11 ms·

Helium

150 points by Liron 4y ago

digdugdirk 4y ago
Whoof. A pretty damning overview of one of the few intriguing "Web3" use cases. I've always thought blockchain subsidized mesh networks were a great idea - people provide access via a router, and are reimbursed based on how many other people access the network via their node. Seems ideal, and could quickly and easily scale across an urban area. Is there some inherent limitation in the underlying technology that prevents this type of distributed system?
- amluto 4y ago
  Yes, two of them. First, RF bandwidth is a shared resource. One may credibly complain about the FCC’s allocation of bandwidth, but the big cellular networks work well because they are centrally managed. If every tall building had ten antennas operated by competing token miners, then they would probably have incentives to deliberate interfere with each other, and they would have little incentive to cooperate. The overall results would be much worse than what we have today. 2. Decentralized blockchains are inefficient. Helium would work every bit as well as it does today (hah) if the payments were centrally managed. Of course, it would be more to regulators and law enforcement, which might be a good thing.
  - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
    I don't think the primary issues are technical (LoRA is packet-based, so there'd need to more than 10 antennas near each other to cause headaches), they're financial. Even if we grant the basic premise that it would be useful to have LoRA coverage all over the place, the operator of the network needs to actually have customers who will pay to use it, and pay enough to cover then paying the people hosting nodes. I think you're right that Helium's blockchain/crypto angle is more about avoiding oversight / taxes / liability than it is any sort of fundamental requirement of getting lots of people to sign up to join building out coverage.
- jonathan-adly 4y ago
  No - it is a great idea and will eventually work. A massive demand for this service doesn't really exist yet - so Helium is struggling. IOT devices everywhere are not here yet. But I don't see anything wrong with the underlying technology and the subsidy model. The only hiccup is the expected legal fight from big telco!
  - rcoder 4y ago
    I'm working on a different LoRa-related startup, and I can say with pretty high confidence that most people hear "mesh network" and jump directly to, "so I can check Facebook from anywhere?" (Replace Facebook with Slack, Zoom, YouTube, or any other bandwidth-hungry, "use it all day" app you can think of.) And yet, the theoretical (not even real-world) bandwidth for LoRa is in the hundreds of bytes per second; perhaps whole _kilobytes_ if you're giving up most of the range and power savings that LoRa offers for traditional IoT. On the "small devices exchanging small amounts of data" front, LoRa, particularly for large-scale deployments like the ones Helium resells access to, faces a lot of competition from Thread, Matter, and other "home-scale" mesh options. Until Apple or Samsung puts a LoRa radio in their handsets, it's going to be a niche product. (Unlikely because Semtech owns all the patents on LoRa. One of them might _buy_ Semtech, but I imagine they'd shell out $2 per handset approximately _never_.)
    - digdugdirk 4y ago
      Do you have any good starting points for reading up on the differences between LoRa and traditional WiFi? Both technical and practical.
- wmf 4y ago
  Since Internet access has converged on an unlimited usage pricing model this will end up like Spotify: customers pay a flat rate which gets sliced extremely thin and providers get paid very little.
  - LordDragonfang 4y ago
    I'm not sure it's correct to say that internet access has "converged" on unlimited usage. Most cellular plans have data caps (even "unlimited" plans have caps that they throttle after) and even hardwired internet plans are starting to have data caps by default now.
- munificent 4y ago
  As I understand it, the idea is that people are essentially subletting the bandwidth they pay for from their ISP. ISPs famously overprovision users. While your ISP plan may nominally guarantee some level of bandwidth, the network physically can't support all users using that much bandwidth at the same time. It's like gyms where if everyone who had a membership actually showed up, there wouldn't be enough gear to go around. The gym's business model completely relies on the fact that most members don't use the maximum of what their plan allows. ISPs don't want you subletting their bandwidth because that makes it easier to consume all of what your plan allows. They absolutely can't handle a signficant fraction of their users doing that. So, if a subsidized mesh network were to ever become popular enough to be a viable business, ISPs would simply forbid users from participating in it. It's just a fundamentally broken business model. It would be like sharing a gym membership across multiple people. Makes perfect sense for the member. "Hey, I only go one day a week anyway, so I can let 6 other people share it on the other days!" But the gym itself straight up could not sustain that at their current membership prices. Their only options are: 1. Forbid it (which is what they already do, since membership is associated with a specific person). 2. Go out of business. 3. Jack up membership prices until they can sustain all members fully utilizing their membership. But that would drive away members who didn't share memberships and make it so that your fraction of a shared membership is about as expensive as a single one used to be. Fundamentally, you can't pull infrastructure out of thin air. Pretending you can be reselling it won't work.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Sharing a portion of my 300Mbps down/20 Mbps up bandwidth for a LoRaWAN network that passes dozens to low hundreds of bps per device is like fretting over people breathing the air in the gym parking lot.
    - munificent 4y ago
      If the device is only passing a few hundred bits per second, that also implies that it is doing almost nothing of value as well. Here's maybe another way to think about it: What possible viable business model is there for consumer ISP customers to build an ad hoc wireless network on top of the ISP's infrastructure that wouldn't immediately get killed by ISPs entirely reasonably cutting out the middle man?
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  > Is there some inherent limitation in the underlying technology that prevents this type of distributed system? The ToS of the ISP you plugged your "web3 router" into prevent you from reselling your bandwidth.
- nradov 4y ago
