Helium Network Hints at Crypto's Practical Uses

I agree with the author that this is a relatively interesting, or at least benign, use of crypto. But let's look at what this project seems to boil down to.

It's about you earning crypto by letting others use bandwidth provided to you by your ISP, which is typically against your ISP's ToS.

And it makes sense that this is against the ToS. You're basically setting up a mini-ISP on your ISP's pipes without compensating them any extra for the increased traffic.

This is just fancy mooching, and if it were to scale up, ISPs would surely crack down on it.

And if ISPs really wanted to leverage end user hotspots to expand access, they could probably just do it themselves.

Better crypto idea than average, but still seems unsustainable and Rube Goldberg, like other crypto schemes.

I wonder if they can apply this model to all wireless protocols?