Comment by sumoboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sumoboy | Hacker News Reader

Definitely a helium miner in play here. Plenty of pics on reddit where people have built self-powered deployments, solar charges a battery inside, 4g for internet access, and mine away helium all day long. Was very profitable 14-24 months ago but HNT crypto price has plummeted and helium founders pretty much bet the same type of deployment could happen for 5g deployments which has pretty much been a disaster. 5g implementations require more $$$ equipment and pricey antennas, and a complex setup with a limited range.

The appeal of these helium miners was a very simple setup and low cost. I'd seen offers for people who work on cell towers in SLC to rent space for these miners. Plenty of places in the SLC that can reach a large % of the valley without having to go that high. I still have a single miner running in Vegas that has a 50km reach from a residential house with a single 5.8dbi antenna. Could easily put one on a hilltop but doubtful it would help. I highly doubt the cartel is invested in these, very low data throughput which why IoT devices are the target market.

> Was very profitable 14-24 months ago but HNT crypto price has plummeted and helium founders pretty much bet the same type of deployment could happen for 5g deployments which has pretty much been a disaster.

When I looked into it, very little of the Helium miner payouts were coming from people using the network. Most of the payouts were from the network minting HNT to reward node operators, which they then cashed out by selling HNT to people on exchanges.

The obvious problem is that this model only works as long as the speculative value of the HNT token remains high. Once the speculative demand for HNT disappears, getting actual cash in exchange for mining operations is going to become very hard. Supposedly the operators planned on having actual end users pay to use the network, but that demand has been minimal so far.

They also had some problems where people discovered how to game the system and extract a lot of the rewards without providing much actual coverage. I don't know if they overcame these or not.

Like most crypto things, being early to the speculative game was the only way to make money. I suspect a lot of late arrivals who haven't even received their backordered miners yet are going to be in for some losses.

>but that demand has been minimal so far.

I am mostly anti-crypto but I always thought the concept of Helium was cool. If the "price" was competitive with LTE-M and NB-IoT (I'm not sure if it was, maybe it is now?) what stopped people from using it?

I've worked on low data rate projects that would be a good fit for the Helium network.

Biggest issue was uncertainty about the future of the network. The only reason people were interested in running nodes was to collect payouts, denominated in the Helium token. If the Helium token price crashes (as it has), the network will stop expanding at best and start shrinking at worst.

Meanwhile, regular cellular data contracts dropped to relatively low prices for low data applications. When retail pricing starts at $1/month, you can imagine how cheap we're getting contracts for 10,000 devices locked in over multi-year contracts.

Also, the Helium founders seem to have realized they squeezed everything they can out of their first project, so they switched their attention to a new 5G project to try to repeat their token-fueled success once more before crypto speculation ran out of steam. They didn't quite make it.

Registration of a hotspot and asserting its location costs the miner 50,000,000 Data Credits, plus 2x65,000 DC in transaction fees. Registration fees for receiving packages has a fixed fee of tens of millions of DC too. Meanwhile, transferring a single 24-byte package over the network costs the user 1 DC - which is equivalent to $.00001.

I live in a medium-density city, and there are 50+ miners within a half-mile radius from me. Considering IoT is designed for low-volume data, there is no way packet payout will ever come remotely close to the network fees itself. The protocol was designed to reward proof-of-coverage at first, slowly switching to rewarding data forwarding.

What we are seeing right now is that the data volume simply doesn't exist, and the proof-of-coverage was showing a false demand. Even if it were to see widespread use, it would still not live up to expectations.

And if you are a commercial user, why would you mess around with Helium rather than just contracting one of the well-known commercial IoT parties? Even if a commercial provider is 100x as expensive you are still only paying $.001 / package.

Most crypto concepts are similarly cool, but hijacked by speculators and fraud.

> but hijacked by speculators and fraud.

only after the non-feasibility of scaling the concept drives out the sensible people.

I've been interested in cryptocurrencies back when they were still called "hashcash" so this whole corruption of the original ethos really hits me in the feels.