  Regardless of the payment model, construction of reliable, large scale wireless mesh networks remains an unsolved problem. Scaling those is not easy due to nodes going up and down, terminal devices moving around, intermittent RF interference, etc. The One Laptop Per Child project famously tried to use such a network in order to extend Internet access into areas lacking communications infrastructure, but it never really worked. This remains an area of active research and I'm skeptical whether the field has matured enough for commercialization.
deleted 4y ago
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xtremew0lf99 4y ago
Is Helium's New '5G Network' Just Hot Air? https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-heliums-new-5g-network-just-hot-air https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-heliums-new-5g-network-just-ho...
- joewadcan 4y ago
  This was pretty disappointing. To see FreedomFi not own up to the fact that 4g vs 5g is misleading... with their excuse that everyone else is doing it.
sanxiyn 4y ago
Instead of reading about Helium that doesn't matter, you may want to read about helium that does matter. https://cen.acs.org/business/specialty-chemicals/Podcast-helium-shortage-wasnt-supposed/100/web/2022/03 https://cen.acs.org/business/specialty-chemicals/Podcast-hel...
- DJBunnies 4y ago
  I mean for one, not the same helium and for two, breeder reactors.
superchroma 4y ago
I wouldn't have spent so long talking about $HNT spot price, as it erodes the impact of the article. There are companies doing good work with share prices that aren't pumping, too. Helium is a scam regardless. I've read additional criticism where bad actors in China operate fake nodes which report as being in the middle of the ocean; using the network browser tool you can see arrays of nodes there. This is far more alarming to me as it indicates that the security model isn't real and the network is compromised.
- wmf 4y ago
  AFAIK they "fixed" the fake node problem by preventing people from building their own; now you have to buy them from Helium. Arguably this is semi-centralized but no one really cares.
  - delabay 4y ago
    There are 30+ vendors of helium compatible hardware. Nothing is purchased "from helium".
    - wmf 4y ago
      AFAIK those vendors are officially licensed.
      - delabay 4y ago
        by a third party who gets paid about $5000 to validate the hardware/firmware/business entity of aforementioned HW manufacturer. It's not shady, as others would have you think.
erulabs 4y ago
Well, no ill will to the Helium people - it seems like a somewhat smart idea. I wouldn't call it a "Web3" use-case though - as many have mentioned - they could have done their own payment processing and it wouldn't change the underlying product much (except possibly in the excitement of customers / would-be hotspot hosters). I guess my ill will here is with VC firms. Helium has raised 364.8M. With $6,500 revenue? I've talked to about a dozen folks like me, doing small, on-the-cusp-of-success startups, doing 3 to 5x that revenue with nowhere near the exposure as Helium, who get essentially laughed out of the room when trying to raise 500K. I have a very hard time buying that the founders are ~600x better at fund raising than others, or that the idea even requires that much capital to prove out. Could they have not started with say, one neighborhood in SF, proved the idea, and raised from there? The only conclusion is that the author of this piece is right - it's a scam to dump the hyped coin onto retail investors. If it ever comes out that A16Z did in fact sell at peak and profited massively from this, I cannot help but feel it is existentially damning for the concept of silicon valley. I say that as a lowly but devoted tech acolyte. Well, at any rate, my response of being a bit annoyed at "what's your path to 100B" type questions from VCs will now change to "What makes you a capitalist and not a racketeer?".
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > With $6,500 revenue? I've talked to about a dozen folks like me, doing small, on-the-cusp-of-success startups, doing 3 to 5x that revenue with nowhere near the exposure as Helium, who get essentially laughed out of the room when trying to raise 500K. Try 20 billion dollars lost over 10 years... and still getting investor money (Uber; Lyft will soon be on par). There's a magic combination of no morals, a product and rampant speculation that investors flock to.
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    You're mixing up revenue (the amount of money coming in) and profit (what's left over after costs). Helium doesn't have $6500/mo profit -- their profit is, in all probability, deeply negative. They have $6500/mo revenue.
shimonabi 4y ago
My biggest disappoinment is with NPR. They were shilling Helium on their recent podcast. Anderssen Horowitz was even cited as a source in their story. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/22/1113115868/little-house-on-the-blockchain?t=1659717904035 https://www.npr.org/2022/07/22/1113115868/little-house-on-th...
- pstuart 4y ago
  NPR disappoints me on a regular basis but it's still valuable to have in the news ecosystem. I saw the Helium ad on YouTube a couple years ago and was instantly enamored (yay decentralization) but upon actually checking out the details it became clear it was Yet Another Crypto Scam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx9YyS7-d3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx9YyS7-d3g
Archelaos 4y ago
> He conveniently ignores that conflict of interest policies prevent journalists owning cryptocurrencies, not experiencing them using the paper's money. To see a a conflict of interest here is like saying that you must not write about the US-Dollar as a journalist as long as you have some. Perhaps it is a conflict of interest if you own a lot of it and do not disclose the fact -- but any? Is this really the case?
- cmiles74 4y ago
  I believe the conflict of interest is not simply that the author reported on a company they had invested in. In my opinion, the conflict lies in the fact that they then wrote pieces, in their role as a journalist, that pretty much were free advertising and encouraged other people to also invest in this company. The fact that these pieces appear to be poorly researched is like icing on the cake. Because they benefit from people investing in this company, isn't that a clear conflict of interest?
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  > To see a a conflict of interest here is like saying that you must not write about the US-Dollar as a journalist as long as you have some. No, it's like having AT&T stock and writing about AT&T. As much as web3 fans WANT crypto "currency" to be a currency, it is still, at best, a volatile, high risk investment vehicle.
  - asah 4y ago
    FYI a sizable percentage of America owns some amount of crypto - depending on the study, anywhere from 8%-20% - that's more than $100 bills in wallets, which is ~5% of Americans. Only if you include ETFs and mutual funds can you claim this about AT&T stock. https://www.google.com/search?q=percent+america+owns+crypto https://www.google.com/search?q=percent+america+owns+crypto https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+americans+have+100+dollar+bills https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+americans+have+10...
