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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

#301
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is a reasonable amount of time for an emerging technology like this to develop? 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 You are 100% correct. It is time to End The Fed.

You left out the beginning of the quote, “solving nothing”. If you want to use my own comment as rebuttal, I ask you argue in good faith.

Even if as a thought exercise we equate the two, responding to criticism with “but other systems also have problems” doesn’t absolve you:

— Chief, we caught the murderer!

— What about the thief that escaped last month?

— You’re right chief, I’ll let the murderer go.

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

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This again ? Did you miss the last 47 threads where people discussed the real world goods and services they purchase with cryptocurrency?

"Entirely" is the keyword.. there are certainly a lot of things you can buy with crypto, but at some point you need to convert it to a 'real' currency to pay for food or gas or server costs or whatever. And if you find a service that lets you buy food with crypto, eventually they will need to pay their suppliers with 'real' money. Everyone needs to keep track of the btc/USD (or whatever coin) exchange rate to ensure…

> but at some point you need to convert it to a 'real' currency to pay for food or gas or server costs or whatever.

No you don't.

> And if you find a service that lets you buy food with crypto, eventually they will need to pay their suppliers with 'real' money.

No they don't.

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

#303
There is the basic use case of getting something like weather sensors broadcasting conditions over time. That could be useful. The way I think this will be used if it ever got market traction is to spy on you.

Today if I don't put my tv or my fridge on my home wifi, they can't call home unless they had a phone modem - I hope that doesn't make financial sense (I just realized I was hoping they only spy on you with wifi). I can put my own streaming device on the tv with a defined privacy policy. I don't want my tv showing me ads, and it doesn't, and that's one reason I'm using a 3rd party streaming device. Because I'm paying them there's a much higher chance it will only do what they say. If this ever got popular, your tv would have a direct connection to broadcast outside of your control what you are watching. I don't want devices doing more corporate surveillance things not in my control.

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

#304

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.

You should advertise on youtube then ;-) Lately it seems every youtube video I watch has endless steams of scammy "How do I invest to get good returns". "You should invest with fred johnson crypto, I made 100k off a 10k investment in 1 week".

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

#305
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

All the naive investors who keep making investments in crypto will lose their money, like they have on current round of failing crypto 'banks'. It's both the fact that existing finance is hard to access for poor people, and it's got a lot of regulation that can protect them, and it can cost more, and there are still terrible legal investments (payday loans). But it provides way more protection than defi, which provides none.

With all the large firms (crashing daily) that provided impossible ~19% returns still trying to attract new investors, there's just no defense of the 'industry'.

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

#306
post #303

There is the basic use case of getting something like weather sensors broadcasting conditions over time. That could be useful. The way I think this will be used if it ever got market traction is to spy on you. Today if I don't put my tv or my fridge on my home wifi, they can't call home unless they had a phone modem - I hope that doesn't make financial sense (I just realized I was hoping they only spy on you with wif…

To be fair to these industries there can be more to it as well: construction operations may require inventory management for a fleet of power tools. Some IoT devices can potentially provide useful services via regular software upgrade, etc. But yes: it's mostly going to be spying and feature upsells.

The problem now is that network access is becoming a bottleneck. Many devices have the hardware they need to connect to networks, but don't provide the UI to enable Wi-Fi or Bluetooth pairing, nor do they provide any compelling incentive for users to connect to their own devices.

Networks like Amazon Sidewalk and maybe Helium are one answer to this problem. The manufacturers can make very inexpensive deals with the network operator, reflecting the fact that their devices don't actually need very much bandwidth. My personal theory is that networks like Apple's FindMy (AirTags) will also compete in this arena.

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

#307

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 cry…

>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.

Yes, that's how it currently works.

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

#308
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think you've basically defeated your own arguement. These Web3 principles of decentralization are not new, and fully possible to implement with Web2. Bittorrent, DNS, Napster, PeerTube, Matrix, Mastodon... all of them are Web2 software that use the smart principles of Web3 without adopting asinine smart contracts or self-sabotaging governance concepts. The Blockchain does have problems it can solve, they just got s…

Try creating a fully decentralized version of Uniswap that’s resistant to attacks and isn’t based on a blockchain. it can’t be done.

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

#309
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I guess the difference is the size of entity you are breaking the terms and conditions with and the impact that breaking such terms and conditions will have on their business model.

R.I.P Aaron Swartz

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

#310
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By timing the market on a coin hype cycle?

Pretty much - no “long term” passive investment in crypto. Its a casino, but one with extremely good odds for players if you time it right.

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