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Can Helium compete with Amazon's Sidewalk (also LoRa) though? Democratizing the network is nice, but when the hardware costs so much, I'm not sure they can buil

Can Helium compete with Amazon's Sidewalk (also LoRa) though? Democratizing the network is nice, but when the hardware costs so much, I'm not sure they can build the network fast enough compared to Amazon building it into Echo devices everywhere. Also Helium doesn't let me use my own LoRa radios, so I'm not even sure I consider that democratizing it. It still feels like it's a network that belongs to Helium rather than individuals

gymbeaux 3y ago
I hadn't heard of Sidewalk so I had to do some research. It sounds like a better Helium network. I mean you're right, getting a Helium hotspot is difficult and you can't just use any old LoRa radio, it needs to be one whitelisted by the Helium network. The whole think smelled like a scam back in ~2019 when I saw ads for it. Pay ~$300, give away your Internet to these IoT devices, but in exchange get some fake Internet money. I think it's impressive that Amazon managed to deploy what at a glance looks like an identical network with superior coverage without all the blockchain/crypto bullshit... AND it's free for non-Amazon devices to use. I'm pretty sure Helium costs some fake token money to consume data from. One concern I had was if someone were to use an IoT device to use my Internet connection to download CP. I don't think it's pragmatic, but there are lots of dumb people on this Earth and I can pretty much guarantee someone, somewhere is going to try it, and the poor guy hosting that Helium hotspot is going to have to lawyer up and probably have his computers seized until law enforcement figures out what happened. Same applies to other illegal activities. Imagine if the ransomware attack on that US company that resulted in them paying some amount of Bitcoin... that transaction was made on a random IoT device connected to someone's Helium hotspot. How would the FBI track that one down? Perhaps, then, that is a/the benefit of Helium over Sidewalk, because presumably Amazon will comply with any/all requests from government/law enforcement for data on which devices connected to what and when. With Helium, I'm not sure the FBI would have been able to figure out anything beyond the county and state the ransomware host collected his Bitcoin ransom at.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  I think you're overestimating how much bandwidth LoRa can handle. Because of airtime fairness, you're only allowed to be transmitting about 1% of the time. Best case LoRa is about 253 kb/s. 1% is 864 seconds, for a total of 25 megabytes a day. That would probably require you to be right next to the transmitter. Real world usages is going to be closer to single digit kilobits/second, maybe 1 megabyte/day. Also because of how Bitcoin is P2P, it's impossible to declare where the transaction is coming from. Transactions are all cryptographically signed and freely shared between nodes until picked up by miners. To figure out who the original sender is, you would need to host the majority of nodes so that the sender gives you the transaction first. Even then you can't prove they are the original sender rather than a rebroadcaster. There's a also few services that will broadcast a transaction for you: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_broadcasting https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_broadcasting I don't disagree with you that Helium (or any crypto) is a scam. I couldn't dissuade one of my friends from buying the hotspots, and he has not made any money on them. There's also some sentiment that "Amazon should be paying me for the bandwidth they're using!" with Sidewalk. Also I don't think networks like Amazon Sidewalk or Helium get direct access to the internet: they wanna go through Amazon's API or Helium's to be able to charge the company fees for the broadcast. Probably to track and log it too since it's only a few bytes anyways.
  - gymbeaux 3y ago
    Considering dial-up was typically ~48-56kbps, I would say I was underestimating how much bandwidth LoRa can handle ;) I guess the main issue with both Helium and Sidewalk is that anyone who hosts their own LoRa radio probably isn't using any IoT devices that would be outside Bluetooth or WiFi range at their home/business, so it's kind of a chicken-egg problem where presumably the people who would leverage a LoRa network are also NOT the people who would host a LoRa radio... hence the argument from people that they should be compensated by Amazon for hosting Sidewalk.

gymbeaux 3y ago

I hadn't heard of Sidewalk so I had to do some research. It sounds like a better Helium network. I mean you're right, getting a Helium hotspot is difficult and you can't just use any old LoRa radio, it needs to be one whitelisted by the Helium network. The whole think smelled like a scam back in ~2019 when I saw ads for it. Pay ~$300, give away your Internet to these IoT devices, but in exchange get some fake Internet money. I think it's impressive that Amazon managed to deploy what at a glance looks like an identical network with superior coverage without all the blockchain/crypto bullshit... AND it's free for non-Amazon devices to use. I'm pretty sure Helium costs some fake token money to consume data from. One concern I had was if someone were to use an IoT device to use my Internet connection to download CP. I don't think it's pragmatic, but there are lots of dumb people on this Earth and I can pretty much guarantee someone, somewhere is going to try it, and the poor guy hosting that Helium hotspot is going to have to lawyer up and probably have his computers seized until law enforcement figures out what happened. Same applies to other illegal activities. Imagine if the ransomware attack on that US company that resulted in them paying some amount of Bitcoin... that transaction was made on a random IoT device connected to someone's Helium hotspot. How would the FBI track that one down? Perhaps, then, that is a/the benefit of Helium over Sidewalk, because presumably Amazon will comply with any/all requests from government/law enforcement for data on which devices connected to what and when. With Helium, I'm not sure the FBI would have been able to figure out anything beyond the county and state the ransomware host collected his Bitcoin ransom at.

ThatPlayer 3y ago
I think you're overestimating how much bandwidth LoRa can handle. Because of airtime fairness, you're only allowed to be transmitting about 1% of the time. Best case LoRa is about 253 kb/s. 1% is 864 seconds, for a total of 25 megabytes a day. That would probably require you to be right next to the transmitter. Real world usages is going to be closer to single digit kilobits/second, maybe 1 megabyte/day. Also because of how Bitcoin is P2P, it's impossible to declare where the transaction is coming from. Transactions are all cryptographically signed and freely shared between nodes until picked up by miners. To figure out who the original sender is, you would need to host the majority of nodes so that the sender gives you the transaction first. Even then you can't prove they are the original sender rather than a rebroadcaster. There's a also few services that will broadcast a transaction for you: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_broadcasting https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_broadcasting I don't disagree with you that Helium (or any crypto) is a scam. I couldn't dissuade one of my friends from buying the hotspots, and he has not made any money on them. There's also some sentiment that "Amazon should be paying me for the bandwidth they're using!" with Sidewalk. Also I don't think networks like Amazon Sidewalk or Helium get direct access to the internet: they wanna go through Amazon's API or Helium's to be able to charge the company fees for the broadcast. Probably to track and log it too since it's only a few bytes anyways.
- gymbeaux 3y ago
  Considering dial-up was typically ~48-56kbps, I would say I was underestimating how much bandwidth LoRa can handle ;) I guess the main issue with both Helium and Sidewalk is that anyone who hosts their own LoRa radio probably isn't using any IoT devices that would be outside Bluetooth or WiFi range at their home/business, so it's kind of a chicken-egg problem where presumably the people who would leverage a LoRa network are also NOT the people who would host a LoRa radio... hence the argument from people that they should be compensated by Amazon for hosting Sidewalk.