Ideally people would use the hotspots to back-haul IoT data. Its a business that is real, and could work (eg. TheThingNetwork, Amazon Sidewalk) but doesn't make a lot of sense to use as a customer until you see strong coverage in areas you need... which open-access incentives like crypto (or just paying hotspot owners) could theoretically help solve. The crypto-washing of an otherwise valid business model (even if not profitable business) probably ruined a lot of the potential for this business to be successful.
For example, instead of Lime scooters using 5g cell towers to track their scooters, they could use LoRa, which would be lower power, but it only works if the service area is already fully covered.
Always thought it was suspicious that all documentation, videos, discussion was around mining Helium tokens, not around how to use the network for something real
just dont understand why these kinds of frauds or predatory market manipulations, whatever you want to call them are not super illegal, they are pure theft
"Using information from leaked company documents, Forbes matched the street addresses of dozens of Helium insiders named on an internal “family and friends” list with GPS coordinates tied to hotspots that were distributed in the months after the project launched in 2019. These documents contained information such as names, work emails and home addresses. Then, after cross-referencing those addresses with property records, information from Helium’s public blockchain revealed how many tokens were earned by each of those hotspots.
For example, a hotspot linked to Haleem’s wife displayed the coordinates of a California home the couple owned, according to a property records search. Five hotspots connected to this wallet mined 250,000 HNT in the first three months of the network’s inception, according to blockchain data. The wallet has earned a total 455,000 HNT from mining rewards, worth $25 million at HNT’s peak price, and $2 million today. It is unclear when or if Haleem sold those tokens; he declined to comment."
This is a solid piece of journalism. The truncated HN title does it a disservice.
This kind of "instamining" happens for every cryptocurrency, going all the way back to Satoshi mining 1M BTC before people had even heard of Bitcoin. The decreasing reward schedule of many coins disproportionately rewards miners who get in at the very beginning.
9 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 31.0 ms ] threadHelium stopped mentioning hnt and keeps referring to a new mobile token for their new CBRS cellular service offerings: https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/t-mobile-allows-helium-mob...
For example, instead of Lime scooters using 5g cell towers to track their scooters, they could use LoRa, which would be lower power, but it only works if the service area is already fully covered.
For example, a hotspot linked to Haleem’s wife displayed the coordinates of a California home the couple owned, according to a property records search. Five hotspots connected to this wallet mined 250,000 HNT in the first three months of the network’s inception, according to blockchain data. The wallet has earned a total 455,000 HNT from mining rewards, worth $25 million at HNT’s peak price, and $2 million today. It is unclear when or if Haleem sold those tokens; he declined to comment."
This is a solid piece of journalism. The truncated HN title does it a disservice.