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Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

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Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#191
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that they also bet on the hypetrain lasting longer. They are now trying to cancel some of their TSMC orders. [1] They'll probably end up with a juicy profit overall anyway, but perhaps the more clear shovel sellers here are foundries like TSMC and Samsung. -- [1] https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-reportedly-wants-to-cut-t...

Clear winner is energy companies who sell electricity to miners :(

Investing into an illegally tapped coal power plant in Mongolia is about as safe an investment as investment in crypto itself.

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#192
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm genuinely curious what their thought process is. The thought process for VCs investing in crypto is simple: they get a huge discount on the tokens in the raise that they can turn around and dump on retail a few months later for huge returns. Instead of waiting 10+ years for a traditional exit, they can get liquidity in a few months. As Chamath admitted on the podcast, even when they're on a vesting schedule the…

This is basically the same equation if you replace "crypto" with "startup". The multiple investment rounds followed by eventual IPO is typically just a legal ponzi scheme.

If it is not a viable business (eg We work) the IPO will fail and the VCs would be left holding the bag.

Businesses make money from customers. Ponzis shuffle around capital from late investors to early investors

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#193
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single one of these web3 companies is going bust. They could all be built without tokens or a blockchain if they wanted to. There are only two things propping up the entire crypto economy, VC funding and fraud. Once the VC money leaves the ecosystem the dominoes will fall.

>> They could all be built without tokens or a blockchain if they wanted to Sure, and all web2.0 tech can be built without AWS or docker. But in many cases, they give you a powerful advantage. Same with blockchain. What now is happening in web3.0 is not that different from the dot com bubble. But it busted, and then a ton of new profitable companies appeared. Blockchain tech will for sure have many legit use cases, s…

>But in many cases, they give you a powerful advantage

What is the advantage? Apart from evading securities regulation that is. In 99.99% of cases the only advantage is pointless hype

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its absurdly easy to make a ton of money very fast in crypto At least right now mainly be doing something illegal e.g. scamming, rug pulling, insider trading. SEC and other regulators may be late to the party but are starting to put people in jail for this fast and easy money.

I turned 10k into 300k without doing any of the above in 6 months. You need to fight your biases.

Crypto is zero sum. For you to get 300k someone else got a loss of 300k.

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#195
post #8

The problem with Helium is that there's virtually no demand for LoRa protocol's super-low datarates. Cellular is a different story. There are already 3rd-party cellular towers operators who profitably provide data service to handsets on behalf of the big network providers. Tokenomics could work for cellular with carriers providing demand-side token consumption. However, cellular wasn't Helium's initial target, and wa…

> Tokenomics could work for cellular with carriers providing demand-side token consumption.

Why would that make any sense?

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#196
post #99

I looked into getting a Helium hotspot, but when I looked at my ISP‘s terms of service, the Helium use case is explicitly forbidden (I use Frontier Internet in Florida.) If you’re not familiar with it, what a Helium hotspot does is allow compatible IOT devices to share your Internet connection. I suspect that allowing random third parties to use your Internet connection it’s explicitly forbidden by the terms of servi…

The same thing happened with AirBnB and Uber and they are still around. Most people disregard the terms and conditions. ToS exist because of (and for) lawyers.

Unauthorized access of their network could be be prosecuted as felony. Those are rules to access their network. Like or not, people do get prosecuted for violating these terms.[1]

1. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/217115/20110719-schwa...

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#197

This thread lacks factual information : no source for the $6.5k/month revenue, and no source for the LoRaWAN market analysis supposedly demonstrating it is a "fake, overblown use case" Actually I would be interested in understanding better the choice made by Helium and the current and future use of LoRaWAN. When I first heard about Helium some years ago I wondered why they focused on this protocol compared to WiFi or…

> Which kind of devices are supposed to connect to Helium ? I suppose it is IoT devices, but most of them actually work perfectly fine with good old cellular networks

You're right that there are some IoT applications where a cellular connection makes sense. If you need to know when a vending machine needs restocking, spending $5/month on a SIM card is good business.

But some things have more marginal benefits. A city might like to know which streetlights are working and which aren't. If they can get that functionality for $5 per light with no ongoing costs, that's worth it. But if it's an ongoing $5/light/month? It's probably not worth that much - after all, they get fault reports from citizens for free.

Whether Helium can support the latter use case usefully I have no idea. And it's not clear to me why they need a blockchain, or whether it's good business sense to target people too miserly to use a cellular connection. But there's certainly use cases out there for connections that are cheaper than cellular connections.

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily my ISP was actually selling Helium hotspots themselves. :)

I have long thought that ISPs should charge by bandwidth used. It would incentivize improving infrastructure. Any ISP that would charge by bandwidth used would want their customers reselling bandwidth.

> It would incentivize improving infrastructure.

How?

That doesn't seem to work in any industry that is close to being a utility. Just look at toll roads.

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the next set of companies will become more smarter in their vesting terms. Just think about it, if these data point of selling claims get be bought to on-chain then I am sure people and next set of companies will not borrow some such investors. because of this particular reason I feel DeFi will replace traditional finance first before any other form of crypto companies takes. A recent IMF admitted that DeFi i…

> A recent IMF admitted that DeFi is 10x efficient than TradFi.I am sure once DeFi get a bit regulated and has better risk management principal embedded into code the system will become more efficient Do you have the source for this?

https://twitter.com/jackchong_jc/status/1521603629580533763?...

For the efficiency part. To be fair, traditional finance as an industry operates as a super inefficient, regulatory-captured pyramid scheme. Shouldn’t be too hard to beat.

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#200

This thread lacks factual information : no source for the $6.5k/month revenue, and no source for the LoRaWAN market analysis supposedly demonstrating it is a "fake, overblown use case" Actually I would be interested in understanding better the choice made by Helium and the current and future use of LoRaWAN. When I first heard about Helium some years ago I wondered why they focused on this protocol compared to WiFi or…

It is my understanding that the goal is to expand the network to include WiFi and cellular devices, in addition to LoRaWAN devices.
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