[HN Gopher] Senet and Helium Announce LoRaWAN Network Integratio...
___________________________________________________________________
Senet and Helium Announce LoRaWAN Network Integration Partnership
Author : delabay
Score : 63 points
Date : 2021-09-22 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.senetco.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.senetco.com)
| wyager wrote:
| I can't take helium seriously because it's an ICO scheme wrapped
| in a thinly plausible veneer of being about peer-to-peer
| communication.
|
| If you come up with a peer-to-peer network technology, and you
| want people to take it seriously, don't try to make a quick buck
| off it. If it needs payments for routing or whatever, just use an
| existing payment technology like lightning or something.
|
| It would be hard to sound more like a hype scam if they tried:
| "Powered by the Helium Blockchain, The People's Network
| represents a paradigm shift for decentralized wireless
| infrastructure."
|
| Edit: against my better judgment I read some of the technical
| stuff on their site. This is either decentralized in name only or
| vulnerable to Sybil attacks.
| joezydeco wrote:
| I've got a Mark 1 Helium IoT kit in the basement somewhere. You
| want it?
| delabay wrote:
| They have already built the worlds largest contiguous Lorawan
| network (a spectrum and application woefully underserved in the
| united states), and the network grows at 40-50% monthly. Token
| distribution is inherently tied to providing provably useful
| coverage, and "miners" use as much electricity as an LED
| lightbulb.
|
| This is probably the most socially useful, productive means of
| mining crypto conceived so far.
| vmception wrote:
| > This is either decentralized in name only or vulnerable to
| Sybil attacks.
|
| The Helium network does a variety of things to mitigate sybil
| attacks by requiring/incentivizing geographic distance between
| the routers.
|
| There are other proof-of-coverage systems where all of your
| criticisms would apply, such as MXC (the hotspot version, not
| the exchange) as they do allow individuals to just hoard a
| bunch of hotspots in one place and try to earn, reducing the
| health of the network. You should reserve your judgements for
| the ones doing it wrong and compare it to the ones doing it
| right or at least differently.
| wyager wrote:
| It sounds like the thing they actually do is have a
| centralized architecture with one entity issuing miner
| private keys for $40 each. It's DINO (decentralized in name
| only)
| heyrhett wrote:
| Helium literally never did an ICO.
|
| So funny watching bitter losers at hackernews get everything
| about blockchain wrong and stay poor over the past 10 years.
|
| - Throw in some buzzwords you don't really understand like
| "lightning" (does not apply to helium as it is a protocol based
| on bitcoin script)
|
| - use the word "scam" because you don't own any and you didn't
| invest a few months ago when it was pennies.
|
| - sprinkle in some unfounded FUD about decentralization and
| Sybil attacks because you're bitter you still don't own any
|
| Helium is the fastest growing wireless network on the planet.
|
| There are currently 190,000 hotspots over the globe, up from
| 20,000 6-months ago. https://explorer.helium.com/
|
| ...but but but against your better judgement you read some of
| the technical stuff... wooooowwwww
|
| Call me when the Helium node count drops below 100,000 again
| and I'll congratulate you and thank you for warning everyone
| about this "scam" before it was too late.
| lozaning wrote:
| They don't need to do a traditional ICO to grift.
|
| In order to join the network and start mining, you've got to
| buy $80 worth of gear from some company marked up to $600.
| That company then has to pay $40 to the Helium company in
| order for them to generate private keys that let your miner
| join the network and start making money.
|
| Helium is just https://network.fon.com/ on a different
| frequency + a bunch of unneeded crypto bullshit that hides
| the grift.
|
| Call me when I can stand up my helium miner based on open
| source hardware and software and make money using that.
| delabay wrote:
| If your goal is to build a global network with unheard of
| capital efficiency in 1/10th the time as incumbents, then
| the crypto bullshit is means to an end.
|
| Helium will go down as one of quote unquote "actual uses
| for blockchain".
|
| The proof is here. Lorawan coverage is now a solved
| problem.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| One scam here is that there will likely be ubiquitous sensors
| in your tv, door bell, car, fridge, heater and they won't be
| reporting back to you. They'll be telling the sellers of
| these devices about your activities, and it will be sold just
| like connected tvs today sell info about what you watch.
