Find Out Why Helium Hasn’t Stopped Those Rotten Cheaters!

Let’s go through sev­en aspects of why stop­ping cheat­ing, also known as gam­ing, on the Heli­um Net­work is so damn dif­fi­cult. I know, I know, you just want an answer or *some­one* to do *some­thing*.

First, and let me be very clear: A group of tal­ent­ed peo­ple, both vol­un­teer and paid, are work­ing on com­bat­ting cheat­ing and they’ve made tremen­dous progress from the ear­ly days. They acknowl­edge they ain’t where they want to be in terms of con­trol­ling it, but con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, a fair amount of work has been and will con­tin­ue to be done on keep­ing cheat­ing to min­i­mum levels.

Still, when you’re try­ing to secure an enor­mous decen­tral­ized per­mis­sion­less net­work against sophis­ti­cat­ed and moti­vat­ed crim­i­nals, it ain’t an easy game. Look at this way: Mod­ern soci­ety has­n’t suc­ceed­ed in stop­ping crime; why should it be any dif­fer­ent in a sub­sec­tion of soci­ety, par­tic­u­lar­ly one that’s very new?

Let’s go through the hur­dles to stop­ping gam­ing along with what you can and can’t do, what is being done, then talk about where your time as a mem­ber of the Heli­um net­work is prob­a­bly most prof­itably spent.

First, RF is weird. RF stands for Radio Fre­quen­cy, and the “RF is weird” say­ing is com­mon in radio expert cir­cles. Using RF to deter­mine a Hotspot’s loca­tion is one of the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of Heli­um. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the way Heli­um is using RF to prove loca­tion is not con­ducive to know­ing where any giv­en Hotspot is if some­one is try­ing to cheat.

In a lab, RF is pre­dictable; radio waves trav­el at the speed of light and take “X” amount of time to get from a known dis­tance between point A and point B. In the real world, they bounce of build­ings and trees and planes, get stopped by moun­tains, refract off of water, and behave in ways that, while gen­er­al­ly pre­dictable, are not indi­vid­u­al­ly predictable.

Don’t believe me? Talk to any HAM radio enthu­si­ast who’ll tell you that one day you’ll talk to South Africa and the next you can’t get out of your city. With the fun­da­men­tal method of “prov­ing” whether or not a real world sig­nal is legit­i­mate so fuzzy, it’s dif­fi­cult to apply a clean set of rules that give a “cheat/no cheat” label to any giv­en sig­nal set.

Sec­ond, GPS is incred­i­bly easy to spoof. Poke­mon proved that, and Heli­um is no exception.

That means you can set up a bunch of hotspots in a base­ment in Boston and it’ll take a few hours on the inter­net and about $40 to make them seem like they’re set up in a beau­ti­ful lay­out in the moun­tains halfway around the world. Yes, sophis­ti­cat­ed anti-gam­ing algo­rithms can beat that, but not every time, and…

Third, no one wants to see a “good” hotspot get roped in with a bunch of bad ones. Sure, the PoC SWG (Proof of Cov­er­age Secu­ri­ty Work­ing Group, the group gen­er­al­ly in charge of anti-gam­ing) could cast a fine net that caught, say, 90% of the cheat­ing hotspots, but if it also acci­den­tal­ly scoops up 10% of the good hotspots, that’s not acceptable. 

That brings us to the fourth rea­son cheat­ing is hard to stop: The net­work is decen­tral­ized. The whole point is that the net­work itself is the pro­tec­tion; ide­al­ly there isn’t a need for an “anti-cheat­ing police force” the way we have in tra­di­tion­al gov­ern­ment. I know you want some­one to go kick in the doors of Bent Pas­tel Por­poise (which has been on the denylist over 50 times) and con­fis­cate all those stolen HNT, but…who does that? The Heli­um Police Force? Do they fly to Chi­na and lodge a protest? What if they’re wrong, and BPP is actu­al­ly a Xiangyang farmer just mak­ing a few extra HNT on the side?

This brings up a few impor­tant points: What if there WAS an enti­ty in the Heli­um ecosys­tem that could take HNT out of your wal­let if they thought you’d stolen it? That’s anath­e­ma to all of cryp­to; what’s in your wal­let is incon­tro­vert­ibly yours. Who should judge that? If it’s just a pig-pile method of vot­ing, what stops a few whales using their vot­ing pow­er to say that your HNT isn’t yours? What hap­pens to the recov­ered HNT?

It gets tricky fast, and the only rea­son­able way to judge right now is to err on the side of peo­ple who are *prob­a­bly* doing the right thing, even though that prob­a­bil­i­ty pro­vides cov­er for an awful lot of cheaters.

Let’s get into some bet­ter news, now that you see a few of the (very dif­fi­cult) obsta­cles to stop­ping all cheating. 

Fifth, there actu­al­ly IS a group tak­ing on the mon­u­men­tal task of pro­gram­ming the net­work itself, and not just you or your bud­dy or any self-appoint­ed Heli­um police, to make cheat­ing not worth it. They work under the acronym PoC­SWG, men­tioned above. In gen­er­al they remain out of the lime­light, although they will bring forth cas­es against appar­ent insti­tu­tion­al gam­ing to be heard by the MCC (Man­u­fac­tur­er’s Com­pli­ance Com­mit­tee). Full dis­clo­sure (and no sur­prise to those of you who’ve watched the MCC calls), I sit on the MCC as a Com­mu­ni­ty rep­re­sen­ta­tive (vs an RF or secu­ri­ty expert, which I’m not). If you’d like to learn more about the MCC, their char­ter is here.

