4 ms·

Agree. The amount of spectrum they use for their application is so small (15 MHz?) that there is really no good use-case that can not be addressed by cellular o

Agree. The amount of spectrum they use for their application is so small (15 MHz?) that there is really no good use-case that can not be addressed by cellular or Wi-Fi. Helium is just a toy project with good marketing. It is really a scam.

dzhiurgis 4y ago
FWIW I'd love to move away from "you must have a cell number to do ANYTHING in life". It's super inconvenient if you move between countries. Example - local taxi app (Bolt) wouldn't even let me register. I'm guessing their SMS gateway doesn't support new number ranges I've got assigned. Engineers don't give a fuck to enable my mobility. I've spent weeks trying to get on.
- Canada 4y ago
  I'm not saying that the Helium idea of having this network of access points is bad. That's actually great, I wish there were such a thing. What doesn't work is their token. Instead of having that they could have used a whitelist of acceptable payment... eg. ETH, USDT, USDC, DAI, WBTC, BTC... But no, they had to have their own shitcoin of course, because if they used a cryptocurrency with actual value they wouldn't be able to give themselves a bunch of it to dump on the suckers.
  - tradertef 4y ago
    Agree 100%. Helium and similar project could very well work with other tokens or even with regular payments in dollars or whatever. But they choose to come up with their own shitcoin so that they could dump it to others with marketing.
KaiserPro 4y ago
> no good use-case that can not be addressed by cellular or Wi-Fi. Cellular is power hungry, and Wi-fi is range limited. Long range low bandwidth, that is both cheap in power and money to use, is really useful. Cellular is a pain in the arse, expensive to miniaturise, difficult to power longterm.
- tradertef 4y ago
  You know WiFi can use the same spectrum and get better range? Check out Halow. For IOT applications, power during transmit is not a big deal. Battery life is limited by the leakage (sleep power). Also those "miners" use lots of power.
barnabee 4y ago
LoRa makes a lot of sense. Whether Helium can make a lot of sense as a way to deliver LoRa connectivity remains to be seen, but it's certainly not true that there's no good use case for the underlying tech or that WiFI and cellular cover all such use cases just as well.

dzhiurgis 4y ago

FWIW I'd love to move away from "you must have a cell number to do ANYTHING in life". It's super inconvenient if you move between countries. Example - local taxi app (Bolt) wouldn't even let me register. I'm guessing their SMS gateway doesn't support new number ranges I've got assigned. Engineers don't give a fuck to enable my mobility. I've spent weeks trying to get on.

Canada 4y ago
I'm not saying that the Helium idea of having this network of access points is bad. That's actually great, I wish there were such a thing. What doesn't work is their token. Instead of having that they could have used a whitelist of acceptable payment... eg. ETH, USDT, USDC, DAI, WBTC, BTC... But no, they had to have their own shitcoin of course, because if they used a cryptocurrency with actual value they wouldn't be able to give themselves a bunch of it to dump on the suckers.
- tradertef 4y ago
  Agree 100%. Helium and similar project could very well work with other tokens or even with regular payments in dollars or whatever. But they choose to come up with their own shitcoin so that they could dump it to others with marketing.

KaiserPro 4y ago

> no good use-case that can not be addressed by cellular or Wi-Fi. Cellular is power hungry, and Wi-fi is range limited. Long range low bandwidth, that is both cheap in power and money to use, is really useful. Cellular is a pain in the arse, expensive to miniaturise, difficult to power longterm.

tradertef 4y ago
You know WiFi can use the same spectrum and get better range? Check out Halow. For IOT applications, power during transmit is not a big deal. Battery life is limited by the leakage (sleep power). Also those "miners" use lots of power.

barnabee 4y ago

LoRa makes a lot of sense. Whether Helium can make a lot of sense as a way to deliver LoRa connectivity remains to be seen, but it's certainly not true that there's no good use case for the underlying tech or that WiFI and cellular cover all such use cases just as well.