| delabay wrote:
| All these devices must be FCC certified so if you don't
| like the products, dont buy them.
|
| There are already thousands of societal beneficial uses of
| lorawan.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| Like what?
|
| No one wanted tvs to spy on them via the internet
| connections, they just wanted connected tvs with built in
| streaming devices. Today for any privacy you have to buy
| your own streaming device and not connect your tv itself
| to the internet. In the very near future, most devices
| will come with a low power radio that can't be turned off
| (just like you basically can't turn off the ubiquitous
| spying from your streaming connected tv). This network
| aids that.
| wyager wrote:
| > Helium literally never did an ICO.
|
| They clearly have some sort of central issuance because they
| have an airdrop. Their "proof" mechanism is either
| centralized or Sybil vulnerable - haven't bothered checking
| which.
|
| > So funny watching bitter losers at hackernews get
| everything about blockchain wrong and stay poor over the past
| 10 years.
|
| This is a hilariously off-the-mark shot. I have nothing
| against blockchain when used where it's actually useful (I.e.
| for solving double-spend or zooko). This, however, seems like
| a silly misapplication.
|
| > Throw in some buzzwords you don't really understand like
| "lightning"
|
| I think you did not understand what I said, which is that
| payment for network services should use normal payment
| mechanisms instead of special ones.
| delabay wrote:
| > Silly misapplication
|
| 200k operators climbing their roof to deploy beneficial
| coverage beg to differ
| wyager wrote:
| Probably not many, if any, of them understand the
| technology at any level deep enough to comprehend why
| it's a dumb idea. 200k people getting caught up in an
| altcoin scam is hardly new.
| delabay wrote:
| Yet helium solved Lorawan coverage in spite of it all :)
| joewadcan wrote:
| Helium fan here.
|
| I think a deeper dive is warranted on what and how they are
| "paying" people. Helium tokens are used as an incentive to
| bootstrap a network, but in the future part of payment for
| network services like you mentioned. I think this is one of
| the purest uses of crypto... less as currency replacement
| but more sharing in a network's future.
| lozaning wrote:
| The helium company charges miner manufacturing partners
| $40 a unit in order to generate the required private keys
| for their miners to be able to join the network.
|
| As soon as I found out I couldn't stand up my own DIY
| helium miner and start providing coverage and making
| money I became entirely disinterested.
| delabay wrote:
| With DIY they couldn't insure the security of
| participants. The temptation is too hight to create 100s
| of cloud miners.
|
| That said, there are 50 HW manufacturers queued up to
| supply. Incorporating Helium into an existing Lora
| framework is very easy.
|
| In fact, Helium is seeing an interesting phenomena where
| the PoC mining tech is becoming bundled with existing HW
| platforms because the material costs are so cheap.
| Projects are now bootstrapping on top of Helium.
| syedkarim wrote:
| I think the issue is with the $40 fee. Why not $1, or $5?
| delabay wrote:
| Onboarding fees maintain a buy-side for the network token
| until true network utilization catches up. The original
| article is an example of network utilization literally
| catching up.
|
| How did they arrive at $40 I'm not too sure. It seems
| like a moderate amount?
| lozaning wrote:
| Then it sure sounds like what they have is a proof of
| private keys algo, and not a proof of coverage algo. In
| which case why bother with a blockchain at all if there's
| a singular central entity that is the arbiter of all
| trust?
| delabay wrote:
| this is probably the only valid criticism in this thread
| so far. But your statement is not entirely correct:
|
| - An organization different from Helium Inc. disperses
| keys to hardware manufacturers.
|
| - Said independent org also performs an audit and
| approval process.
|
| - Improvements to the network are crowdsourced and voted
| by rough consensus.
|
| - Anybody can make suggestions or implementations similar
| to ethereum improvement proposals.
|
| - Once deployed, there is no way to remove the node from
| the network.
|
| - Nobody has banning or revocation abilities.
| wyager wrote:
| > With DIY they couldn't insure the security of
| participants. The temptation is too hight to create 100s
| of cloud miners.
|
| Indeed, that's why helium is DINO (decentralized in name
| only).
