Buy a Special Router and Earn Passive Income with Helium (HNT)
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Once you’ve paid the up-front cost of a router and set it up somewhere in your home, a new-ish project called ‘Helium’ really could offer some ‘passive income’.
It’s unclear just how long it could take to recoup the cost of that router, since it will be mining the cryptocurrency HNT, as long as your hotspot remains online.
The value of HNT
The value of your HNT income will depend on the success of the Helium project and token in providing long-term value and connectivity to any device that should want to use this special network of decentralised, peer-to-peer hotspots.
What is this network?
Your Helium router or node will be contributing to something called ‘Longfi’, which is a very interesting, far-reaching type of connectivity technology. It requires very little energy and yet the router can support up to thousands of devices.
Helium is both private and secure; the data is encrypted from machine to cloud.
The hope is that the network will prove itself over time, achieve growth and utility by all number of IoT or smart gadgets that may require this low-bandwidth connectivity. This may include devices in the home that can’t be plugged in to a socket.
You can view the Helium site business page, and scroll down to see what kind of businesses currently utilise these routers.
You can view the current coverage in the Network Monitor.
Proof-of-Coverage
The validation of the network, and the payout of HNT to your router or ‘node’, is generated by something called Proof-of-Coverage, since HNT is the cryptocurrency of the Helium blockchain. Data Credits is a secondary token which comes in to play for single users of the network, when it comes to sending data and for blockchain transaction fees. You’ll need to convert Helium into Data Credits.
Over time, the distribution of HNT rewards (powered by the blockchain) will go more to those transferring…