Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by arcticbull » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 2:54 PM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #131

MrMan wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

privacy is a basically impossible thing to achieve, like trying to be invisible in all spectrums.

Doesn’t mean that you stop trying and hand it all over to Zuckerberg on a platter.

It also doesn't mean the solution to every problem is to start an MLM scheme around unregistered securities. Kind of a false dichotomy here. Sounds like the answer is to start services that cost human dollars that don't sell data - and definitely don't publish data on a public immutable pseudonymous ledger for all to see.

The problem is that as you said, when the rubber meets the road, the customers don't value privacy - and at the end of the day they're the ones paying.

All the major platforms were built without ownership and without privacy, and this didn't hurt them in the slightest from being some of the most valuable companies in human history. I'm not saying I like it either, btw.

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

#232

Post by itsoktocry » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 2:57 PM UTC

ackbar03 wrote: post #14

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.

Yet some VCs are still plowing into web3. There was an article today about how Moellis was getting into Web3 companies. I'm genuinely curious what their thought process is. I tend to be in the camp that web3 is just a bunch of hot air seeing how cryptos been around for quite a while now with few use cases, but I also give benefit of the doubt there could be something there given the nature of tech.

>Yet some VCs are still plowing into web3

Some VCs, some even with legendary reputations, are going to ruin said reputations from the scams they're pushing. In 10 years much of the sheen of Silicon Valley will have worn off. Tech will be as beloved as banking.

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

#233

Post by stiltzkin » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #26

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.

The older protocols that were built in the depth of 2018-19 bear markets will survive. Many of them are also doing wonderfully well in terms of revenue. COMP, MKR, AAVE, CRV all make a ton in revenue and have a well-defined product-market fit. Crypto projects are tough to value. Their sheer global scale means that they can ramp up revenue and even profits extremely fast. StepN, a move-to-earn app reportedly made $120…

I do use StepN and should be noted that the $120 million was from the first quarter and the project has less than a year online. But that quarter GST and the sneakers were at ATH before the crash and people "invested" more than $1K for a pair of sneakers, earning were $30 dollars a day with a single common shoe and you could reach your ROI in 30 days. The numbers are different now as GST has crashed 98% and people who invested a lot in the first quarter have their ROI in years.

The FitnessFi space has so much potential but StepN has new competition in the space which they are already starting with better ponzinomics and in web3 projects are community driven and StepN community will ape to the next one.

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

#234

Post by oblio » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #210

risyachka wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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?

Well, it will only take as long as for web 1.0 and web 2.0 to find legit use cases.

What's that you say? Those technologies have legit cases from almost day 1, it just took the technology a bit to catch up?

That's just like crypto tech.

Ah, it isn't, you say? Blockchain has the tech but the list of legit and popular use cases only it can solve is almost 0 and we haven't really found new ones in almost 14 years?

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

#235

Post by arcticbull » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 3:00 PM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #94

arcticbull wrote: post #46

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…

The discounts are getting smaller and smaller as the valuations go up. A new chain, Aptos, is raising at 2B valuation. Optimism, an ETH Layer2 raised at 1B valuation. Until like last week, it had a circulating marketcap of 100m. Lots of smaller projects are priced below VC prices. For example, CowSwap is at like 12c when private rounds were at 15c.

> Lots of smaller projects are priced below VC prices.

How do you know what the VCs paid? These are private transactions. Sometimes they invest in equity in the business at the published round price, but get tokens for almost free on the side.

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

#236

Post by woodruffw » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 3:01 PM UTC

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…

> Their vision is actually very lofty - build a distributed low data wireless network completely independent of phone providers and cable companies.

It presumably connects to the actual Internet at some point, yes? Presumably via each (or some) nodes' residential ISP hookups. Otherwise it'd be a glamorized intranet.

Extremely lofty visions that only loosely adhere to both reality and the practical applications of cryptocurrencies are typical for crypto companies.

> 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.

The government would probably get much more bang for its buck by funding something like NYC Mesh[1]. They also have an actual peering agreement.

[1]: https://www.nycmesh.net/

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

#237

Post by shtopointo » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 3:04 PM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #147

shtopointo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It relies entirely on someone else coming along later and paying more Yes, just like any part of the economy. Scarcity and/or productivity is why someone pays: either something, or more for it. If it's BTC, the theory is it will be scarce, like gold. If it is one of the other crypto coins, it has to be productive like e.g. this app enabling sharing internet with others.

The S&P 500 pays out over a trillion dollars each year in dividends and stock buybacks funded by the profits of their productive economic activity. This is what you are investing in when you buy a stock. The numbers-go-up of the stock market is both directly (through stock buybacks) and indirectly (through expectations of future dividends) a consequence of this productive activity, not just greater fools.

We don't disagree. A crypto coin can be that too – stock in a company.

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

#238

Post by jaywalk » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 3:06 PM UTC

efitz wrote: 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…

I think you could argue that Helium is not making "the Service" itself available, since it's not providing an actual Internet connection as a Wi-Fi network would. The only thing using "the Service" itself is the Helium hotspot that is within your premises.

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

#239

Post by prepend » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 3:06 PM UTC

efitz wrote: 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…

If it’s any consolidation Apple and Amazon break those ToS by allowing third party devices to connect and use bandwidth.

I think these terms are pretty hard to enforce and not sure how your ISP would differentiate traffic.

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

#240

Post by prepend » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 3:09 PM UTC

buf wrote: post #114

davidguetta wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early investors were excited by the technology, not the promise of quick gains and speculation, like VC nowadays.. that probably where his "superiori moral", provided he meant it that way which I doubt, are. A lot of people think crypto are plain useless but that is just wrong in practice. They are de facto actual "currency", which is already a lot especially for people in third world countries whose national currenc…

Yes, this. I had to difficult time replying to pembrook because their reply was so venomous that I felt out of breath by just how far off the mark pembrook was to how it was for me in 2017. Crypto in 2017 really felt like the beginning of something big and amazing, like we were going to change the world's currency, solve reputation, etc. Me personally, I've been weathered by the constant fraud. I still 'believe' in i…

Seemed like vapor in 2017 to me. I felt bad like it was scamming people who were dumb out of their money.

Once I looked at how the prices rose and the at didn’t support the Eth use case, I thought the architecture was stupid or at worst built purposely to have unnecessary scarcity to drive prices up.