Can Helium (HNT) ever become a viable business?

Ya'll should check out the Forbes article about Helium: Crypto Darling Helium Promised A ‘People’s Network.’ Instead, Its Executives Got Rich

They showed that 99% of Helium's revenue comes from other users rather than its wireless data service.

Forbes found that over the past year, between June 2021 and August 2022, just $92,000 in revenue was generated from data moving across the network, according to Helium’s own numbers ... Instead, Helium generates the vast majority of its revenue — $53.3 million during the same time period — from people registering their new hotspots and authenticating other devices on the network.

Helium would need to increase customer demand by almost 900,000% if miners are to break even. Why 900,000%? There's close to 1M hotspots on the Helium Network, with each miner paying ~$500 per device amounting to approximately $500M in capital expenditure. For each hotspot to break even in 3 years, the network needs to generate monthly wireless data revenue of $14,000,000 rather than August's amount of $1,580--or merely an additional $13,988,420 per month.

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That means there's an unattainable task of covering the world in sensors that exclusively use Helium's service:

The crypto landscape is “littered with the bones of projects that have basically fallen by the wayside because the ultimate promise is not being met by fundamental economics returns,” Monsur Hussain, head of Financial Institutions Research at Fitch Ratings, told Forbes. For Helium’s network to become profitable, Hussain added, “You'd actually need to have the whole earth covered in a few feet of these devices to potentially consume enough data.”

An average IoT sensor generates approximately $0.09 in revenue per month, so in August, you could estimate 17,500 sensors on the network. Not bad right? Except that to generate enough customer demand to break even, you would need 160,000,000 sensors using the network, just another 159,982,000 more sensors to go. There needs to be more than 100 sensors using each Helium hotspot uninterrupted for years. Tell me how many hotspots actually serve that kind of data???

Sensors aren't cheap either, they cost $30-$100+ each. Just assuming that half of the sensors are yet-to-be acquired, 80M, at $30 a pop means customers would need to spent at least $2.4 billion to even have enough IoT hardware to reimburse miners for data transmissions.

Helium was founded in August, 2019 and has had 3 years to figure this out, but they're shockingly far away from generating revenue like a sustainable business--yet executives are withdrawing millions of dollars.

For example, a hotspot linked to Haleem’s wife displayed the coordinates of a California home the couple owned, according to a property records search. Five hotspots connected to this wallet mined 250,000 HNT in the first three months of the network’s inception, according to blockchain data. The wallet has earned a total 455,000 HNT from mining rewards, worth $25 million at HNT’s peak price, and $2 million today...Over the course of a single day in August 2021, for example, a wallet that appears connected to COO Frank Mong received almost a dozen payments from two other wallets linked to him within a two-hour window. The sum of those payments, then valued at nearly $1 million, moved to the Binance wallet minutes later, according to Forbes’ analysis.

What all of this amounts to is the simple conclusion that Helium is a ponzi. All money made is on the back of other investors' money rather than a consumable service. Early entrants have profited like crazy, but late entrants don't have the same access.

The only thing keeping it afloat is Helium's large investor warchest: a $110M token sale and a $200M funding round in February.

All of this is related to the IoT network ("LongFi"), which still has a waiting list of 1M+ hotspots slated to join. The 5G network will follow the same pattern, most data will be provided by T-Mobile rather than Helium's 5G hotspots--once again miners will be making money from other investor money.

In conclusion, know what you're getting into. This is not a realistically viable Web3 biz but rather a propped up speculation pool.

TL;DR: All money made is on the back of other investors' money, rather than revenue from a wireless network service. The path to a sustainable business is so far away that it's just unattainable. Helium is untenable and everyone who's exited with profits should consider themselves lucky. If you're still in it, sorry but you're hosed.