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Comment by eikaramba | Hacker News Reader

I am currently building a end consumer device using LORAWAN. It sends you a push notification upon receiving mail in your mailbox. It also uses helium, because the network coverage is quite good. https://notific.at - i think end user use cases are the key to make the business model behind Helium work. The fact that helium was able to scale within 1 year what TTN had to do in 8 years is quite the proof for me that paying gateway owners some kind of revenue is the way to scale the network coverage.

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The beauty of helium is that it didn't exist, then two years later, it exists everywhere, covering most of the western world. People don't "agree" with how it got there: guess what, all other attempts to do the same have utterly failed.

The data is so cheap that it enables fantastic new applications like yours. Don't stop building. There are many people (not on HN) cheering for you.

The ends don't justify the scamming.

Nah. There was a period about 20 years ago where there was pervasive public Wi-Fi that provided full coverage of virtually every sufficiently dense urban area. Then people started locked down their hotspots, and within 2-3 years that was the end of that. Nice while it lasted though; thank god the advent of speedy cellular wasn’t too far around the corner.

Nah, bad example. Not ubiquitous enough. Nice try

the problem is that battery consumption. of course there are alterantives, but all of them need WAY more power than LORA

thank you for that kind words, means a lot. i am not selling a lot and the whole development process was part of the journey for me. i also think that one should just try to build stuff, even if it is only helping a small amount of people.

Except they used crypto to mask the fact that the positive ROI of ownership is at best years out rather than months out.

That's the whole point of crypto tokenomics. You use the token to incentivize capital expenditure on the speculation that demand will come. The entire point of a token is to align incentives around this. It has worked for Bitcoin and Ethereum. It has worked for many other protocols (Sushi, Aave, Chainlink, Filecoin, Arweave, etc). It has also failed for some protocols.

Actually it hasn't worked anywhere except to incentivize capital expenditure on mining hardware which does nothing of value beyond wasting electricity. All of those protocols you listed are scams or pointless failures.

You really think the first, ever, widely used public key databases are useless? You don't believe cryptography has any usecase? Or you misunderstand why a blockchain is novel? Two possibilities.

We have had widely used public key infrastructure available in database products since the 1980s. Perhaps you weren't paying attention?

Cryptography obviously has use cases. Real customers have been paying for it since long before the advent of digital computers. That has little to do with the scammers, grifters, and ideologues pushing cryptocurrency schemes.

There's not much novel about blockchains. It's a clever bit of mathematics, but so far no significant commercial value. You should read the NIST overview.

https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final

I read your comment, and started to draft a reply, but I went back through it, I don't actually think you understand the words you're using, so it's kinda pointless.

It seems you could sell the mailbox device and the gateway together if cost permitted (I know you say "No base station required" but some users may not mind running a basestation, especially if it required little/no configuration).

Too much friction. Reminds me of the classic HN refrain: why use Netflix when I could just setup a RAID storage server and my own linux-based media platform?

Wha?

That would cost a lot of money and have no content. The problem isn't friction. The friction would be easy to overcome if you didn't have those two fatal problems.

yes i thought about that. Interestingly there are a lot of customers who are buying gateways and extend the coverage in their neighbourhood. It takes around 5 minutes to set one up.

There are gateways who are more complicated and more for developers, but of course i don't want to offer these.

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