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
macrolime 4y ago
It's not surprising that the revenue is that low. LoRa consumer devices are almost nonexistent at the moment and office buildings etc who use LoRa devices have their own hotspots on site. Since there are now tons of Helium hotspots everywhere, maybe that could be open up the market for more consumer LoRa devices? Not seeing much of it yet though, but who knows.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  That’s the bit I don’t get: how is so little of the money raised going into its own product? $6.5k/month is embarrassing. Personally I looked into using their tech for a semi-remote cabin where I didn’t want to pay for extortionist telecom rates just to turn something on/off remotely, and couldn’t find a good way to do it with Helium. I would have thought there would be an off-the-shelf thing, but nope.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    If you have cell coverage, you may want to take a look at https://www.particle.io/ https://www.particle.io/. Device availability is somewhat limited, but the service is cheap enough ($3/device/mo I think?) and their tools are pretty good.
haasted 4y ago
> Roose could have rapidly found enough information to cast doubt on Helium's sustainability. Couldn't a similar accusation be levied against a lot of other hyper-growth startups, eg Uber? They were heavily subsidizing rides to grow and might not actually have a workable model if the subsidies are removed.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > Couldn't a similar accusation be levied against a lot of other hyper-growth startups, eg Uber? They were heavily subsidizing rides to grow and might not actually have a workable model if the subsidies are removed. Yes. Yes it could, and it must. Uber lost over 20 billion dollars over 10 years. It's not a business. It's a speculation and price dumping vehicle.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  Only difference is that bagholders won't be retail in those cases.
  - haasted 4y ago
    Uber is listed on NYSE, so there's plenty of opportunity for retail to get in on the action.
rco8786 4y ago
> A major reason that cryptocurrencies have become such a problem is that mainstream journalists Stopped reading exactly here. It’s also the first sentence.
- davidgerard 4y ago
  A refusal to do the reading, especially when forming opinions on something, is a chronic problem amongst crypto promoters, yes.
lxe 4y ago
I have disconnected my gateway, as it's been wasting bandwidth downloading the blockchain all the time due to some bug. At its peak, I was generating about $100 a month, which was nice. Should have sold a while ago, but now I'm just holding the almost-worthless tokens, just like everything else in crypto winter.
eikaramba 4y ago
I am currently building a end consumer device using LORAWAN. It sends you a push notification upon receiving mail in your mailbox. It also uses helium, because the network coverage is quite good. https://notific.at https://notific.at - i think end user use cases are the key to make the business model behind Helium work. The fact that helium was able to scale within 1 year what TTN had to do in 8 years is quite the proof for me that paying gateway owners some kind of revenue is the way to scale the network coverage.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  Except they used crypto to mask the fact that the positive ROI of ownership is at best years out rather than months out.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    That's the whole point of crypto tokenomics. You use the token to incentivize capital expenditure on the speculation that demand will come. The entire point of a token is to align incentives around this. It has worked for Bitcoin and Ethereum. It has worked for many other protocols (Sushi, Aave, Chainlink, Filecoin, Arweave, etc). It has also failed for some protocols.
    - nradov 4y ago
      Actually it hasn't worked anywhere except to incentivize capital expenditure on mining hardware which does nothing of value beyond wasting electricity. All of those protocols you listed are scams or pointless failures.
      - orril 4y ago
        You really think the first, ever, widely used public key databases are useless? You don't believe cryptography has any usecase? Or you misunderstand why a blockchain is novel? Two possibilities.
        4y ago
keepquestioning 4y ago
Is LoRa compatible with IEEE Wi-Fi HaLow?
- Rackedup 4y ago
  LoRa is a closed protocol... probably not
- wmf 4y ago
  No, they're different protocols.
- cozzyd 4y ago
  No, and HaLow would be an awful choice for a mesh network as there are only 3 possible channels as I understand it.
yuan43 4y ago
From the Helium home page: > Using a Burn-and-Mint Equilibrium token model, The People’s Network utilizes two units of exchange: HNT and Data Credits. Here's a simple heuristic to separate "crypto" wheat from chaff: is a "utility token" involved? If yes, you are probably looking at a scam. If not, scam is less likely. Here Helium gives off a strong aroma of eau-du-scam in that not just one but two tokens are involved. Wait, there's more. A few hops through the home page leads to a GitHub repo with the following: > In order to join the blockchain, every hotspot requires an onboarding code. This code is validated by a staking server and used to onboard a hotspot and pay the $40 staking fee. Currently, these codes are exclusively issued by Helium Inc and validated by their staking server at <staking.helium.foundation>. https://github.com/helium/HIP/blob/main/0019-third-party-manufacturers.md https://github.com/helium/HIP/blob/main/0019-third-party-man... So not only are there tokens, but there's a non-refundable fee to get going. Maybe it's possible to run one of these projects without it turning into a MLM scam. But given enough time, even the ones with the best intentions seem to arrive at that destination.
- joewadcan 4y ago
  I think you're misreading. HNT was the original token and was a new chain. Data credits are just how the outside world burns those credits at a fixed price, so that they don't need to know about crypto. Not a token. And Nova Labs doesn't get any of that onboarding money. That is burned by the network.
_fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
Helium is basically Herbalife marketed to crypto bros. There is no reason these hotspots cost $500 dollars or more. It's a simple Lora access point and should sell somewhere around a $100 (or less, considering how many are sold). Just like MLMs: People believe they are a partner and will profit along with Helium. In reality they are the end customer. Nova Labs makes money from onboarding people's hot spots and that's it. Every other revenue is a rounding error.
- joewadcan 4y ago
