DePin projects, the good, the bad and the ugly

First posted on https://www.publish0x.com/a-foray-into-crypto-a-technophobes-journey/depin-projects-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-xdkmmrj

Good morning/evening.
 
I have written a little about DePin ( Decentralized Physical Infrastructure) and some of the projects I am in, but I will give you a little insight in how we first got into it and some of the many projects within DePin that I have looked at but not got involved in.
 
Firstly living in rural Eastern Europe some things are just not available to buy 'off the shelf' and I wanted a central heating type system that would work. I also did not want pipework everywhere and was adamant that 'the guy that does the central heating' was not allowed to step foot in my house due to the fact that when I was at a friends house and looked at the work done, having a water pipe being ran across an electricity socket just was not for me! (when I say across the socket, it was positioned so you could not put a plug in although the socket was still live!) The main type of fires you can buy here are woodburners but I also wanted all the other rooms to be warm too. 
 
That led us to a whole lot of research and eventually this was the plan and as it was a new build hiding the ducting would be easy and we would allow for it.
 
HOW DID THIS BRING US TO DePin?
 
Well we also wanted to control temperature and heating from a touch pad and have it voice activated. This is where the tech came in and it was just not available for us to 'just buy'. Arduino boards and raspberry Pi's were the answer and the husband aka David purchased a great book called 'Arduino for dummies' and learnt how to programme these boards to do what we wanted and connect all of this to the touch screen. To be fair when there were hurdles the Arduino community were fantastic and helped when the odd bit of code that did not work. We had so many spare boards at the end that we even mined some 'Duino' coins.
 
Whilst looking for some fun projects for more of these Arduino boards we saw Helium. That was the start of the crypto journey. 3 weeks of research and we ordered our first Helium miners and then just kept ordering more as there were only a few others within 100km of us. You may have read some of my posts regarding Helium but we were fully immersed and I spent a lot of my time helping others with set ups. What I did not do at the time was research crypto as a whole. My bad!
 
Around this time there were so many of these projects coming out and I looked at most of them.
 
RevoFi
This project was trying to build a WiFi 6 mesh coverage, as well as doing decentralized storage, decentralized app hosting and sharing your spare bandwidth. You were to be able to earn revos tokens in return.
I followed for a while, asked a few questions (no answers)
I chose not to buy one for many reasons but mainly, they had already missed shipping dates of the product and it seemed like it was trying to do too many things.
Is it still going? The website just says version 2 coming soon so I would guess no.
 
 
NitroNetwork
This was about mining without buying a device. You would buy a 'Nitro Bot' NFT to earn rewards.
 
 
I chose not to buy, I had no idea about NFT's then and you owned no device.
Is it still going? Well it is not the best looking chart!
 
 
 
SC Prime
This is a decentralized cloud storage and you can receive tokens based on the bandwidth speed you provide and the amount of people using your device to store data on.
I chose not to buy, there were many competitors in this area and I had no idea how many people would use it.
SCPrime is still going.
 
I05
This was another project to earn tokens using your Helium miner.
You had to buy a license and then hope the project was legit, there were red flags so I did not go for this.
Is I05 still going? I do not think so and most people that did join declared it to be a scam.
https://www.publish0x.com/a-foray-into-crypto-a-technophobes-journey/io5-using-helium-hotspots-is-a-bit-fishy-xxzzeqx
 
WeatherXM
The project to sell weather data and earn rewards.
I loved the idea of this, thought it had a great use case and I have 1 weather station/miner.
Is WXM still going? Yes but still no mainet after 2 years.
Me waiting for mainet.
 
 
Akash Network
This is a network for buying and selling computing resources.
It seemed a bit technical for us at the time and I was not sure it would take off so I did not get involved in the project.
Is Akash still going? Oh yes. The Akash token is not far off from its all time high. It has a lot of attention now due to the AI narrative and has just been listed on a top Korean exchange.
 
 
DIMO
This project is about being able to establish a blockchain based identity for users, vehicles and trips and rewarding you in tokens for the data you provide.
It sounded like a project worthy of more research but my car was not compatible so I did not look into it further. 
Is Dimo still going? Yes and up 26% on the year.
 
 
HIVEMAPPER
This project is like a decentralized google maps. You need a dashcam and the Hivemapper app on your phone to transfer data from the dashcam to the app.
Cool idea but you need to do some decent mileage to earn anything and preferably not the same route day in day out, Our mileage is low and it is pretty much the same few roads so no good for them or us!
Is Hivemapper still going? Yes you can earn Honey tokens. 
Areas covered so far from https://hivemapper.com/explorer
 
 
 
Bit Harvest Studio
This one has been on my radar for a while now and the project will allow you to mine over 5 different tokens on one Helium (Bobcat) or Raspberry Pi device, ThingsX, Wingbits, Honeygain and Pawns as well as Helium's IOT token and more. You need to buy a license to be able to multi- mine.
I have done no research yet on this project but may look into it in the future.
Is BHS still going? Yes they have spent a lot of time getting the code right on Bobcat devices to allow them to multi mine.
Tokens you can mine with BHS.
 
 
This is a small selection of the depin projects I have looked at but I am also in these projects.
wingbits-a-depin-project-xkedreq ,
https://www.nodle.com/ mining using the phone.
 
 
To conclude
 
I have spent many hours looking at these projects and more, some are good, some are bad and in hindsight even if I did not join Akash Network I should probably have at least bought some tokens. There have been a couple of scam projects along the way that I have luckily avoided and one I was involved with for a while (Yes Defli is/was a scam that I was lucky to not lose any money on, but many people have unfortunately).
There are also many DePin projects I have not even looked at. Grass, Silencio and Click to name a few. 
Our IOT earnings from Helium mining are still giving us a small passive income but for a long time now they have been converted into SOL, BTC and TIA, and although that was the project that got us involved with crypto I must admit that I find buying BTC is an easy play. I spent a long time reading about BTC before I bought any, and it is the same with most of tokens I hold. I find that this strategy is probably far more efficient than getting involved with some of these DePin projects, although if it looks good a punt on some of their tokens is an alternative.
 
As always thank you for reading and feel free to comment.