I remember reading a Tor article (blog post maybe? Cannot find it anymore) about the "revenue model", and why they settle on donations only (mostly?). Back then I was interested in the Nym model (a mixnet trying to use a "proof of mix" to pay the nodes for their work). It's been a while, so take it with a grain of salt.

I found it very interesting to see that Tor had actually considered paying to encourage nodes (different technical solutions), but decided against it for a philosophical reason: if you run a node for profit, chances are that you don't really care about helping the project ("you just want money"). So it's a risk to attract "bad actors". And they don't want that.

I think there is a similar argument to make for all those services trying to use cryptocurrencies to attract nodes: those "bad actors" will always optimize for their profit, not for the health of your service. Seems like it applies for Helium, too.

If you go on the Helium subreddit, there are many posts from people saying that their Helium modems took several months to ship, and the modems themselves are completely overpriced for what they do.

Amusing discussion in the Helium subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/HeliumNetwork/comments/104hpx4/alri...

I always assumed these helium miners were doing some weird radio data collection, IP obfuscation, or something. There has to be some incentive behind getting people to set up these radios everywhere.

Being paid in HNT crypto to run the device. With a $250 box and the HNT pricing around $15-$20 and on the rise, people were making thousands mining a 100+ coins a month deployed in a half decent location. The buying demand for these miners went through the roof and people were waiting 9-12 months to get one. Easy to buy one now but likely only to mine around 4 coins a month due to halving and price decline. HNT coin is around $1.70 right now.

Why does the physical location of the mining rig matter?

Helium is a "proof-of-coverage" crypto system: "Proof-of-Coverage is a unique work algorithm that uses radio waves to validate Hotspots are providing legitimate wireless coverage."

The more people that see you, better chance your miner is involved with proof of coverage to get a mining reward. It's still just a radio wave so "line of site" improves everything.

Visit https://explorer.helium.com/ You can visually see the miners and activity.

The one thing I like about them is the mapping of Proof of Work onto a thing of value in the real world. I think it's a pretty strange thing of value to have selected and there are better behaviors out there to encourage.

I know someone they interviewed for a job last year and he said they were cashed up with years of runway but I also know they have a very bad rep in the LoRa equipment vendor space based on conversations although moved on to the LTE CBRS innovation band from what I can tell.

Last I looked into it they locked down the supported hardware pretty aggressively and I could never trace a clear line on how the "proof of coverage" was validated. The physical aspects of radio transmission that are unforgeable are a bit hard to do without dedicated hardware and large distances(ex: time of flight for GPS).

The RF nerd in me thinks it could be interesting but the skeptic makes me wonder how forgeable coverage would be and if the overhead of coverage challenges uses more of the limited spectrum than carrying actual data.

It's kind of a joke, the entire thing is relying on the locked down hardware as it contains the keys that generate coins. You can set up your own mini network that only sees / validates your own nodes and get rewarded. The solution they came up with is a CSV of "bad" nodes. No joke.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helium/denylist/main/denyl...

Helium has been paraded around as a successful use of blockchain when it's highly centralized and has no actual customers.

Woah this seems actually useful, unlike most other crypto endeavors

There are lots of Helium rigs in NYC, so the reward pool is smaller than it would be in places like Utah.

The whole idea appears to be that "miners" get paid for providing coverage by service users that need the packets forwarded to them

I don't know how much they have changed the incentive structure lately, but the original goal was to build-out a large LoRa network and then transition it to have a business model based on customers buying access tokens and spending them as their packets get carried by the Helium network.

LoRa networks are not IP networks until the LoRa packets reach the internet edge and get backhauled to gateways that then deliver them to the owners of the data collected over LoRa. So anyone trying WiFi packet sniffing is barking up the wrong radio, and wrong layer 2.

Thing is, LoRa is not that big a business for commercial network operators, never mind oddball blockchain-based network operators. A lot of LoRa is deployed for a single purpose or application by the organization building both the sensors and the data collection network.

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