[cmews]

Ok, I will bite :) The gateway rewards are becoming less and less every month because more gateways join the network. So in a certain way that feels like a pyramid scheme because the people that joined earlier have an advantage (they also took the most risk by backing this project in a early state). It is quite normal to reward the first movers to your platform (PayPal even gave away free money to grow their user base)

There is a twitter account that publishes the DC burn rate hourly/daily/weekly: https://twitter.com/HNT_DC_Burn. Last week they burned $1,064,348 in data fees so the revenue is way higher than the 3 million per year you described, but you make a fair point for the gateway activation fee and not sure how much of the DC burned is because of this. But focusing on growth by giving out rewards for early hotspots is not a weird tactic and the question is indeed if the pricing make sense for the long run. Nowadays most priced stocks or other assets don't make any sense to me as well, so I would have agreed with you 10 years ago, nowadays I'm not so sure. They are also expanding to the decentralized 5G market and the packets send will be way more than the LoRaWan network, so I think that is priced in the helium price as well at the moment.

Your last statement I don't really understand. If you participate in a network by investing/running the hotspot you would want a compensation and nowadays a gateway would earn less than 600 dollars a year because of the increased hotspot amount. There will be an equilibrium that the market decides otherwise people would shutdown their hotspots.

[ninepoints]

> It is quite normal to reward the first movers to your platform (PayPal even gave away free money to grow their user base)

The cognitive dissonance here is astounding. Surely you can see how the analogy isn't even remotely 1-1.

[cmews]

This is what Elon said about PayPal growth strategy:

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Well, we started off first by offering people $20 if they opened an account. And $20 if they referred anyone. And then we dropped it to $10. And we dropped it to $5. As the network got bigger and bigger, the value of the network itself exceeded any sort of carrot that we could offer.

Helium is trying the same thing (only decentralized) with the proof of coverage algorithm and rewards (which are diminishing by a halving process every two and a half years I think) so that the network can sustain itself. Please let me know why the cognitive dissonance is astounding because their proof of coverage hotspot rewards look a bit more advanced to the growth strategy PayPal used and they hope the network will be sustained by data transfer only when the rewards are not given anymore. (https://cdn.codetober.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/1111471...)

[twic]

If these numbers are correct, then this is a cool product and business model.

It doesn't require a blockchain, though.