  Nova Labs makes no money from onboarding hotspots. That goes to the Helium network. You're just counting network billings as Nova Labs, when they are two separate entities. I think Nova did the right thing by getting out of the manufacturing business, so that those hotspots can go sub $100.
- delabay 4y ago
  Nova makes no money in the sale of hotspots.
idkyall 4y ago
I think I'm most bothered by Helium lying about their corporate users. There is no longer a question in my mind that we need better government protections for consumers in the crypto space. Whether we ascribe their false marketing to negligence or outright malice, companies like Helium and their investors should be held responsible for exploiting consumers. I purchased a Helium hotspot last year and was drawn in by what seemed like a real use case for a decentralized system - it made sense to me as far as what value was being provided by miners compared to other PoW cryptocurrencies. I was disappointed by the rewards being somewhat low, but I chalked it up to bad timing. A few months later, the helium network proposed a change which would take a % of rewards away from hotspot operators and gave it to large holders of the token who have staked it(validators). Sure, this change was 'voted' on - but having more HNT tokens gives you more votes. If large capital holders(at least 50% of the supply seems to be held by the top ~25-30 wallets per https://explorer.helium.com/accounts/richest https://explorer.helium.com/accounts/richest) can outvote those actually providing utility(hotspot owners), then it doesn't really strike me as a particularly fair and decentralized system.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  You ran towards an unregulated market - literally because it was unregulated, these promises couldn't be made by a regulated entity, and now you're unhappy because you feel screwed. That's literally why the regulations exist, but you have to accept that you aren't just going to get "free money" offers in real markets. You're going to get them in unregulated markets, and they're going to be lies.
  - idkyall 4y ago
    Well, you make a fair point, expecting to get rich quick is obviously unrealistic. I think people like me got caught because with Helium at least the basic economic premise of "you are being paid to offer your internet uplink/bandwidth for use by others" makes sense. This is in contrast to some of the various crypto ponzi schemes where the only way for a token to gain value is for more people to buy into it. If we took crypto out of the equation entirely and Helium was a startup offering payments in $ while not being transparent about their usage/adoption rates, would we feel the same way about those who "fell for it" and invested in miners? I'm honestly not sure.
SnowHill9902 4y ago
Words are too overloaded already. Time to invent new letters.
_tom_ 4y ago
Can we not get decent titles on things? At least enough to know whether a post is about an element, a crypto tool, software for amazon, etc. And maybe a hint of what about helium people the post addresses?
- cozzyd 4y ago
  It's their fault for having a shitty name.
jshprentz 4y ago
Andreas Spiess, "the guy with the Swiss accent," analyzed the Helium network in May 2021 for his YouTube channel about electronics and micro-controllers. His video [1] provided a technical description and also analyzed the Helium business case. Spoiler alert: he concluded that the business case for hotspot owners was comparable to a Ponzi scheme. At the time of his analysis, the Helium network had about 39,000 hotspots with about 32.5 million data credits spent in 30 days by network customers for data transport. At the fixed price of $0.00001 per data credit, that customers spent a total of $325. On average, each hotspot earned a little over 8/10 of a cent from data traffic during those 30 days. In the 14 months since that analysis, Helium signed up many more data customers and grew the network to almost 920,000 hotspots. Customers spent about 187 billion data credits in the past 30 days at a total cost of $1.87 million. On average, each hotspot earned about $2 from data traffic during the past 30 days. Hotspot owners also earn rewards from proof of coverage activity: sending beacon messages and witnessing those messages from other hotspots. Proof of coverage rewards were very lucrative during Helium's first year, but diminished rapidly as more hotspots shared proof of coverage pie. Those rewards also diminished in urban and suburban areas as people deployed other hotspots nearby. The Helium Explorer [2] lets hotspot owners find locations where proof of coverage earnings remain high. These locations are in smaller communities and on the periphery of overdeveloped metropolitan hotspot clusters. [1] https://youtu.be/nerQCrOam5U https://youtu.be/nerQCrOam5U [2] https://explorer.helium.com/ https://explorer.helium.com/
bArray 4y ago
I follow a Facebook page for Helium miners in the UK, because a family member was interested in getting involved and I said I would check it out first. I recommended against it (as I do with all crypto 'investments'). I observed it going "well", with people boasting massive return on investment. I then saw their profits drop, with software updates and faulty equipment being blamed. As a result, people went out and purchased new and more expensive equipment, many buying ludicrously expensive support equipment to improve signal properties. After quite some time of this, I then saw their revenue drop even more so. Many of these people are invested several thousand pounds (multiple miners, multiple types of miners and support equipment). I see fewer and fewer people post now, with many now accepting their loss. There is a real cost here, and as per usual, it is the people least able to afford it that pay it.
colinsane 4y ago
impressive to me that this thing managed to construct global coverage provided by literally tens or hundreds of thousands of disparate actors, while delivering on nearly zero of the mesh networking dream. IIUC each node is a one-way LoRa gateway. literally: a Helium device can only communicate with devices NOT on Helium. in the LoRa implementation traffic is strictly one-way. a device can transmit sensor/heartbeat data, and that’s it. no ACKs from whatever IP service is ingesting that data, much less HTTP error codes. the 5g stuff doesn’t really solve this. it broadens the applications — because at least now you can have bidirectional comms initiated from within the Helium network (TCP streams). but you still can’t initiate connections into or even within the network. it’s fundamentally flawed as a “mesh network”, in that it only works so long as a majority of IP destinations aren’t on Helium.
trenchgun 4y ago
Is it just a yet another spying operation by China? https://www.reddit.com/r/HeliumNetwork/comments/s0cw2e/can_anybody_here_explain_what_this_is_all_about/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/HeliumNetwork/comments/s0cw2e/can_a...

