I always assumed these helium miners were doing some weird radio data collection, IP obfuscation, or something. There has to be some incentive behind getting people to set up these radios everywhere.
I know someone they interviewed for a job last year and he said they were cashed up with years of runway but I also know they have a very bad rep in the LoRa equipment vendor space based on conversations although moved on to the LTE CBRS innovation band from what I can tell.
The RF nerd in me thinks it could be interesting but the skeptic makes me wonder how forgeable coverage would be and if the overhead of coverage challenges uses more of the limited spectrum than carrying actual data.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helium/denylist/main/denyl...
Helium has been paraded around as a successful use of blockchain when it's highly centralized and has no actual customers.
Visit https://explorer.helium.com/ You can visually see the miners and activity.
LoRa networks are not IP networks until the LoRa packets reach the internet edge and get backhauled to gateways that then deliver them to the owners of the data collected over LoRa. So anyone trying WiFi packet sniffing is barking up the wrong radio, and wrong layer 2.
Thing is, LoRa is not that big a business for commercial network operators, never mind oddball blockchain-based network operators. A lot of LoRa is deployed for a single purpose or application by the organization building both the sensors and the data collection network.