Does a mesh network incentivized by lightning exist? Outside of the LOT49 Paper by Richard Meyers/GlobalMeshLabs?
My buddy is invested in Helium and runs/owns a node or whatever they call it. He makes solid earnings..I do like what he has told me about Helium. I hate how most of you bitcoiners think that every other coin is trash...
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For tens of thousands of years money was always the most liquid good in a society. Sure, governments corrupted that model a bit but their experiment in fiat is coming to an end. Hard money is returning soon.
Bitcoin was designed to be the hardest money the world has ever seen. Just think about that for a minute. Why would we put up with anything else trying to be money?
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Bonus points if it were to be designed to run as a bitcoin full + LN node as well.
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That would be my goal.
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There's also althea.net
I'm not sure how they actually handle the money though.
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Looks like althea uses some shitcoin called xDia: https://blog.althea.net/altheafaq/#needtoknow
hopefully some day they'll see the light.. and switch to lightning
A related post, here on SN:
We need a real decentralized mesh network for censorship resistant Bitcoin usage #49841
https://nitter.it/bradllscan/status/1551951097375358976
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Swapping in Lightning ⚡ for whatever scamcoin is used by Helium and Althea should not be too hard technically as long as they remain open source. But bootstrapping a new network is expensive.
We might as well wait until their networks are built out more with cantillon VC money and speculators chasing gainz.
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yeah then when their coins collapse people can just install bitcoin software on the same machines
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Create a token on Taro for bootstrapping 😂
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I have a friend that was really enchanted by the project and was considering investing in the routers or whatever. He had an uncle that owned a chain of stores and was going to install them there.
Go to market is tricky. Maybe could do something like Uber. And what’s required of the client devices using the network? Probably a lot, meaning it wouldn’t work on phones.
I also don’t know much about helium or the lot49 paper
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I like this privacy focused satellite system Femtostar currently in development.
They don't use Bitcoin or any speculative Blockchain token. Just a prepaid service token that you could easily resell for sats.
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Not quite the same as Helium, but @Pseudozach has built an Android app that shares internet via wi-fi, it's called Lightspot.
LightSpot Mobile Wifi Hotspot Android app. Earn or Pay with Lightning. Beta version available now.

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this is cool, but now comes a dumb question: how to do you pay that LN invoice if you still don't have internet access from the hotspot?
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I had the same question. The captive portal first presents the LN invoice. Then:
In my app, I allow them access for the first minute or so and they can complete payment. Obviously you need to track it so it's not abused.
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Here's a message on Telegram that starts a discussion on that: https://t.me/kriptodecom/1500
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https://github.com/araspitzu/btc-hotspot https://www.peplink.com/products/max-adapter/ This product has custom captive portal with a radius integration. So basically we just need to build a public captive portal that takes payments with LN and allow the user access.
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It's been a decade now since the first "bitcoin-enabled hotspot" discussions began:
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There is a recurring request!
The Helium network but with sats instead of a shitcoin. Surely this is better? Less complex, more liquid reward. Who is working on this?
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If you could benefit from the service. why get paid to run it? the incentives of this type of project don't totally make sense to me. I suppose if someone wanted a disproportionate amount of the available bandwidth, questions of ROW and incentives can come up RE micropayments.
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What could the incentive model look like? Lightning can easily slice a piece of revenue off to a developer/maintainers, but how do they ensure that slice remains whilst keeping the protocol completely open? What's stopping the developers being cut out thereby losing their incentive to maintain the project?
I have had the same idea before.
Lots of cool ideas from shitcoin companies but unfortunately, they think that they need to launch their own token to make it happen.
I would love to run some open source hardwarw within a city or something and charge a small fee via LN to provide an open internet service.