150 points by Liron 4y ago

Whoof. A pretty damning overview of one of the few intriguing "Web3" use cases. I've always thought blockchain subsidized mesh networks were a great idea - people provide access via a router, and are reimbursed based on how many other people access the network via their node. Seems ideal, and could quickly and easily scale across an urban area. Is there some inherent limitation in the underlying technology that prevents this type of distributed system?

amluto 4y ago
Yes, two of them. First, RF bandwidth is a shared resource. One may credibly complain about the FCC’s allocation of bandwidth, but the big cellular networks work well because they are centrally managed. If every tall building had ten antennas operated by competing token miners, then they would probably have incentives to deliberate interfere with each other, and they would have little incentive to cooperate. The overall results would be much worse than what we have today. 2. Decentralized blockchains are inefficient. Helium would work every bit as well as it does today (hah) if the payments were centrally managed. Of course, it would be more to regulators and law enforcement, which might be a good thing.
- blacksmith_tb 4y ago
  I don't think the primary issues are technical (LoRA is packet-based, so there'd need to more than 10 antennas near each other to cause headaches), they're financial. Even if we grant the basic premise that it would be useful to have LoRA coverage all over the place, the operator of the network needs to actually have customers who will pay to use it, and pay enough to cover then paying the people hosting nodes. I think you're right that Helium's blockchain/crypto angle is more about avoiding oversight / taxes / liability than it is any sort of fundamental requirement of getting lots of people to sign up to join building out coverage.
jonathan-adly 4y ago
No - it is a great idea and will eventually work. A massive demand for this service doesn't really exist yet - so Helium is struggling. IOT devices everywhere are not here yet. But I don't see anything wrong with the underlying technology and the subsidy model. The only hiccup is the expected legal fight from big telco!
- rcoder 4y ago
  I'm working on a different LoRa-related startup, and I can say with pretty high confidence that most people hear "mesh network" and jump directly to, "so I can check Facebook from anywhere?" (Replace Facebook with Slack, Zoom, YouTube, or any other bandwidth-hungry, "use it all day" app you can think of.) And yet, the theoretical (not even real-world) bandwidth for LoRa is in the hundreds of bytes per second; perhaps whole _kilobytes_ if you're giving up most of the range and power savings that LoRa offers for traditional IoT. On the "small devices exchanging small amounts of data" front, LoRa, particularly for large-scale deployments like the ones Helium resells access to, faces a lot of competition from Thread, Matter, and other "home-scale" mesh options. Until Apple or Samsung puts a LoRa radio in their handsets, it's going to be a niche product. (Unlikely because Semtech owns all the patents on LoRa. One of them might _buy_ Semtech, but I imagine they'd shell out $2 per handset approximately _never_.)
  - digdugdirk 4y ago
    Do you have any good starting points for reading up on the differences between LoRa and traditional WiFi? Both technical and practical.
wmf 4y ago
Since Internet access has converged on an unlimited usage pricing model this will end up like Spotify: customers pay a flat rate which gets sliced extremely thin and providers get paid very little.
- LordDragonfang 4y ago
  I'm not sure it's correct to say that internet access has "converged" on unlimited usage. Most cellular plans have data caps (even "unlimited" plans have caps that they throttle after) and even hardwired internet plans are starting to have data caps by default now.
munificent 4y ago
As I understand it, the idea is that people are essentially subletting the bandwidth they pay for from their ISP. ISPs famously overprovision users. While your ISP plan may nominally guarantee some level of bandwidth, the network physically can't support all users using that much bandwidth at the same time. It's like gyms where if everyone who had a membership actually showed up, there wouldn't be enough gear to go around. The gym's business model completely relies on the fact that most members don't use the maximum of what their plan allows. ISPs don't want you subletting their bandwidth because that makes it easier to consume all of what your plan allows. They absolutely can't handle a signficant fraction of their users doing that. So, if a subsidized mesh network were to ever become popular enough to be a viable business, ISPs would simply forbid users from participating in it. It's just a fundamentally broken business model. It would be like sharing a gym membership across multiple people. Makes perfect sense for the member. "Hey, I only go one day a week anyway, so I can let 6 other people share it on the other days!" But the gym itself straight up could not sustain that at their current membership prices. Their only options are: 1. Forbid it (which is what they already do, since membership is associated with a specific person). 2. Go out of business. 3. Jack up membership prices until they can sustain all members fully utilizing their membership. But that would drive away members who didn't share memberships and make it so that your fraction of a shared membership is about as expensive as a single one used to be. Fundamentally, you can't pull infrastructure out of thin air. Pretending you can be reselling it won't work.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Sharing a portion of my 300Mbps down/20 Mbps up bandwidth for a LoRaWAN network that passes dozens to low hundreds of bps per device is like fretting over people breathing the air in the gym parking lot.
  - munificent 4y ago
    If the device is only passing a few hundred bits per second, that also implies that it is doing almost nothing of value as well. Here's maybe another way to think about it: What possible viable business model is there for consumer ISP customers to build an ad hoc wireless network on top of the ISP's infrastructure that wouldn't immediately get killed by ISPs entirely reasonably cutting out the middle man?
Ensorceled 4y ago
> Is there some inherent limitation in the underlying technology that prevents this type of distributed system? The ToS of the ISP you plugged your "web3 router" into prevent you from reselling your bandwidth.
nradov 4y ago
Regardless of the payment model, construction of reliable, large scale wireless mesh networks remains an unsolved problem. Scaling those is not easy due to nodes going up and down, terminal devices moving around, intermittent RF interference, etc. The One Laptop Per Child project famously tried to use such a network in order to extend Internet access into areas lacking communications infrastructure, but it never really worked. This remains an area of active research and I'm skeptical whether the field has matured enough for commercialization.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

xtremew0lf99 4y ago

Is Helium's New '5G Network' Just Hot Air? https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-heliums-new-5g-network-just-hot-air https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-heliums-new-5g-network-just-ho...

joewadcan 4y ago
This was pretty disappointing. To see FreedomFi not own up to the fact that 4g vs 5g is misleading... with their excuse that everyone else is doing it.

sanxiyn 4y ago

Instead of reading about Helium that doesn't matter, you may want to read about helium that does matter. https://cen.acs.org/business/specialty-chemicals/Podcast-helium-shortage-wasnt-supposed/100/web/2022/03 https://cen.acs.org/business/specialty-chemicals/Podcast-hel...

