I am not complaining 
I was able to modify CS sources to add some features which were missed the day I needed them, and most proably will be able to do the same with TTS if there’s a reason.
I’m going to just raise a couple of issues on GitHub.
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Ugly??? This is down right absurd - it’s technology for small devices to send data and they have a “Manufacturing Oversight Committee” that hears testimonies - is it televised like Judge Judy or something.
I think this post alone will help me solidify the case against using Helium.
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On the point of getting “rewarded” and why people are motivated to run community gateways:
What I would like to know more about, is how TTI views the relation between them and the community.
As far as I know, the community part is what kickstarted TheThingsNetwork, with people setting up gateways often out of their own pocket and extending the network that way. On the other hand, just having gateways is not everything, you need servers/storage/computing power/software development for the backend. I can imagine that without TTI TheThingsNetwork would not have existed anymore. Judging from the responses I see here on the forum, it sometimes feels to me like community users are seen as second-rate users of the network / freeloaders (but of course TTI is not responsible for alle comments here)
So things I wonder about:
- How useful is the community part of TheThingsNetwork actually to TTI? for example in term of community gateways? I can imagine that commercial setups with TTI just roll out their own gateways, with verified coverage, while community gateways can come and go, many of them not at particularly good locations.
- What would TTI like to see from the community? What can the community do for TTI? An emphasis on practical applications was mentioned earlier. I think for community applications this could be citizen science sensing projects, like measuring air quality (particulate matter), environmental noise, etc. I love to help with that (already doing stuff like that).
Personally, and in practical terms, thing I would like to see for the community gateways:
- A kind of notification system, so when a gateway goes down I get notified and can do something about it quickly.
- Get the gateway map back up in a more useful state, e.g. make it display the owner (if made public) so people can more easily contact the gateway owner. For coverage, I’m actually using ttnmapper.org
- In general, I’m just very curious about how “useful” the gateways I administer are. For example, is it passing actual useful traffic, or is it mostly redundant with other gateways? How much of the traffic is peered with other networks? Where are the bottlenecks / gaps?
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You are aware of the API to get gateway statistics, in the json you can see if it is online or offline (but I am telling you something you know), so then you need a few lines of code to push a notification to your preferred platform (e-mail, telegram, SMS, WhatsApp).
And you are aware this same API can provide you with rxRate and txRate. You should know how many nodes you have and their rxRate and txRate, form this you can deduct if your gateway service more than just you.
You could also log the rxRate and txRate of the gateways you are interested in to a db. From this you can see if there are bottlenecks / gaps?
Helium Inc., the company behind the Helium Network, is renamed to Nova Labs.
Did they need some fresh money?
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This said it all and still holds true! #384 LoraWAN + Cryptocurrency Miner = Helium. A good idea? - YouTube
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I am coming from the helium side. I was running my DIY gateway. I moved it recently to TTN, which I am using as a hobbyist.
In theory, the PoC and incentivized decentralized networks are fine, but transactional-based blockchain mining may not be the best way to do so.
I believe Helium HIP-70, the new proposal from Helium, is ditching the decentralization to keep the incentive; all the PoC and data packets accounting is moving to Oracles, and oracles are just centralized servers. Helium will no longer develop blockchain, instead running smart contracts over Solana Blockchain for accounting and registration.
This money-oriented incentivized model mainly brings more constraints than flexibility.
Bitcoin is a money transfer service. It incentive people with bitcoin. The incentives may make more sense if they directly benefit the gateway runner or node runner from what the network offers. In the case of the LORA IoT network, people’s incentive to run their gateway is a free traffic and stable coverage.
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I think this just another example of the whole ‘problem’ with Helium - apart from having to radically restructure to accommodate shortfalls & gaming of a system that is largely built on the quick-sand of notional money - the jargon & practical implementation is almost impossible to understand.
The original TTN model was simple and pure but, like almost everything like that in human history, has been taken advantage of by a minority who use the network resources disproportionately to their own commercial gain, at the expense of the majority.
So in making comparisons, it would be interesting to come up with a workable model.
It has become evident that the majority of gateway deployments are primarily for the benefit of its owner (community or commercial) who need the coverage - and as they get some side benefit from the coverage of other gateways, are inclined towards sharing their gateway on a quid pro quo basis.
It is acknowledged that there are a few totally altruistic deployments from our happy band of benevolent fanatics and those who took the leap of faith by buying a relatively expensive gateway during the bootstrapping phase. However gateways are now relatively affordable in the context of benefit accrued, so there is now little excess capital cost donated to the community network.
In a similar vein, the backhaul costs are typically negligible, leveraging existing infrastructure. For those who need to use a mobile connection there are some considerations about the recurring costs of a data plan and the proportion of own & community traffic.
Devices are deployed almost entirely for own use so any costs involved aren’t relevant to this, but see below for a sharing model.
The primary costs are in the running of an LNS. Relatively speaking, standing data is cheap to store but for the LNS to be responsive, some of the device data has be to kept in memory for instant use, even if the device only transmits once a year or indeed, never. This memory comes with a cost. There also needs to be sufficient processing power to run day to day requirements and have enough spare to cope with a reasonable unexpected surge in throughput.
I’d conclude that the most equitable funding is a small standing cost per device and a cost per uplink & downlink. It may be appropriate to credit the gateway owners a small percentage of the uplink charge, spread proportionally over the gateways that hear the uplink - as that would reduce the incentive to put a gateway in a high-traffic area that already has good coverage. Downlinks and ack’d uplinks should cost more.
A potential extension of running an accounting system may be selling data such that if an area has sensor coverage, a separate part of the stack could manage the publishing of data feeds for purchase. If someone is already collected data it makes no economic or environmental sense to deploy your own sensors. An audit mechanism of locating some verification sensors in the vicinity of the original deployment could be provided for QA.
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Who you calling a ‘fanatic’?! 
…its “evalgelists”, dear boy! or possibly “sponsors” 
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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.
…
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?
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Rumor says you’ve just left that position?
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At that height they’d get phenomenal proof-of-coverage …
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