| humancyborg_ wrote:
| the $40 is burned on-chain, it never comes to the
| company. it's just a cheap form of spam control
| delabay wrote:
| spam control and token demand. crypto places a huge value
| on large public burns.
| heyrhett wrote:
| Please explain how one uses blockchain to solve a zooko.
|
| > I have nothing against blockchain when used where it's
| actually useful (I.e. for solving double-spend or zooko).
| wyager wrote:
| Namecoin
| mNovak wrote:
| My general assumption of every crypto concept is that it is
| naturally incentivized to consume all available resources
| relevant to mining (e.g. Bitcoin -> electricity, Eth -> GPUs,
| Chia -> SSDs, etc).
|
| So then, what's the resource underlying HNT? Unlicensed ISM
| spectrum (and perhaps antenna rent, and latent internet
| backhaul). Which is actually kind of a scary thought, because
| among all crypto fuels, this one is actually very scarce. Sure,
| 900MHz is relatively underutilized and so spamming LoRa
| basestations every 100m isn't the end of the world; but imagine a
| logical extension of Helium into 2.4, 5GHz spectrum, where
| suddenly your home wifi is fighting for signal with 100s of
| venture-backed mining rigs on every street corner.
|
| Not saying good can't come from it, I do appreciate crypto
| concepts that actually try to accomplish something productive as
| a byproduct, and after all ample coverage of a cheap data network
| is a good thing, but the spectrum is fundamentally a shared
| resource, and needs to be approached carefully.
| delabay wrote:
| There is a concept of saturation in Helium network. You can see
| the effect in real time as rewards are plummeting in
| oversubscribed areas like San Francisco. Too many nodes -->
| reward scale goes down --> network deployments percolate
| towards the perimeter where ROI is better --> Network grows in
| geographic coverage.
|
| This is the beauty of the proof of coverage scheme. Its an
| awesome way to distribute rewards to people who provide
| valuable coverage while simultaneously creating a force to
| disperse over a large geographic area.
| axus wrote:
| This reminded me to check up on how Althea is doing. Looks like
| they are changing their blockchain to something they have more
| control of:
|
| https://blog.althea.net/althea/
| goodpoint wrote:
| LoRaWAN's marketing uses the word "community" a lot. Also add to
| that:
|
| > The Helium Network, also known as "The People's Network",
|
| ...and add the fact that LoRa and LoRaWAN is corporate-controlled
| and patented. This is all astroturfing.
|
| Do we really need yet another proprietary radio standard?
|
| > "proof-of-coverage" transactions earn Hotspot owners HNT
| cryptocurrency
|
| Yikes.
| vmception wrote:
| https://explorer.helium.com
|
| the helium network viability is that using the network doesn't
| burden the consumers with the cryptocurrency's fluctuations in
| price or necessarily dealing with it at all. Consumers are able
| to use Data Credits which have a fixed price, creating data
| credits (DC) destroys the HNT token - of which the consumer or
| their future ISP will have to buy/acquire Helium tokens to do.
| So it creates a decent incentive for providers to build and
| expand the network (to earn HNT) and also a demand side as
| consumers (or their ISPs) to buy and destroy helium to create
| DC.
|
| The antenna/routers do not use much energy and instead rely on
| a geographic distance which determines if they earn more or
| less HNT based on the coverage they are providing to the
| network.
| willidiots wrote:
| Helium is ultimately independent of LoRaWAN though - it's now
| expanding to other protocols i.e. CBRS.
| delabay wrote:
| Helium CBRS will be the largest neutral host carrier of 5g by
| 2023 :)
| dv_dt wrote:
| Are there interesting open standards in a similar
| performance/power/range envelope?
| chewbaccainsf wrote:
| explorer.helium.com track the growth here.
| delabay wrote:
| LoRaWAN is extremely cheap (BOM and data costs) and quite
| frankly old tech compared to any other standard which fills the
| same market need. I have a water sensor that has a battery life
| of 10 years and $1 pays for all the data credits it ever needs.
| joewadcan wrote:
| I'd argue we do need a proprietary standard to make move the
| IOT market from a pipedream to reality.
| delabay wrote:
| To add to this, Semtech / Lorawan tech is literally _so
| cheap_. There really aren't technologies as optimal on the
| cost per evilness spectrum.