DJBunnies 4y ago
I mean for one, not the same helium and for two, breeder reactors.

superchroma 4y ago

I wouldn't have spent so long talking about $HNT spot price, as it erodes the impact of the article. There are companies doing good work with share prices that aren't pumping, too. Helium is a scam regardless. I've read additional criticism where bad actors in China operate fake nodes which report as being in the middle of the ocean; using the network browser tool you can see arrays of nodes there. This is far more alarming to me as it indicates that the security model isn't real and the network is compromised.

wmf 4y ago
AFAIK they "fixed" the fake node problem by preventing people from building their own; now you have to buy them from Helium. Arguably this is semi-centralized but no one really cares.
- delabay 4y ago
  There are 30+ vendors of helium compatible hardware. Nothing is purchased "from helium".
  - wmf 4y ago
    AFAIK those vendors are officially licensed.
    - delabay 4y ago
      by a third party who gets paid about $5000 to validate the hardware/firmware/business entity of aforementioned HW manufacturer. It's not shady, as others would have you think.

erulabs 4y ago

Well, no ill will to the Helium people - it seems like a somewhat smart idea. I wouldn't call it a "Web3" use-case though - as many have mentioned - they could have done their own payment processing and it wouldn't change the underlying product much (except possibly in the excitement of customers / would-be hotspot hosters). I guess my ill will here is with VC firms. Helium has raised 364.8M. With $6,500 revenue? I've talked to about a dozen folks like me, doing small, on-the-cusp-of-success startups, doing 3 to 5x that revenue with nowhere near the exposure as Helium, who get essentially laughed out of the room when trying to raise 500K. I have a very hard time buying that the founders are ~600x better at fund raising than others, or that the idea even requires that much capital to prove out. Could they have not started with say, one neighborhood in SF, proved the idea, and raised from there? The only conclusion is that the author of this piece is right - it's a scam to dump the hyped coin onto retail investors. If it ever comes out that A16Z did in fact sell at peak and profited massively from this, I cannot help but feel it is existentially damning for the concept of silicon valley. I say that as a lowly but devoted tech acolyte. Well, at any rate, my response of being a bit annoyed at "what's your path to 100B" type questions from VCs will now change to "What makes you a capitalist and not a racketeer?".

dmitriid 4y ago
> With $6,500 revenue? I've talked to about a dozen folks like me, doing small, on-the-cusp-of-success startups, doing 3 to 5x that revenue with nowhere near the exposure as Helium, who get essentially laughed out of the room when trying to raise 500K. Try 20 billion dollars lost over 10 years... and still getting investor money (Uber; Lyft will soon be on par). There's a magic combination of no morals, a product and rampant speculation that investors flock to.
- duskwuff 4y ago
  You're mixing up revenue (the amount of money coming in) and profit (what's left over after costs). Helium doesn't have $6500/mo profit -- their profit is, in all probability, deeply negative. They have $6500/mo revenue.

shimonabi 4y ago

My biggest disappoinment is with NPR. They were shilling Helium on their recent podcast. Anderssen Horowitz was even cited as a source in their story. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/22/1113115868/little-house-on-the-blockchain?t=1659717904035 https://www.npr.org/2022/07/22/1113115868/little-house-on-th...

pstuart 4y ago
NPR disappoints me on a regular basis but it's still valuable to have in the news ecosystem. I saw the Helium ad on YouTube a couple years ago and was instantly enamored (yay decentralization) but upon actually checking out the details it became clear it was Yet Another Crypto Scam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx9YyS7-d3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx9YyS7-d3g

Archelaos 4y ago

> He conveniently ignores that conflict of interest policies prevent journalists owning cryptocurrencies, not experiencing them using the paper's money. To see a a conflict of interest here is like saying that you must not write about the US-Dollar as a journalist as long as you have some. Perhaps it is a conflict of interest if you own a lot of it and do not disclose the fact -- but any? Is this really the case?

cmiles74 4y ago
I believe the conflict of interest is not simply that the author reported on a company they had invested in. In my opinion, the conflict lies in the fact that they then wrote pieces, in their role as a journalist, that pretty much were free advertising and encouraged other people to also invest in this company. The fact that these pieces appear to be poorly researched is like icing on the cake. Because they benefit from people investing in this company, isn't that a clear conflict of interest?
Ensorceled 4y ago
> To see a a conflict of interest here is like saying that you must not write about the US-Dollar as a journalist as long as you have some. No, it's like having AT&T stock and writing about AT&T. As much as web3 fans WANT crypto "currency" to be a currency, it is still, at best, a volatile, high risk investment vehicle.
- asah 4y ago
  FYI a sizable percentage of America owns some amount of crypto - depending on the study, anywhere from 8%-20% - that's more than $100 bills in wallets, which is ~5% of Americans. Only if you include ETFs and mutual funds can you claim this about AT&T stock. https://www.google.com/search?q=percent+america+owns+crypto https://www.google.com/search?q=percent+america+owns+crypto https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+americans+have+100+dollar+bills https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+americans+have+10...
  - Ensorceled 4y ago

macrolime 4y ago

It's not surprising that the revenue is that low. LoRa consumer devices are almost nonexistent at the moment and office buildings etc who use LoRa devices have their own hotspots on site. Since there are now tons of Helium hotspots everywhere, maybe that could be open up the market for more consumer LoRa devices? Not seeing much of it yet though, but who knows.

