Coffee Space 
Helium is a crypto network based on Helium, where people pay in shit-coin to communicate via the network, which apparently pays for the hotspots. Recently the Helium network has begun to die, and their business model has completely fallen apart.
I was discussing recently on IRC in Pine64’s #lora channel about how I hope Pine64 community developers decided against the Helium support in the end:
0001 B[]: Hopefully Pine devs decided against the Helium network in the end 0002 B[]: I know there was some chatter about it in the beginning 0003 B[]: Not that they would allow the devices to witness anyway, their entire 0004 network was propped up with hardware sales
The answer to this was essentially “people are free to work on what they want”. My concern here is the Pine64 community being dragged into a pyramid scheme. I thought this was worth a quick discussion and some attention, so I wrote this.
Note that I switched people’s tags to @#### to preserve their privacy. Technically it is a public chat, but this is a courtesy. In this chat I am replying to people, and have only selected some of my replies too.
So, what are the problems actually with Helium?
0005 B[]: @#### @#### As it was though, Helium was a pyramid scheme. Maybe it 0006 started off with good intentions, but as they failed to get commercial support 0007 (even lying about it), they then switched to a hardware + mining model.
There was a nice article on this, but I suggest to watch Coffeezilla’s video titled: “The Billion Dollar Network No One Uses”. It’s entertaining and funny, on a topic that is otherwise sad about a pyramid scheme that started with good intentions (we believe).
0008 B[]: I think the question here is "why didn't it kick off?". I suspect there's 0009 just no/low demand for low-bandwidth high-range communications in areas where 0010 there are people, because people tend to build high-bandwidth communications 0011 where they are. 0012 B[]: Maybe the biggest problem with Helium is that it takes something with a 0013 small barrier to entry (you need LoRa gear) and then adds further barriers (now 0014 you need crypto tokens just to use it).
I stand with this, there just simply isn’t any real application for low-bandwidth, low-power networking with such a high barrier to entry.
So if commercial backing isn’t an option for expanding the network, are there other ways we can expand the network?
0015 B[]: As to incentivize gateways, I think it would be much better to just make 0016 it useful, so that people want a gateway in their area to also get to use this. 0017 B[]: What you're up against is 4/5G, which is basically everywhere. Where LoRa 0018 is easily better is low-power applications, and the only place you wouldn't 0019 have power is somewhere remote (typically outside), that isn't typically 0020 directly interfaced with regularly. 0021 B[]: I think this essentially leaves remote sensing, and the next questions is: 0022 What kind of remote sensing would non-hacker people want to do that would 0023 convince them to get involved?
Whilst applications such as messaging, notifications, etc, are fun and cool via a decentralized network, it simply doesn’t replace the ease and usefulness of WiFi and cellular. LoRa needs a different primary selling point, that convinced the average person to host it to get benefits from it regularly.
With this in mind, we need non-commercial applications to convince people to use LoRa. Some initial ideas:
0024 B[]: Maybe something to do with climate change (CO2 monitoring, temperature, 0025 etc)? Perhaps an Apple Airtags alternative for finding things locally? 0026 B[]: (Which of course would be called a PineTag)
Here there was a suggestion to have this as a network for emergency scenarios. My reply to this:
0027 B[]: @#### Whilst I agree, most people only think about the immediate future, 0028 and a "just encase" is a hard sell for an always on network. Also a power 0029 outage would wipe out the LoRa network unless all gateways had batteries, and 0030 requires everybody carry a LoRa device just encase 0031 B[]: I think it would be better to have some daily task it is performing, with 0032 the back-up communication network being an added bonus
Another suggestion was to have it as a weather station:
0033 B[]: @#### Distributed weather stations would be really cool. Probably 0034 something with temperature, pressure, humidity, CO2, light, could be quite 0035 useful information
I’m sure there are other ideas, but generally my guidance for these would be:
Additionally, I would add: