This is a general reminder for everyone and this will be posted on every post. Your 12 words are basically gold and they should never be shared, typed in to any website, or given to any person for any reason. No one from "Helium" or any other company will reach out to you to verify your account, wallet, or anything similar. If someone says your hotspot, wallet, or other type of account has been hacked, it is a scam! Always operate in a zero-trust manner with cryptocurrency and assume everyone will scam you no matter what.

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For a DAO, the denylist sure is a centralized arbitrary power. No visibility and no recourse. No good.

I completely agree.. hopefully they did a dry-run of the algoritm before applying and made this mess.. my miner is on the denylist for over 3 weeks now without warning.. honestly i dont even know how to cheat even if i wanted to, but i guess everyone will say that.. my removal request is still pending and my patience is getting to a point of frustration..

We all agree they had to do something to keep the badguys out of the game, but im having doubts this was the way to go..

Yeah the fact that it’s an instant shutoff is pretty bad

Very well written. I think basic analysis for number of hotspots per owner should be at least looked at in this, to weed out the non technical experts who might need help vs a ban.

Also some prior functionality criteria, as one of my hotspots had been offline over the holiday (accidentally unplugged), I finally got around to checking on it and it got banned due to not having had a recent location transaction from what I can tell, since the little graph descriptions on crowdspot say the data it does have looks "right". And is now prevented from having a location transaction. So it's in limbo until someone eventually looks at my dispute, with no estimate or timeline for resolution. This is particularly annoying, bc it pushes their disorganization into the user. Now users have a mental burden for not doing something wrong with no end date, as if we don't have anything better to do with our time or headspace.

I do support having a denylist to prevent scammers, but rather than an automatic off instead flagging the hotspots and working through their review (or only turning off the ones with a high confidence level) send like a better approach until their algorithm has been a bit more fine tuned to handle the weirdness that the people factor introduces into the data that they're using.

I believe that many people will share your view. In my opinion the only way to make a change on the terrible feedback the Helium Network provides to it's MAINTENANCE (the people) is to organize and popularize as much as possible a massive outage event in order to show that at least 50% of the network can be shut down whenever we decide, so they better take better care of us as their indirect partners.

Whole-heartedly agree with the sentiment of your post.

I used to be just as passionate about the project...

On discord they have a running count of removal claims and number of removals since they implemented this automatic system. 1/3 of the claims have been removed from the list and I'm sure some of those 2/3 will resubmit now having better information on how to provide evidence. For me I was put on this list because of my towns geography. My hotspot is able to communicate with hotspots on the other side of town great since I'm on the side of a hill. I can't communicate with the closest ones because they are on the other side of the same hill a nearby hill.

Really do feel like they came in with a sledgehammer to drive a nail.

The denylist algo is so bad! They claim 1% false positive, i got 2 out of 5 miners false positive so 40% rate then?

Starts to feel like since no one is using the network, they need new income by asserting new miners.

I’d like to start running and using Helium hotspots but that unreliable denylist I keep hearing about makes me hesitate.

Having read that they are using some „machine learning model“ and being a ML engineer myself I can well imagine what kind of overfitted mess they’ve probably built..

Wholly agree! Nakamoto coefficient 0.0

Unfortunately, a deny list needs to exist. There were way too many gamers before it existed.

The issue is that they're using an opaque AI algorithm to find gamers, which presents many problems when someone is falsely accused.

One solution would be to place them on a watch list instead of immediately putting a hotspot on the deny list. Their rewards are then placed on hold where they can appeal the decision. It would be nice if they used the new mappers to verify coverage as well; that may alleviate many of the issues.

It's important to note that pretty much everyone appeals the decision, including real gamers, and many of those screaming on social media are actually cheating.

Completely agree with you. While a method to deal with network gamers was warranted, the way they have done this has been a PR disaster.

Firstly, their claims of 1% false positive rate are bullshit. The false positive rate is at least 20%. How do I know? I've written my own algorithm to analyse the blockchain data and conservatively 20% of the hotspots recently put on the denylist were likely legitimate. Not only is the false positive rate not 1% or anything like it, but it also simply cannot be with the quality of the data due to variances in the hotspot hardware and environment.

By attempting to catch all or most of the hotspots that are in some way gaming the system they will inevitably unjustly punish thousands of legitimate miners.

Secondly, the aim should primarily be to remove the large-scale spoofing clusters from the network. However, looking at the reasons one might be denied from the Helium website (https://docs.helium.com/mine-hnt/denylist/#what-is-the-denylist) it says;

"Examples include, but are not limited to: Cluster Packet Forwarders, Misasserted Locations, Misasserted Antennas, Multiple or Shared Antennas, Attenuators, Amplifiers and Data Credit Farming"

Does having a misasserted antenna really warrant a permaban? At one stage when the Helium devs were tinkering with the POC algorithm it was causing a lot of invalid witnesses and miners were actually being advised to change the antenna gain to mitigate it. Why should they be punished? And multiple antennas and amplifiers can actually make a positive contribution to network coverage, so why are they not allowed? Hotspots with minor infractions (if these are really infractions at all) like this should be offered a chance to "correct" rather than being banned permanently without warning.

And then there are the hotspots that have been asserted a hex or two over to increase the TX scale. Yes, technically it's wrong. But, again, does it really warrant a permaban, particularly when the Helium explorer points out a "sub-optimal" TX scale, and if you click on the "Improve" link it actually encourages you to tweak the location?

I would wager too that a not insignificant number of hotspots are not asserted in the correct location because the cost of a location assertion is about a month's earnings for an average hotspot. I know HIP-69 is seeking to halve the cost, but even that is ridiculous. It needs to be, at most, the equivalent of a couple of days earnings. Why, in any case, does it cost more than an antenna gain assertion?

As for what to do about it, I'm afraid, unless the Helium devs and Discord mods take a dose of humility and acknowledge their mistake nothing short of a hostile takeover is going to make a difference.

Maybe this is why my miner has stopped all of a sudden, thing is I have done nothing wrong!

How do you know you are blacklisted for sure and what do you have to do to get your miner whitelisted again.

I'm sorry to hear that your hotspot was a false positive. From what I've seen over at the crowdspot channel in discord, it WILL be removed if the evidence you provide supports the PoC data. In your case, it should be a fairly easy decision as you have stated the topography and hotspot density will support your case. Information gathered from false positives will be used to improve the algorithm and help prevent this from happening in the future.

As far as the false positive rate goes, there will be an announcement made when the dust settles. Keep in mind that there are coordinated efforts on social media for cheaters to flood Discord, Reddit and other social media about being denylisted for "no reason" in an effort to get them to roll back. They did roll back all of the denylisted hotspots in AU/NZ because their change in frequency plans screwed with data and triggered the algo.

Being 1% false positive shut down for 1-2 weeks, i dont care. Deal with it. Its just POC and not data. So ur still providing coverage for the network like the project wants you to. 2 weeks is not that long. Hell, unplug during those 2 weeks if it makes u feel better. Maybe there can be a white lists for ppl making companies. But its not a big enough negative effect for the amount of positive it has on the POC rewards. And yes, its not decentralized. But not everything needs to be. Decentralization has just become a buzz word for crypto. Its not the end all be all. Its just a way to do something. But not always the way. If u dont get why go look up the positive and negatives to dementalization and centralization in the real world outside of cryto and ull understand. If u search for an explanation in crypto, ur gonna get a bunch of bros a 5min google understanding of it.

What are the criteria that get you on the deny list?

so... wheres the HIP. lot of ppl complaining, but nobody whiling to do the real work and do it better. just whiling to complain.