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Comment by spiddy | Hacker News Reader

I tend to look closely into projects that are outside of the echo chamber that can provide real world value and better economic models than web2 solutions.

My two favorites are:

helium where they build IoT global network, I use a helium GPS-alternative tracker for my moto which costs 10 times less than GPS tracker.

scPrime (although there are other storage alternatives) which build global S3-compatible storage using available disk space on HDs. There is a lot of real estate that is sitting right now that can be harvested for money easily with networks like this.

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Helium is very much centralised because it has to (by the nature of their offering) lock down the end-user devices heavily. They have a single approved manufacturer last I checked.

It essentially operates as a unregistered and unregulated ISP and that isn’t something to be taken lightly. It does that by pushing all legal and regulatory liability to operators. There’s also a lot of scams with operators faking their signal etc.

Running a node also likely violates your ISPs ToS - can you contractually resell bandwidth?, so it has similar concerns as what AirBnB etc for the housing market.

There’s nothing stopping something large ISPs from blocking Helium traffic and/or suspending customers for running a node. Alternatively, if this gets big enough, you’ll see ISPs offer LORA hotspots of their own.

Ultimately, it is a very much VC-funded company running regulatory arbitrage on a global scale by using crypto instead. It’s the same if Uber decided to pay drivers in UberBucks a decade ago - that doesn’t change the offering, it just makes it easier to scale while pushing off any regulatory liabilities (including taxation).

> Helium is very much centralised because it has to (by the nature of their offering) lock down the end-user devices heavily. They have a single approved manufacturer last I checked.

As far as I can see there are currently 19 approved device manufacturers [0].

> It essentially operates as a unregistered and unregulated ISP and that isn’t something to be taken lightly. It does that by pushing all legal and regulatory liability to operators. There’s also a lot of scams with operators faking their signal etc.

Scams faking their signal will only help improve the robustness of the network on the long run as these are fixable issues.

Regulation seems to be spurring on every web3 conversation. I believe regulation is lagging behind user adoption and is a pending conversation. As for the exact scenario (LORA network) what kind of regulation do we __want__ the network to have? I don't think blocking user traffic is something we want to have, as an example you mentioned with current ISPs.

[0]: https://www.helium.com/mine

It’s not as much as “what regulations we want”, as “this is already a regulated space with every country having its own set of concerns and regulations.

This isn’t about Web3 though - Starlink for eg started accepted beta signups in India without a ISP license and was forced to go back on that. This is exactly kind of regulatory questions that Uber brought with it and it deserves the same level of scrutiny. Uber for eg, was forced to get a Taxi license in various jurisdictions.

Nice to see that they have more manufacturers though.

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