The PoC­SWG is made up of experts from the world of RF, secu­ri­ty, machine learn­ing, pro­gram­ming, math­e­mat­ics, AI, and man­u­fac­tur­ing. If you’d like to join, jump into Heli­um’s Dis­cord and look for the #poc-dis­cus­sion chan­nel. Read through the past week’s posts and see if you think you can help. If you do, apply here. The PoC­SWG works togeth­er to devel­op ways of com­bat­ting gam­ing on the Heli­um net­work, and while they’re not per­fect, so far they’ve done pret­ty well. That brings us to the next thing:

Sixth, quite a few gamers actu­al­ly HAVE been stopped. Now, hav­ing friends and clients who have point­ed me to “cheat­ing” hotspots that seem to pret­ty clear­ly cheat­ing and still get­ting away with it, I know that not all cheaters have been stopped; not by a long shot. 

I asked Dave Akers over at Heli­um Ana­lyt­ics to run the stats on how many gam­ing hotspots there are and how much they’ve earned. He sug­gest­ed we use the denylist as our stan­dard for “gam­ing hotspots”, so this does­n’t include all cheaters, but it prob­a­bly gets most of ’em.

Here’s a quick table for ya. Gamed Rewards are the rewards that went to Hotspots on the denylist. Hotspot Rewards rep­re­sent HNT that went to Hotspots NOT on the denylist. Denylist Reward Por­tion is that per­cent­age of Hotspot rewards that went to the denylist. Net­work Rewards is all HNT that was emit­ted to all actors; Hotspots, Val­ida­tors, and the HST to investors.

Take­aways?

First, about 10% of all Hotspots (just over 100k) are cur­rent­ly on the denylist and not allowed to earn by either receiv­ing chal­lenges or wit­ness­ing a beacon.

Sec­ond, in 2022 so far (Oct 23rd), about 2 mil­lion HNT was earned by Hotspots on the denylist. Yes, that’s a prob­lem. No one is deny­ing gam­ing isn’t an impor­tant issue. While it is a lot, it’s only about 10% of all HNT emit­ted dur­ing that period.

Now, those of you who’ve been stri­dent about let­ting me know that gam­ing is a much big­ger prob­lem and may com­prise up to 50% of the network…show me the stats. As far as I know, there isn’t a way to see not-yet-caught cheater rewards. If there were, we’d prob­a­bly be able to stop them.

I’m going to GUESS that less than anoth­er 10% is going to as-yet-uncaught cheaters, which would mean, again, as a GUESS, less than 20% of all rewards are going to cheaters. Yes, that’s a prob­lem. No, it’s not 50%. Yes, peo­ple are work­ing super hard on this to bring it down to accept­able levels. 

Com­pared to esti­mates on glob­al crime as a per­cent­age of GDP, we’re behind, by a lot. Still, it’s rea­son­able to believe that the PoC­SWG and oth­er enti­ties will bring cheat­ing down to more nor­mal lev­els with­in a year. 

The sev­enth aspect is what YOU can do to help stop cheat­ing on the Heli­um net­work. You can report sus­pect­ed gamers to Crowdspot.io. Crowdspot isn’t a per­fect fix. What it does is sur­face up appar­ent­ly bad behav­ior so folks from the PoC­SWG can find poten­tial bad actors faster. Just report­ing a gam­ing clus­ter does­n’t mean they’ll be shut down by the end of the week (or even in 6 months), it just makes it eas­i­er to iden­ti­fy who might be poten­tial­ly bad. Remem­ber, if it was just a vot­ing sys­tem, a whale could just vote against YOU and there’d be noth­ing you can do about that.

Oth­er ways you can help includ­ing dig­ging into the stats to see if you can fig­ure out bet­ter ways to spot and prove cheat­ing, or vol­un­teer your efforts for the PoCSWG.

The most excit­ing news out of all of this (for me) has noth­ing to do with cheat­ing, and every­thing to do with a net­work worth try­ing to cheat. We have built some­thing amaz­ing here, a glob­al­ly use­ful decen­tral­ized net­work. It is so amaz­ing and valu­able that actu­al crooks are try­ing to cheat it. While it’s bloody frus­trat­ing, it’s also the sign of a very healthy net­work. After all, no one steals from a beggar.

With that in mind, if you’ve been frus­trat­ed by cheat­ing, know two things: First, a group of peo­ple are work­ing on your behalf to min­i­mize the dam­age cheaters are caus­ing, and they’re more or less suc­ceed­ing. Sec­ond, even if all cheaters on the net­work were stopped TODAY it would have a min­i­mal impact to your earn­ings com­pared to what you could do if you actu­al­ly built a busi­ness using the network. 

The time for crush­ing on PoC and data rewards is gone. The absolute­ly most prof­itable thing you can do right now is not the focus on what is wrong, but on how you can build some­thing on the net­work. THAT is where the largest oppor­tu­ni­ty lies, and where I strong­ly rec­om­mend you put your ablest effort.

To your suc­cess in Helium!