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Wow, whether or not this is helium... I just learned about this thing and I'm like "okay, so you have LoRaWAN and blockchains and yes I can see how you could co

Wow, whether or not this is helium... I just learned about this thing and I'm like "okay, so you have LoRaWAN and blockchains and yes I can see how you could combine these together but what's the effin point? Don't get me wrong, I get that some people want to do stuff just for the fun of it and IMHO that's humanity at its best. But this just looks like "new tech -> magic happens -> profit" 0_o

slicktux 4y ago
It’s really about the “crypto hype” and that’s really the only incentive behind most of these helium hot spots… They are expensive and the return is slow. Really nice idea in the grand scheme of things but it’s not DIY friendly network…well it is but if you want to send data via the helium network you MUST pay per message using the helium currency; that and a lot of these hotspots piggy back of internet…sadly not completely decentralized.
cozzyd 4y ago
It's annoying if you use LoRa components for something else since they are more likely to be out of stock
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
petre 4y ago
Too bad you don't have enough scrap metal collectors. Beats any cryptocurrency. This network wouldn't resist a week in my country.
walrus01 4y ago
You're not wrong in being puzzled by why people would try to glue LoraWAN stuff to "blockchain" BS, that's been pretty much the reaction of everyone who works professionally in wireless telecom industry/applications. Helium is (was) yet another pump and dump cryptocoin hype train.
jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
I think it was mostly a strategy of combining IoT hype with Blockchain hype, details be damned. Helium isn't nearly as crazy as IOTA, which was blathering on about a starlink style network powered by trinary circuitry (no, I'm not kidding).
- astrange 4y ago
  That sounds like a Star Trek script.
paranoidrobot 4y ago
I'm very much a cryptocurrency-sceptic, but the basic idea seemed interesting. There's a whole lot of companies that do want to deploy various sensor things - fixed and mobile. They're using cellular networks at the moment, which comes with costs/capacity/coverage issues. LoRAWAN would seem to solve some of these - it's unlicensed spectrum, it's low rate, but high enough for basic signalling, and the coverage vs installation cost/complexity thing is amazing. If you could convince enough people & businesses to drop mesh-nodes on their window sills, ideally with access to their wifi, it could be a relatively cheap way of bootstrapping a large mesh network. The crypto-mining thing... well I guess that's one way to pay people without involving actual direct cash payments. But like so much in the cryptocurrency space, the actual ROI was far over-sold.
- seanw444 4y ago
  > I'm very much a cryptocurrency-sceptic So does this mean the cryptocurrency itself has gone sceptic, or has cryptocurrency made its way into your bloodstream?
  - paranoidrobot 4y ago
    You made me think I'd written septic, but no, sceptic is correct in British-English (and I guess Australian-english, too)
    - seanw444 4y ago
      That's embarrassing. I was sure septic was spelt "sceptic". And my PC didn't correct me on it either, so that reinforced the misconception. My apologies.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
kybernetikos 4y ago
I think it makes a lot of sense. A huge difficulty in deploying new wireless networking tech is getting enough coverage out of the gate to make it worth people creating hardware for. To try to build a network from grassroots rather than raising an enormous amount of capital first, you need incentives, and having a token based system where the money that people pay to use it rewards the people who are providing the coverage makes perfect sense. If this specific implementation of it actually doesn't make sense, I think it's a shame, because I would like to live in a world where small groups of techies could put together a protocol and get something like a big distributed mesh network deployed and useful across the world, and blockchain tech seems like a very natural fit for creating a system like that. Coordination problems and network effects are where we have our most difficult interaction between technology and society, and our standard tools for addressing them (government and corporations mainly) feel like a small part of the solution space.

slicktux 4y ago

It’s really about the “crypto hype” and that’s really the only incentive behind most of these helium hot spots… They are expensive and the return is slow. Really nice idea in the grand scheme of things but it’s not DIY friendly network…well it is but if you want to send data via the helium network you MUST pay per message using the helium currency; that and a lot of these hotspots piggy back of internet…sadly not completely decentralized.

cozzyd 4y ago

It's annoying if you use LoRa components for something else since they are more likely to be out of stock

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

petre 4y ago

Too bad you don't have enough scrap metal collectors. Beats any cryptocurrency. This network wouldn't resist a week in my country.

walrus01 4y ago

You're not wrong in being puzzled by why people would try to glue LoraWAN stuff to "blockchain" BS, that's been pretty much the reaction of everyone who works professionally in wireless telecom industry/applications. Helium is (was) yet another pump and dump cryptocoin hype train.

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago

I think it was mostly a strategy of combining IoT hype with Blockchain hype, details be damned. Helium isn't nearly as crazy as IOTA, which was blathering on about a starlink style network powered by trinary circuitry (no, I'm not kidding).

astrange 4y ago
That sounds like a Star Trek script.

paranoidrobot 4y ago

I'm very much a cryptocurrency-sceptic, but the basic idea seemed interesting. There's a whole lot of companies that do want to deploy various sensor things - fixed and mobile. They're using cellular networks at the moment, which comes with costs/capacity/coverage issues. LoRAWAN would seem to solve some of these - it's unlicensed spectrum, it's low rate, but high enough for basic signalling, and the coverage vs installation cost/complexity thing is amazing. If you could convince enough people & businesses to drop mesh-nodes on their window sills, ideally with access to their wifi, it could be a relatively cheap way of bootstrapping a large mesh network. The crypto-mining thing... well I guess that's one way to pay people without involving actual direct cash payments. But like so much in the cryptocurrency space, the actual ROI was far over-sold.

seanw444 4y ago
> I'm very much a cryptocurrency-sceptic So does this mean the cryptocurrency itself has gone sceptic, or has cryptocurrency made its way into your bloodstream?
- paranoidrobot 4y ago
  You made me think I'd written septic, but no, sceptic is correct in British-English (and I guess Australian-english, too)
  - seanw444 4y ago
    That's embarrassing. I was sure septic was spelt "sceptic". And my PC didn't correct me on it either, so that reinforced the misconception. My apologies.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

kybernetikos 4y ago

I think it makes a lot of sense. A huge difficulty in deploying new wireless networking tech is getting enough coverage out of the gate to make it worth people creating hardware for. To try to build a network from grassroots rather than raising an enormous amount of capital first, you need incentives, and having a token based system where the money that people pay to use it rewards the people who are providing the coverage makes perfect sense. If this specific implementation of it actually doesn't make sense, I think it's a shame, because I would like to live in a world where small groups of techies could put together a protocol and get something like a big distributed mesh network deployed and useful across the world, and blockchain tech seems like a very natural fit for creating a system like that. Coordination problems and network effects are where we have our most difficult interaction between technology and society, and our standard tools for addressing them (government and corporations mainly) feel like a small part of the solution space.