Scoundreller 4y ago
That’s the bit I don’t get: how is so little of the money raised going into its own product? $6.5k/month is embarrassing. Personally I looked into using their tech for a semi-remote cabin where I didn’t want to pay for extortionist telecom rates just to turn something on/off remotely, and couldn’t find a good way to do it with Helium. I would have thought there would be an off-the-shelf thing, but nope.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- duskwuff 4y ago
  If you have cell coverage, you may want to take a look at https://www.particle.io/ https://www.particle.io/. Device availability is somewhat limited, but the service is cheap enough ($3/device/mo I think?) and their tools are pretty good.

haasted 4y ago

> Roose could have rapidly found enough information to cast doubt on Helium's sustainability. Couldn't a similar accusation be levied against a lot of other hyper-growth startups, eg Uber? They were heavily subsidizing rides to grow and might not actually have a workable model if the subsidies are removed.

dmitriid 4y ago
> Couldn't a similar accusation be levied against a lot of other hyper-growth startups, eg Uber? They were heavily subsidizing rides to grow and might not actually have a workable model if the subsidies are removed. Yes. Yes it could, and it must. Uber lost over 20 billion dollars over 10 years. It's not a business. It's a speculation and price dumping vehicle.
cuteboy19 4y ago
Only difference is that bagholders won't be retail in those cases.
- haasted 4y ago
  Uber is listed on NYSE, so there's plenty of opportunity for retail to get in on the action.

rco8786 4y ago

> A major reason that cryptocurrencies have become such a problem is that mainstream journalists Stopped reading exactly here. It’s also the first sentence.

davidgerard 4y ago
A refusal to do the reading, especially when forming opinions on something, is a chronic problem amongst crypto promoters, yes.

lxe 4y ago

I have disconnected my gateway, as it's been wasting bandwidth downloading the blockchain all the time due to some bug. At its peak, I was generating about $100 a month, which was nice. Should have sold a while ago, but now I'm just holding the almost-worthless tokens, just like everything else in crypto winter.

eikaramba 4y ago

I am currently building a end consumer device using LORAWAN. It sends you a push notification upon receiving mail in your mailbox. It also uses helium, because the network coverage is quite good. https://notific.at https://notific.at - i think end user use cases are the key to make the business model behind Helium work. The fact that helium was able to scale within 1 year what TTN had to do in 8 years is quite the proof for me that paying gateway owners some kind of revenue is the way to scale the network coverage.

aidenn0 4y ago
Except they used crypto to mask the fact that the positive ROI of ownership is at best years out rather than months out.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  That's the whole point of crypto tokenomics. You use the token to incentivize capital expenditure on the speculation that demand will come. The entire point of a token is to align incentives around this. It has worked for Bitcoin and Ethereum. It has worked for many other protocols (Sushi, Aave, Chainlink, Filecoin, Arweave, etc). It has also failed for some protocols.
  - nradov 4y ago
    Actually it hasn't worked anywhere except to incentivize capital expenditure on mining hardware which does nothing of value beyond wasting electricity. All of those protocols you listed are scams or pointless failures.
    - orril 4y ago
      You really think the first, ever, widely used public key databases are useless? You don't believe cryptography has any usecase? Or you misunderstand why a blockchain is novel? Two possibilities.
      - 4y ago

keepquestioning 4y ago

Is LoRa compatible with IEEE Wi-Fi HaLow?

Rackedup 4y ago
LoRa is a closed protocol... probably not
wmf 4y ago
No, they're different protocols.
cozzyd 4y ago
No, and HaLow would be an awful choice for a mesh network as there are only 3 possible channels as I understand it.

yuan43 4y ago

From the Helium home page: > Using a Burn-and-Mint Equilibrium token model, The People’s Network utilizes two units of exchange: HNT and Data Credits. Here's a simple heuristic to separate "crypto" wheat from chaff: is a "utility token" involved? If yes, you are probably looking at a scam. If not, scam is less likely. Here Helium gives off a strong aroma of eau-du-scam in that not just one but two tokens are involved. Wait, there's more. A few hops through the home page leads to a GitHub repo with the following: > In order to join the blockchain, every hotspot requires an onboarding code. This code is validated by a staking server and used to onboard a hotspot and pay the $40 staking fee. Currently, these codes are exclusively issued by Helium Inc and validated by their staking server at <staking.helium.foundation>. https://github.com/helium/HIP/blob/main/0019-third-party-manufacturers.md https://github.com/helium/HIP/blob/main/0019-third-party-man... So not only are there tokens, but there's a non-refundable fee to get going. Maybe it's possible to run one of these projects without it turning into a MLM scam. But given enough time, even the ones with the best intentions seem to arrive at that destination.

joewadcan 4y ago
I think you're misreading. HNT was the original token and was a new chain. Data credits are just how the outside world burns those credits at a fixed price, so that they don't need to know about crypto. Not a token. And Nova Labs doesn't get any of that onboarding money. That is burned by the network.

