Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

I think the issue is with the $40 fee. Why not $1, or $5?

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?

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?

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.

At first glance it might seem like that but the hotspots are measuring signal from eachother and are rewarded accordingly. The Proof of Coverage comes from actual measurements of RSSI against distance and power variations.

This is one of more interesting parts of the Helium network. It's wholly not forkable. Helium hotspot owners get their firmware updated automatically... which again seems like a big negative (single company controlled hardware) but it's imperative for this stage of network bootstrapping. I want Helium to tightly control quality now to get to a level of resources where trust itself can be disaggregated amongst DIY hotspots and firmware developers.

> 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).

the $40 is burned on-chain, it never comes to the company. it’s just a cheap form of spam control

spam control and token demand. crypto places a huge value on large public burns.

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).

Namecoin

> Silly misapplication

200k operators climbing their roof to deploy beneficial coverage beg to differ

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.

Yet helium solved Lorawan coverage in spite of it all :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com