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

#261

Post by TomSwirly » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 3:57 PM UTC

tarunmuvvala wrote: post #91

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…

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.

Oh, yeah? Here's the document: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fintech-notes/Issues/202...

Where does it say that?

It doesn't say that, because it isn't true.

You continue to reinforce the idea that cryptocurrency advocates deliberately make up false statements.

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

#262

Post by cuteboy19 » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 3:57 PM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #255

cuteboy19 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Correction: for me to get 300k, many people had to aggregate 300k of losses across many different projects. You make it sound like the market is two participants - me and the guy I took 300k from. In reality, the market is broad as well as deep. You can lose $10 on one project, make $20 on another, and come out with $10 profit overall. Someone else can reverse that trade and come out with $10 profit as well.

Correct. But overall if you net out the cash flows, the crypto market does not create any new wealth (as opposed to the stock market). Old investors benefit by getting more new investors who themselves are always on the lookout for even greater fools.

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

#263

Post by TomSwirly » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 3:58 PM UTC

retcon wrote: post #161

gingerlime wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s my understanding as well after listening to Crypto Critics and Griftonomics podcasts. Highly recommend both although so much stuff is way over my head. I wish there was a beginner’s version :)

I'd like to recommend a shelf of great to read erudite and intelligible financial history and financial social history and technicality, from which you'd recognize the simulacra, but it wouldn't help very much because this crypto game strips out everything fundamental economic and human from their imaginary systems and leaves solely a caricature of a carcass. I'm despondent about the overall crypto situation, please…

It's a non-zero sum game - a negative sum game because aside from the trading, there are the huge costs in network and electricity.

It will collapse. It is simply masked to some extent by the fact that industrial civilization is a generational Ponzi scheme.

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

#264

Post by dougSF70 » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 3:59 PM UTC

dougSF70 wrote: post #223

I will build you an $80k ARR business, I just need a $365mn down payment. If you want a business that loses $100mn a year, that will cost you a lot more - probably in the region of a $5bn down payment.

Of course this view is ridiculous. It is like looking at one hand of black jack in a casino : "you mean you spent millions of dollars building a casino and you let that player win!" Sadly though we only get to see the non-portfolio view of VC firms performance, the case-by-case view, when really the success of the fund (and the casino) is about the distribution of performances. Having said that, my offer still stands. I will build any member of this community a firm with a globally recognized brand name, that loses $100mn a year for $5bn down now. I will even throw in some jail time for securities fraud too.

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

#265

Post by TomSwirly » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #30

pg_bot wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done my due diligence, there is no future in web3. I don't disparage early VCs who invested in blockchain startups because it is their job to put money into companies that could be revolutionary. However, the revolution has failed to materialize. While it may not be obvious to all it should become clearer in the coming months. When I say 'fraud' I don't mean juicing the numbers or asking forgiveness instead or p…

web3 is going to thrive whether you like it or not. Primarily because of three reasons: - Greed. Its absurdly easy to make a ton of money very fast in crypto. As long as that's possible, money will keep pouring into the system. - Gambling. The global gambling industry is half a trillion every year. Even if you think crypto has no fundamentals and is akin to gambling, it still represents a massive market. Opening a 50…

> Its absurdly easy to make a ton of money very fast in crypto.

Not at all. It's easy for one person to make a lot of money _at the expense of another_. It's a less than zero sum game, though, so each net transaction _cost_ people money todal.

> Self-sovreignity, privacy, ownership - these are ideas worth pursuing.

The ability to evade government regulations and scrutiny is crime.

The underlying idea is that you don't like the laws on financial disclosure, so you want to "get around" them.

As an honest citizen, I see the desire to evade the securities laws as literally criminal intent, which it legally is.

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

#266

Post by TomSwirly » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 4:12 PM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #255

cuteboy19 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Correction: for me to get 300k, many people had to aggregate 300k of losses across many different projects. You make it sound like the market is two participants - me and the guy I took 300k from. In reality, the market is broad as well as deep. You can lose $10 on one project, make $20 on another, and come out with $10 profit overall. Someone else can reverse that trade and come out with $10 profit as well.

Mathematician here - one who has been paid to write successful option models for Wall Street, for example.

Your argument is wildly wrong because you cannot add negative numbers and make a positive. You simply invent random transactions to come up with a desired outcome, and refuse to look at the big picture.

The whole cryptomarket is a negative sum game, because of the costs of electricity, bandwidth and personnel. For every dollar that goes into the whole cryptocurrency market to buy a coin, less than a dollar comes out, because some of that money is buying mining rigs and generator plants.

This is certain because there is a law of conservation of money in this case. Cryptocurrency neither creates nor destroys fiat currency, so the inputs and outputs have to net equal less than zero.

Why don't you try to come up with some sequence of actual transactions in a "toy" market with a small enough number of participants that you can work through it by hand, not forgetting to take out money from the pot for electricity, network, and personnel? You'll soon see that this network net destroys money - it doesn't create it.

If you don't believe it, I'll write you a math proof, but TBH if you don't understand the explanation above, you'll understand the math proof even less.

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

#267

Post by mcculley » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 4:21 PM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #198

mcculley wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The utility from which I buy electricity charges me per kWh consumed. They earn more revenue when I use more electricity. If they charged a flat $100 per month like my ISP, they would, like my ISP, cap my usage.

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

#268

Post by creeble » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

csdvrx wrote: post #21

beambot wrote: 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…

> The problem with Helium is that there's virtually no demand for LoRa protocol's super-low datarates yet. FTFY. Personally, I'd love to relay my home weather station readings over LoRa - then many other things too, if it's cheap enough! (say my TPMS - why not? Then I can retroactively track my car to cross correlate where I went shopping) Helium business model that's paying for the deployment of a worldwide network…

But I could put my weather station and TPMS readings on the internet, for free?

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

#269

Post by mcculley » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

bauruine wrote: post #151

mcculley wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 No it wouldn't. The actual usage has a negligible impact on the expenses for infrastructure. Most people barely use any bandwidth anyway. Even on 1 Gbit/s lines the average bandwidth used is in the single digit Mbit/s. And the usage basically doesn't differ if they have a 100Mbit/s or 10Gbit/s connection. Also those countries where data caps are still a thing are general…

The usage in Switzerland, South Korea, and other developed countries is very different. They use the bandwidth available.

Netflix and YouTube show us that many people want more bandwidth.

There would be no data caps if paying for bandwidth consumed.

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

#270

Post by eternityforest » Tue, Jul 26, 2022, 4:28 PM UTC

detaro wrote: post #154

eternityforest wrote: post #146

Helium would be so cool if it wasn't crypto-based and used BT instead of LoRa, and was more focused on being local-first. They're doing some pretty amazing stuff as is, but Sidewalk/Tile/AirTags/YoSmart are doing it without crypto, and with small enough bandwidth to work via mobile. I'd much rather have a centralized but selfhostable system, where you choose what network(s) to be a part of, and payments or lack there…

Helium without cryptocurrency stuff is The Things Network, basically.

Which is in fact, an awesome project, aside from being LoRaWan centric, and requiring registration of devices, as opposed to something like how AirTags work.