#598 - Helium

[Peabody]

The Helium network and associated cryptocurrency were discussed at the end of this episode.  Previous guest Andreas Spiess had a video on this over a year ago, and got it right:



To the nearest approximation, nobody is using this network, and nobody wants to use it.  But the runup in the crypto gave all the early players good profits just from having their gateways up and running.  Why did the runup take place?  For the same reason Bitcoin had its runup, I suspect, which is what has always bothered me about this stuff.  But Dave likes it, so I must be wrong.  After all, the fine art market has operated on the same basis for centuries, and there's no sign that's going to crash.

[ataradov]

It is an obvios scam. Helium started as a real startup, but it did not go well for many reasons. This is where build your own gateway comes from - they wanted more coverage. But that still did not help and it was time for the company to fail.

Thankfully at about the same time crypto hype happened, so they pivoted and jumped on it. The offer looked attractive because they just decided to give away money. This increased coverage, but still did nothing for the users.

All that time LTE was a much more viable option. More expensive and much more power hungry, but with actual useful coverage. There is no point in having low power if you can't send any data outside of major cities.

And with NB-IoT getting more popular, there is no place for Helium network.