| chewbaccainsf wrote:
| yeahhhhhhhhh boiiiiiiiiii !!!!!!!!! $HNT
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| This is potentially very interesting for certain regional
| operations if the price is right. It's good to have a little bit
| of competition against cellular.
|
| However, nothing really competes with the coverage of cellular
| networks yet. Even this press release boasts about being present
| in 29 states. An impressive accomplishment, but it's a non-
| starter for any mass market products.
|
| If the price is low enough then this could be very attractive for
| local applications like sensor monitoring, smart meters, and
| other low bandwidth operations.
| delabay wrote:
| This announcement is for 900Mhz (unregulated spectrum) coverage
| which is woefully underserved in the united states. 900Mhz
| LoRaWAN is for low power IoT devices. Helium is using
| blockchain coordination / incentive to change this equation --
| where once was tons of geographically small and incompatible
| network, Helium is bridging them all by enabling roaming across
| the world at a price of $.00001 per packet (24 bytes). Most IoT
| application can run for years for less than a dollar since
| their data needs are small.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| Building a low power connected wan so you can use lots of
| internet of things devices just leads to adding radios in
| your devices and them reporting back on you. Today it's
| impractical because of cost to have my tv spy on me if I
| don't have it connected to the internet. But with this, in
| the future they will put low power radios on tvs,
| refridgerators, cars, anything.
|
| The money to pay for the crypto currency (helium) you get
| paid in must be coming from companies that will benefit from
| having these radios working.
|
| I know it's not that there is not legit use for this in terms
| of sensors. But there's also no way for me to restrict
| devices that in things I purchase from being part of this
| network.
| vmception wrote:
| > The money to pay for the crypto currency (helium) you get
| paid in must be coming from companies that will benefit
| from having these radios working.
|
| It comes from inflation. There is an emission schedule.
|
| The demand to offset the inflation comes from the
| people/organizations that want to send data over these
| networks - which is not the device sellers or the people
| that own them. Data Credits have a fixed dollar amount so
| the cost to use the network is always predictable, but
| creating a data credit requires acquiring/purchasing Helium
| tokens and destroying them. So the more subscribers to send
| data over the network, the greater demand there is for
| Helium tokens in order to create Data Credits.
|
| The companies that benefit from the radios working make
| _dollars_ from selling hardware to people that want to earn
| HNT and expand the network.
|
| Yes, there is now a reason for there to be a lot of IOT
| devices reporting stuff. Okay.
| delabay wrote:
| Just use a Faraday cage in your home if you're worried
| about errant RF signals.
| eli wrote:
| Keeping the price of connectivity high was never going to
| be a longterm privacy safeguard. The answer is probably
| legislation
| gazzini wrote:
| I think the Helium project is a fascinating experiment, and I've
| had a lot of fun participating in it. I've been tracking my
| experience for a while (with pictures): [0]
|
| It's certainly a weird project, and watching the corporation
| contort itself into something coordinated enough to drive
| partnerships like this but decentralized enough to qualify as a
| cryptocurrency is a sight to behold.
|
| The governance of this project isn't "decentralized" in any
| strict sense of the word, but the separation of the dewi alliance
| from the main corporate entity is interesting.
|
| The self-imposed technical constraints are equally fun to
| observe. The scaling issues (gossiping blockchain data across
| 100k+ raspberry pi devices with no broker) are insane, and the
| incentive mechanism for "validators" is an interesting
| incremental solution. Specifically, people "stake" $200k on cheap
| cloud servers, which might earn money for a few hrs a week when
| elected to a "consensus group." This made sense historically (on
| distributed raspberry pi devices) but is now really strange
| compared to most other blockchains where validators earn
| consistently.
|
| Every one of these issues is a bottomless pit of learning
| opportunities as worlds collide (economics, telecom incentives,
| cryptocurrency price swings, hobbyist antennas, etc...).
|
| I'm no maximalist (I've sold lots of coins), but there is
| something deeply fun about watching _anybody_ try to do something
| novel to compete against the old guard. That's why I was up at
| 6am today to fiddle with an antenna on a friend's roof.
|
| 0: https://gazzini.com/projects/posts/helium/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-22 23:01 UTC)