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I set up a helium hotspot today, It was ordered in january and finally arrived last week. As you can probably figure with bitcoin and basically everything shitting the economic bed, now is not exactly the most profitable time to recieve a cryptocurrency miner. Oh well, as is life.
Discussions were had on antenna placement, right now I have the indoor miner against a second story window stacked high above the screen. Right outside said window is a mount where a satalite dish used to be. A window-passthrough runner coax cable and a conversion kit to turn that satalite mount into an antenna pole mount and we might be cooking with fire. For now, I will leave it alone and see how things do. Im not expecting much considering im in a somewhat rural area with mountainous terrain blocking line of site at places, but will be happy to see any progress at all.
Helium is an interesting network built off millions of people contributing their own coverage via small hotspots running LoRaWAN radio technology. The network is currently used to transmit Internet Of Things data between radio frequency data and internet data but in the future many different companies can adapt the helium network into their own projects thus increasing its profit potential.
The helium hotspots are extremely energy efficent. Their low energy consumption comes due to them being basically spruced up radio transmitters/recievers with a specialized SBC. Maybe 20~30 watts are used at maximum, realistically somewhere around 15w.
Compare that to the traditional crypto mining rigs, huge GPU farms and ASIC rigs producing massive amounts of CO2 and waste energy. Where does all this energy really go? What is it being used for to make these digital tokens?
Bitcoin and most other cryptos validate their blockchain through collectively parcicipating in a kind of mathematical lottery. The way to 'win' the lottery and bring a new bitcoin into existance is to randomly guess a very *very* big number which acts as a kind of 'key' to a particular math puzzle. Each crypto miner competes against each other to try and find this special number. But ginding that key-number requires a huge amount of computational energy becuase it is such a stupid big number that can only be randomly guessed. That huge amount of energy used acts as a kind of proof of work. That proof of work is an integral part of verifying the blockchain hasn't been tampered with, and the miner that found the key is rewardeded for that work with a bitcoin.
Bitcoin creates scarcity through progressively making the puzzle harder and harder for computers to solve over time. Eventually to a breaking point of impossibility, thus creating a finite and scarce resource (in theory). Already the numbers needed to break the puzzle are so huge and hard to generate that individual miners need to pool together their resources and share the prize just to have a hope in hell of making new coins.
Channel insane amounts of computational energy to find an infinitecimal needle in a galaxy sized haystack, then do it all again. All of that computational energy produces a LOT of waste collectively. At some point you need to question if all that waste is worth it.
HNT is generated from another kind of blockchain validation algorithm called 'proof of coverage'. Hotspots/miners earn HNT by locally communicating with eachother, to validate their signal strength and expand local area coverage. POC is an interesting way of creating a system of trustless validation which also rewards improving total network coverage over time.
The validity of the helium blockchain is not through proof of work but proof of coverage. The very structural stability of the network acts as its own validity checking mechanism. Thousands and thousands of hotspots giving coverage and the validators, whom all have a copy of the entire blockchain, are continually testing against eachother.
Instead of something like Bitcoin rewarding the use of computational energy for validation, Helium rewards the 'integrity' and 'utility' of the network through witness validation. All of this while being extremely energy efficent through its radio based technology.
The technology being developed by the helium network could some day be repurposed to create a new kind of decentralized internet free of the shackles that are ISPs. Small net technologies that maximize data usage to informational value could potentially go really well with this sort of low-cost networking. Im not the guy whos smart enough to figure out all the details of that mental lovechild, but a person can dream. And hey, I might not get rich from this particular crypto venture (or even break even) but I can contribute to a new and growing technology I idealisticlly align with. Cryptocurrencies are polluted to the brim with scams, but every once in awhile one pops up with some genuine use case and creativity behind its conception.
When bitcoin first poped into existance, its maker Satoshi had a couple of privacy issues they wanted ironed out in the algorithm in the future. A decade later, exactly no progress was made and unsuprisingly as a result bitcoin is in a bad state when it comes to the privacy of its blockchain. Every transaction is public for anyone to see and keep track of. Getting a hold of any amount of bitcoin without mining it yourself is a bitch without going through an centralized exchange with KYC regulations. Bitcoin is just kinda shitty for what it originally set out to do. But the public still regard it as the currency criminals use for its alleged anonymity when its anything but.
In comes monero! Monero is a truly anonomyous cryptocurrency that protects its users transactional information to the upmost degree. Implementing all the security fixes satoshi outlined and then some.It does what everyone *thought* BTC did privacy-wise and is the gold standard of anonymous transactions within darknet communities because of it. Needless to say, The FED and Friends do not like it. The IRS is offering a 600,000$ bounty to anyone who can break its privacy in any way or track its transactions. This makes it effectively pentested by the best of the best. To anyone who wants so stick a finger to The Man's economy or buy a blotter of LSD on the current verion of silk road, there is no better solution. Monero is the true crypto for those who support its mission to uproot the centralized economic system as we know it.
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