I think a deeper dive is warranted on what and how they are "paying" people. Helium tokens are used as an incentive to bootstrap a network, but in the future part of payment for network services like you mentioned. I think this is one of the purest uses of crypto... less as currency replacement but more sharing in a network's future.
As soon as I found out I couldn't stand up my own DIY helium miner and start providing coverage and making money I became entirely disinterested.
That said, there are 50 HW manufacturers queued up to supply. Incorporating Helium into an existing Lora framework is very easy.
In fact, Helium is seeing an interesting phenomena where the PoC mining tech is becoming bundled with existing HW platforms because the material costs are so cheap. Projects are now bootstrapping on top of Helium.
How did they arrive at $40 I'm not too sure. It seems like a moderate amount?
- An organization different from Helium Inc. disperses keys to hardware manufacturers.
- Said independent org also performs an audit and approval process.
- Improvements to the network are crowdsourced and voted by rough consensus.
- Anybody can make suggestions or implementations similar to ethereum improvement proposals.
- Once deployed, there is no way to remove the node from the network.
- Nobody has banning or revocation abilities.
This is one of more interesting parts of the Helium network. It's wholly not forkable. Helium hotspot owners get their firmware updated automatically... which again seems like a big negative (single company controlled hardware) but it's imperative for this stage of network bootstrapping. I want Helium to tightly control quality now to get to a level of resources where trust itself can be disaggregated amongst DIY hotspots and firmware developers.
Indeed, that’s why helium is DINO (decentralized in name only).