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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

#201

Post by swamp40 »

Helium isn't your typical crypto company. Their vision is actually very lofty - build a distributed low data wireless network completely independent of phone providers and cable companies.

And pay the people who own nodes a percentage of the $ earned thru the traffic flow of their node.

The payment just uses crypto because the ecosystem is a nice fit. Everybody knows what miners are and that they make money.

The problem is that you need the entire network in place before people can build on it. So they have been subsidizing the miners. And it's a race of how much money can you raise and payout vs how much is a network like that is worth.

And right now everybody has cellular and cable and fiber and no one really needs another system. Most of the use cases (LOTS of sensor data) aren't really worth that much money.

Personally, I think the government should subsidize something like this to allow it to get off the ground. Earthquake data, climate data, traffic data, etc. Essentially public use.

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

#202

Post by kredd »

aaaaaaaaata wrote: post #183
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #5

Look into SoRare’s volume. They raised over $500m. Volume is now lower than it was way back in 2020. The crypto down rounds are going to be hilarious. Note to investors: if you’re investing in crypto projects, carefully consider the ponzinomics and the vesting schedule. You want your unlocks to happen in the middle of the bullrun when exit liquidity is ample. And also remember that whatever you might think of as “nor…

GameStop NFT did $2M the first day. Maybe everyone just doesn't know where the volume is? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32238127

I don’t follow crypto space that up close, but my understanding is, it’s mostly GME holders trying to make GameStop to look better on paper? Generating 2M isn’t hard if you have a few thousand people trading back and forth.

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

#203

Post by JumpCrisscross »

muro wrote: post #100
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> crypto down rounds are going to be hilarious That’s optimistic. Best case is orderly resolution and/or fire sales to Wall Street. Worst case: retail investors lose money while executives and senior employees see prosecution.

Why is worst case a bad outcome? It's all a scam and if people invest in it or propagate it, they shouldn't expect anything else.

> Why is worst case a bad outcome? It's all a scam and if people invest in it or propagate it, they shouldn't expect anything else

The damage is already done. Either our laws were broken, and there will be more misery. Or our laws were not and they'll need to be revised. Even if justified, misery is misery. It's a worse outcome than customers getting their money back and nobody going to jail.

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

#204

Post by adrr »

Nextgrid wrote: post #29
WALoeIII wrote: post #12

Don’t the terms of service for nearly all consumer ISPs explicitly prohibit sharing or reselling?

Who cares? It's not like a packet that's a result of sharing/reselling suddenly "weighs" more on the network wires.

People running the hotspots should care, they could get prosecuted for unauthorized access of their ISPs network. Sharing you connection is not authorized. Don't like it, lobby to change the law but what they are doing is explicitly illegal.

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

#205

Post by hansword »

ricochet11 wrote: post #81
arcticbull wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If "web2" hadn't shut off its own users from any semblance of ownership in the platforms, or had done more for privacy, web3 would have died in 2017. Honestly nobody cares about these things. This is just a narrative that was grafted onto Web3 after the fact.

I care about these things and i've been in crypto since before gavin coined web3. In fact most of the devs I know that started pre-2017 deeply care about these things. Many were around in the OWS groups back in the day, they transformed via bitcoin and now mostly work on eth projects. The cool thing is most of those people who were in it for political reason (rather than the newer investors looking to make quick mone…

I care about these things and left crypto over a decade ago.

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

#206

Post by olsonjeffery »

swamp40 wrote: post #201

Helium isn't your typical crypto company. Their vision is actually very lofty - build a distributed low data wireless network completely independent of phone providers and cable companies. And pay the people who own nodes a percentage of the $ earned thru the traffic flow of their node. The payment just uses crypto because the ecosystem is a nice fit. Everybody knows what miners are and that they make money. The prob…

>Personally, I think the government should subsidize something like this to allow it to get off the ground. Earthquake data, climate data, traffic data, etc. Essentially public use.

Literally the exact opposite of what web3 is. You're arguing for a _public good_, but web3's entire premise only makes sense when the opposite happens: everything is privatized, everything is monetized.

THIS is the world that web3 makers envision: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...

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

#207

Post by AlexandrB »

swamp40 wrote: post #201

Helium isn't your typical crypto company. Their vision is actually very lofty - build a distributed low data wireless network completely independent of phone providers and cable companies. And pay the people who own nodes a percentage of the $ earned thru the traffic flow of their node. The payment just uses crypto because the ecosystem is a nice fit. Everybody knows what miners are and that they make money. The prob…

> build a distributed low data wireless network completely independent of phone providers and cable companies.

Don't the people buying the LoRa gateways just connect them their router, which is being provided bandwidth by phone and cable companies? Or alternately LTE, which is also being run by phone companies?

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

#208

Post by thesausageking »

orzig wrote: post #66

A16Z is obviously well known, but are they respected? I naïvely assumed that they would have access to enough expertise and deal flow to avoid the most absurd losers, but a few examples in the last few months have made me question that. And an important follow up question: do they have enough dry powder to keep sustaining these things?

a16z is an odd fund. They've made a ton of money in crypto investing in projects, pumping them, and then dumping on retail. Most crypto insiders view them as completely toxic and won't touch projects they've backed.

But a16z has such a strong brand in general tech and is so great at PR, I don't see them slowing down anytime soon. They're making way too much money.

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

#210

Post by smoldesu »

risyachka wrote: post #169
pg_bot wrote: 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…

> Blockchain tech will for sure have many legit use cases

When?

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