_fizz_buzz_ 4y ago

Helium is basically Herbalife marketed to crypto bros. There is no reason these hotspots cost $500 dollars or more. It's a simple Lora access point and should sell somewhere around a $100 (or less, considering how many are sold). Just like MLMs: People believe they are a partner and will profit along with Helium. In reality they are the end customer. Nova Labs makes money from onboarding people's hot spots and that's it. Every other revenue is a rounding error.

joewadcan 4y ago
Nova Labs makes no money from onboarding hotspots. That goes to the Helium network. You're just counting network billings as Nova Labs, when they are two separate entities. I think Nova did the right thing by getting out of the manufacturing business, so that those hotspots can go sub $100.
delabay 4y ago
Nova makes no money in the sale of hotspots.

idkyall 4y ago

I think I'm most bothered by Helium lying about their corporate users. There is no longer a question in my mind that we need better government protections for consumers in the crypto space. Whether we ascribe their false marketing to negligence or outright malice, companies like Helium and their investors should be held responsible for exploiting consumers. I purchased a Helium hotspot last year and was drawn in by what seemed like a real use case for a decentralized system - it made sense to me as far as what value was being provided by miners compared to other PoW cryptocurrencies. I was disappointed by the rewards being somewhat low, but I chalked it up to bad timing. A few months later, the helium network proposed a change which would take a % of rewards away from hotspot operators and gave it to large holders of the token who have staked it(validators). Sure, this change was 'voted' on - but having more HNT tokens gives you more votes. If large capital holders(at least 50% of the supply seems to be held by the top ~25-30 wallets per https://explorer.helium.com/accounts/richest https://explorer.helium.com/accounts/richest) can outvote those actually providing utility(hotspot owners), then it doesn't really strike me as a particularly fair and decentralized system.

SilverBirch 4y ago
You ran towards an unregulated market - literally because it was unregulated, these promises couldn't be made by a regulated entity, and now you're unhappy because you feel screwed. That's literally why the regulations exist, but you have to accept that you aren't just going to get "free money" offers in real markets. You're going to get them in unregulated markets, and they're going to be lies.
- idkyall 4y ago
  Well, you make a fair point, expecting to get rich quick is obviously unrealistic. I think people like me got caught because with Helium at least the basic economic premise of "you are being paid to offer your internet uplink/bandwidth for use by others" makes sense. This is in contrast to some of the various crypto ponzi schemes where the only way for a token to gain value is for more people to buy into it. If we took crypto out of the equation entirely and Helium was a startup offering payments in $ while not being transparent about their usage/adoption rates, would we feel the same way about those who "fell for it" and invested in miners? I'm honestly not sure.

SnowHill9902 4y ago

Words are too overloaded already. Time to invent new letters.

_tom_ 4y ago

Can we not get decent titles on things? At least enough to know whether a post is about an element, a crypto tool, software for amazon, etc. And maybe a hint of what about helium people the post addresses?

cozzyd 4y ago
It's their fault for having a shitty name.

jshprentz 4y ago

Andreas Spiess, "the guy with the Swiss accent," analyzed the Helium network in May 2021 for his YouTube channel about electronics and micro-controllers. His video [1] provided a technical description and also analyzed the Helium business case. Spoiler alert: he concluded that the business case for hotspot owners was comparable to a Ponzi scheme. At the time of his analysis, the Helium network had about 39,000 hotspots with about 32.5 million data credits spent in 30 days by network customers for data transport. At the fixed price of $0.00001 per data credit, that customers spent a total of $325. On average, each hotspot earned a little over 8/10 of a cent from data traffic during those 30 days. In the 14 months since that analysis, Helium signed up many more data customers and grew the network to almost 920,000 hotspots. Customers spent about 187 billion data credits in the past 30 days at a total cost of $1.87 million. On average, each hotspot earned about $2 from data traffic during the past 30 days. Hotspot owners also earn rewards from proof of coverage activity: sending beacon messages and witnessing those messages from other hotspots. Proof of coverage rewards were very lucrative during Helium's first year, but diminished rapidly as more hotspots shared proof of coverage pie. Those rewards also diminished in urban and suburban areas as people deployed other hotspots nearby. The Helium Explorer [2] lets hotspot owners find locations where proof of coverage earnings remain high. These locations are in smaller communities and on the periphery of overdeveloped metropolitan hotspot clusters. [1] https://youtu.be/nerQCrOam5U https://youtu.be/nerQCrOam5U [2] https://explorer.helium.com/ https://explorer.helium.com/

bArray 4y ago

I follow a Facebook page for Helium miners in the UK, because a family member was interested in getting involved and I said I would check it out first. I recommended against it (as I do with all crypto 'investments'). I observed it going "well", with people boasting massive return on investment. I then saw their profits drop, with software updates and faulty equipment being blamed. As a result, people went out and purchased new and more expensive equipment, many buying ludicrously expensive support equipment to improve signal properties. After quite some time of this, I then saw their revenue drop even more so. Many of these people are invested several thousand pounds (multiple miners, multiple types of miners and support equipment). I see fewer and fewer people post now, with many now accepting their loss. There is a real cost here, and as per usual, it is the people least able to afford it that pay it.

colinsane 4y ago

impressive to me that this thing managed to construct global coverage provided by literally tens or hundreds of thousands of disparate actors, while delivering on nearly zero of the mesh networking dream. IIUC each node is a one-way LoRa gateway. literally: a Helium device can only communicate with devices NOT on Helium. in the LoRa implementation traffic is strictly one-way. a device can transmit sensor/heartbeat data, and that’s it. no ACKs from whatever IP service is ingesting that data, much less HTTP error codes. the 5g stuff doesn’t really solve this. it broadens the applications — because at least now you can have bidirectional comms initiated from within the Helium network (TCP streams). but you still can’t initiate connections into or even within the network. it’s fundamentally flawed as a “mesh network”, in that it only works so long as a majority of IP destinations aren’t on Helium.

trenchgun 4y ago

Is it just a yet another spying operation by China? https://www.reddit.com/r/HeliumNetwork/comments/s0cw2e/can_anybody_here_explain_what_this_is_all_about/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/HeliumNetwork/comments/s0cw2e/can_a...