Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z
281–290 of 344 posts
Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah. With ‘real’ currencies, goods and services are available in that currency. I can happily go about my business and transaction entirely in euros if I’m in the EU.
This again ? Did you miss the last 47 threads where people discussed the real world goods and services they purchase with cryptocurrency?
Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z
#283Helium 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…
And while morally, we can perhaps say that we've progressed as a species to a point that nobody should go hungry, any attempts to do so are necessarily going to rely on that food market to create food, with publicly funded purchases. In general, markets can be really good at solving certain problems.
Now, my comment is not a defense of trying to creating scarcity or monopolies where they don't exist - eg NFTs, Nestle buying up aquifers, copyright, etc. Nor is it a defense of creating "market efficiency" out of things that would be personal capital goods, where market inefficiency allowed for wealth to remain distributed (eg Uber, AirBNB).
Personally, I would say that wireless Internet access is (regrettably) a scarce good and thus attempts to make the market more democratized and efficient are a good thing. This is not the all-too-common converse of someone trying to take something that is already democratized and trying to make a market out of it.
Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
However, most of the cost is producing those kWh and it's linear with kWh produced, while an ISP's costs are about fixed per household...
If you live in a place with only one or two ISPs and they only charge a flat rate per month for capped usage, you never get more bandwidth. The system is working as designed.
Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crypto is the payment method for this service. It's not an essential element, and there is much more to it. I'm not exactly sure where your definition of 'web3' and crypto overlap, but there are many future public use cases for crypto. Banking the unbanked, protection against hyperinflation, etc. Maybe 10+ years away, but it will happen.
> Banking the unbanked I first heard this line eight years ago and so far this hasn't happened. If you are unbanked, it's because you have little money, and you want to put it into something stable and something where you are protected - in other words, the exact opposite of cryptocurrencies. > protection against hyperinflation, In 2022, cryptocurrencies have experienced over 100% inflation. Your one bitcoin today wi…
I’m generally pretty bearish on crypto and the current state of web3, so I’m not here to evangelize for it.
But comparing crypto to a smartphone is arbitrary, and the nature of one does not help us understand the acceptable timeframe for development of the other.
When I see the “it’s existed for X time and isn’t popular yet so it must not be viable”, a follow up question immediately comes to mind.
What is a reasonable amount of time for an emerging technology like this to develop? The modern web took decades to evolve into what it is today (for better or worse).
Depending on who you talk to, web3’s goals are just as lofty, and a similar time horizon doesn’t seem unreasonable.
With that said, the space still struggles to articulate the real problems it will solve, and time and time again it’s just a solution to those problems, and not necessarily the best one.
All of this to say - I’m a web3 skeptic, but we need a better measure of health than the passage of time, or we need a better definition of what an acceptable amount of time actually looks like.
Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Banking the unbanked I first heard this line eight years ago and so far this hasn't happened. If you are unbanked, it's because you have little money, and you want to put it into something stable and something where you are protected - in other words, the exact opposite of cryptocurrencies. > protection against hyperinflation, In 2022, cryptocurrencies have experienced over 100% inflation. Your one bitcoin today wi…
> Cryptocurrencies are almost as old as the smartphone. You can't keep promising something useful and never delivering, forever. I’m generally pretty bearish on crypto and the current state of web3, so I’m not here to evangelize for it. But comparing crypto to a smartphone is arbitrary, and the nature of one does not help us understand the acceptable timeframe for development of the other. When I see the “it’s existe…
Suggestion: it depends on the harm it causes in the meantime.
If an emerging technology isn’t living up to its promise and the downside is the creators wasting their time, let it go on indefinitely. Maybe they’re having fun. As long as no one is getting hurt, it’s a hobby.
If the emerging technology is solving nothing and actively creating new problems, allowing bad actors to consistently hurt others with little to no consequences, and accelerating our demise so a handful of egoistic maniacs can see a number go up in their bank accounts, perhaps it’s time to stop. Put an end to it even sooner if the biggest proponents repeatedly lie and make promises which fail to materialise year after year.
Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z
#287I could not, reading this stuff, figure out what any of it was, or was for, or for who, or why I should care about anybody's revenue.
It’s hard to create a two-sided marketplace when both sides have to buy hardware.
Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z
#288Earlier 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…
It's been 13 years and 0 use cases better solved by crypto than any classical system.
But by all means, I'm sure OP will deliver - let's just wait.
Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
Both don't require a lot of bandwidth and you have caches for their content.
You can buy additional data if you've used your included data. That's basically the same.
Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z
#290Helium 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…
The community-run-hotspot model is 100% wrong for this because IoT nodes for sensing things like earthquakes and climate are more widely spread out than people who want to run hotspots. The #1 model to make it work is ride on top of the cellular network which already offers wide (but not that wide) coverage. The #2 model is to have a plan and do the engineering to figure out where you need to put up towers. Even then…