As much of the community is aware, our team of core contributors has been working on a yet-to-be-activated update to the Proof-of-Coverage system, PoCv11. PoCv11 is a major upgrade that has taken many months of implementation and is one of the largest functional upgrades to the Helium blockchain as it provides a significant upgrade in data available for blockchain participants.
Action Items for Hotspot Hosts You can read more about the specifics of PoCv11 on the blog, but please review the below action items.
The team hasn’t finalized the date of activation, but it should be on or after October 4th:
1. Ensure your Hotspot is asserted in the correct location. If you have asserted your Hotspot to a “nearby” hex so that you could avoid reward scale penalties, or want to “appear” to be further away from a neighbor, PoCv11 may affect you.
2. Assert your antenna gain. It is important to assert your antenna gain (a value between 1.0 and 15.0dBi). One of the key parts of the PoCv11 update is that your transmission power might be scaled down to fit local (regional or national) regulations. Most manufacturers have already provided their standard antenna gains in the Hotspot App but you can also select “custom antenna” to manually enter a value to take into account a third-party antenna or cable loss or connectors. We highly recommend using a known antenna value unless you have extensive experience with antennas and signal loss calculation.
3. Encourage fellow Hotspot owners to update location and antenna gains. A PoC event has three parties: the challenger, challengee and witness. Proof-of-Coverage works best when all parties provide the best data possible to the Network.
Future-Proofing the Network As mentioned, this is one of the largest upgrades to the Proof-of-Coverage system, and will significantly improve data collection and the ability to verify coverage. This upgrade will also enable future improvements to find incorrectly asserted and spoofed Hotspot locations. It sets the foundation for the Network over the coming months and years as it expands from 200K to 1M Hotspots and beyond.
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