Helium isn't your typical crypto company. Their vision is actually very lofty - build a distributed low data wireless network completely independent of phone providers and cable companies.
And pay the people who own nodes a percentage of the $ earned thru the traffic flow of their node.
The payment just uses crypto because the ecosystem is a nice fit. Everybody knows what miners are and that they make money.
The problem is that you need the entire network in place before people can build on it. So they have been subsidizing the miners. And it's a race of how much money can you raise and payout vs how much is a network like that is worth.
And right now everybody has cellular and cable and fiber and no one really needs another system. Most of the use cases (LOTS of sensor data) aren't really worth that much money.
Personally, I think the government should subsidize something like this to allow it to get off the ground. Earthquake data, climate data, traffic data, etc. Essentially public use.
And pay the people who own nodes a percentage of the $ earned thru the traffic flow of their node.
The payment just uses crypto because the ecosystem is a nice fit. Everybody knows what miners are and that they make money.
The problem is that you need the entire network in place before people can build on it. So they have been subsidizing the miners. And it's a race of how much money can you raise and payout vs how much is a network like that is worth.
And right now everybody has cellular and cable and fiber and no one really needs another system. Most of the use cases (LOTS of sensor data) aren't really worth that much money.
Personally, I think the government should subsidize something like this to allow it to get off the ground. Earthquake data, climate data, traffic data, etc. Essentially public use.