helium or any other community-based network.
Not sure how any coin (or fiat) can resolve this?
Edited:
Well, this summarizes my point 
Taking into account that there actually is no coverage beacuse of Helium LoRaWAN server flaws… They took Petr Gotthard’s compact server ( GitHub - gotthardp/lorawan-server: Compact server for private LoRaWAN networks ) and heavily mutilated it
Its GitHub page says there’s “a special category for The Things Stack. " on the forum, but when I tried to follow the link I got the following message " Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.”
Sorry for complete off-topic
Try looking in the categories at the top of this page???
Back on topic, here’s proof from RAK that you can make money out of nothing:
Thankfully one of the “free gifts” that I haven’t had to pay import duty on!
I’ve a mind to wear it to the conference …
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Who is making the money? You or RAK
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There is no substitute for actual experience. So investing £500 in a miner is a small price to pay, one which on typical project values, will pay for itself the first time I need to bring that experience to bear.
Yes, so that is actually what our last idea was before we decided not to move forward with it at all, to make it voluntary and basically donate money to whoever set up gateways and services to forward your traffic. Full disclosure: “services” here meaning routing services (including TTN) also getting a cut. This was one of the options we explored to make TTN financially sustainable. 5 years later, no progress on that front
I still think this is a good idea and I’m still open to exploring options in that direction. Just so long as we don’t involve blockchain in it. Since 2017, there’s been a lot of development in the fintech field to support microtransactions with actual money.
Yes, it will help, but I suppose it’s also fine to trust network servers operated by trustworthy players like TTN and TTI. In a truly decentralized way, with people setting up their own The Thing Stack Open Source or ChirpStack or homebrew LNS via Packet Broker, this proof is definitely helping.
… but not today, and only if roaming is disabled for pre-1.2 devices, right? So, getting back to this thread’s topic, this cannot help Helium in the foreseeable future.
Yep.
The usage data records (UDRs) that sNS (Helium) provides to forwarders (their roaming partners) are not trustworthy. This is not a problem specific to Helium; every roaming scenario has this limitation. Once you start paying for messages (like with Helium) and especially when you want to decentralize trust (with the Helium DOA) and the payout is to potentially hundreds of thousands of parties (lots crypto rambling in this proposal but all trust is ultimately centralized today).
This wasn’t really a problem with roaming agreements between operators like Swisscom and Orange I guess. They have a bunch of meetings, look each other in the eyes, draft some legal documents, sign them and go out for dinner. We never decided to monetize coverage, so for us it wasn’t really a limitation either.
Still, TTN supports this change in LoRaWAN MIC calculation, but indeed, it will be from LoRaWAN 1.2.0 and if it happens, it’s likely going to be optional. Otherwise, all end devices would have to implement a hash function and perform the hash on every uplink (probably CMAC, which consists of 4 AES encrypts in this case), with is power consuming. If end devices are not roaming, it would be a waste of ROM, RAM and battery power, even though it’s little.
I have a gateway at home because it is useful for me; I use it to monitor the flat’s door, the cellar’s door (10 levels below), bedrooms’ temperatures, the fridge, the mailbox, and the balcony plants.
My gateway is in TTN because it is useful for me borrowing other members’ gateways when my nodes are far away from home; for example, the tracker of my car, or my mother-in-law’s flat door, or the trackers in the backpacks of my sons.
Nowadays the use of the TTN network is so little in my area (TTN and LoRaWAN are not yet mainstream in Madrid) that receiving money (either payments or donations) from other members that use my gateway would sum a very low amount.
If in future the use of TTN network would increase (I wish so), and this hypothetical money amount would also increase, other neighbors would install gateways to share it, and the net amount would remain equally insignificant for each gateway owner.
So, I strongly feel that using payments/donation in TTN would not help to extend the network; it could even become a handicap because it introduces a new layer of complexity.
Many people don’t know what LoRaWAN is, and the few ones that do know, mainly use it for home/building automation. But home/building automation has not taken off even being a quite mature sector for years, so I wouldn’t expect a sustainable TTN deployment relying only on this use cases.
I consider that TTN (core+communities) should promote global projects to help to publicize what LoRaWAN is and the benefits of TTN network. For example:
- Education projects that would introduce TTN to students. Last year, TTN Zaragoza promoted a project named “Pájaros en la nube” (Birds in cloud), and 100 birdhouses were installed in schools all around Spain.
- Citizen concern projects like acoustic pollution maps.
I think it is not a matter of money, but a question of organization and usefulness.
It’s very difficult for a sole community to organize this kind of activities, but it would be easier with the back of a broader scope organization like TTN core, that would promote these projects to a global status (people usually are more prone to collaborate in big projects with mediatic repercussion).
I feel that communities are a TTN strength (compared to other networks) that is not being fully leveraged.
We must demonstrate that this network is useful.
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