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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

#311

Post by hgsgm »

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

No post body was provided.

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

#312

Post by woodruffw »

josu wrote: post #307
woodruffw wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Right, so it's "independent" from ISPs and cable companies in the sense that it's a semiparasitical entity that resells your Internet subscription to strangers.

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

#313

Post by smoldesu »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #308
smoldesu wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It shouldn't be done, Uniswap solves a problem that cryptocurrency made for itself. Otherwise, Forex trading has been a thing for decades. Failing that, I might be pedantic enough to suggest that it is possible. "The Blockchain" is just a single permutation of many data structures that could handle such a workload. Hell, you could even use PGP signing to replace a Blockchain altogether, designing a peering system that works similar to proof-of-stake, but without the append-only database or mechanical transaction signing. There are hundreds of such theoretical systems that would have no problem handling this, and I think it's pretty silly to assume it "can't be done". Bittorrent navigated a similar problem space without using a Blockchain. IPFS tackled a bigger problem space than cryptocurrency, and implemented things better than a Blockchain would have. By rejecting a Blockchain, IPFS was able to add sophisticated features like versioning, pinning, high-performance DNS resolution and peering that actually scales.

I think you're overestimating how hard this is to fix, and the utility that the Blockchain is providing in something like Uniswap.

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

#314

Post by landemva »

hansword wrote: post #205
ricochet11 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By that timeline, you were in during 2009 - 2011. Bitcoin was developing. Bitcoin blockchain then was not privacy enhancing.

What were you involved in? And you missed a giant price run.

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

#315

Post by acdha »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #129
D13Fd wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If "web2" hadn't shut off its own users from any semblance of ownership in the platforms What are you talking about?

Do you have any say whatsoever how your data and content are used by, say, Facebook? Or what kind of content is allowed/disallowed?

That’s not web2.0 but rather a couple of companies. Nothing prevents anyone else from doing different things with their web applications, and more importantly there’s no indication that magical thinking about blockchains will somehow prevent that business model from continuing.

The blockchain design makes it even easier to mine peoples’ activity and prevents retroactive privacy improvements but, more importantly, the underlying problem is that people like not spending money. Various people have tried micropayments on the web but ads have less friction and don’t bother a sufficiently large group of people enough to pay more than advertisers, not to mention the precedent suggesting that sites will display ads to even paying customers.

Similarly, content hosting has the same failed promise. Blockchains are too inefficient to store the content, which is why all of the “web3” services are so commonly dependent on normal web companies. NFT pirates trying to steal artists’ work are routinely halted by takedown requests to Google, AWS, etc. There are services like IPFS which try to provide less centralized hosting but they’re expensive and have the same issues with most of the actual hosting being on ISPs who are legally required to honor things like DMCA or other illegal content requests.

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

#316

Post by z9znz »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #192
z9znz wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically the same equation if you replace "crypto" with "startup". The multiple investment rounds followed by eventual IPO is typically just a legal ponzi scheme.

If it is not a viable business (eg We work) the IPO will fail and the VCs would be left holding the bag. Businesses make money from customers. Ponzis shuffle around capital from late investors to early investors

Uber

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

#317

Post by acdha »

danso wrote: post #133
JonathanBeuys wrote: post #41

Google had no revenue for years. But turned out to be one of the best investments of all time. To figure out how they are doing, the first thing I would look at is a chart of Helium's usage growth.

"Years" is stretching it. Google was founded in 1998. In 1999, their revenues were $200,000 [0]. In 2000, it was $19M. And in 2001, it hit $86M in revenues and and profits of $7M [1]. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/08/what-a-1000-dollar-investmen... [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312505...

Also, they had huge adoption numbers in a field with obvious monetization paths: companies like Altavista and Yahoo were selling more revenue than their earliest figures and there was no reason to think Google wasn’t going to capture that along with the users.

The contrast with Helium is glaring: statistically nobody uses it and if it shutdown overnight nobody outside of cryptocurrency speculators would notice.

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

#318

Post by bikingbismuth »

aaaaaaaaata wrote: post #254
snarf21 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GameStop is a meme. It isn't the whole market.

All of their hires by the guy that founded Chewy is a meme? You're misinformed. Which is honestly fair, lots of disinfo on both sides of this fence.

Didn’t they just layoff a bunch of people and let go of their CFO?

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

#319

Post by csdvrx »

creeble wrote: post #268
csdvrx wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

If your car never leaves your driveway, or the reach of your home wifi, sure! That's not the case for most people though.

Also, you can't do that if people don't cooperate, while it may be in your interest (ex: to track customers across the city)

As for the weather station, it involves you having a home internet - many people just have cellphones. A device that would ask for wifi passwords etc or require bluetooth pairing or worse would be complicated. Something that works worldwide with no setup would be a hit!

It's very easy to not perceive an opportunity which doesn't apply to you - in this case if you have say LTE in your car + on every device + at home.

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

#320

Post by joewadcan »

ddrdrck_ wrote: post #22

This thread lacks factual information : no source for the $6.5k/month revenue, and no source for the LoRaWAN market analysis supposedly demonstrating it is a "fake, overblown use case" Actually I would be interested in understanding better the choice made by Helium and the current and future use of LoRaWAN. When I first heard about Helium some years ago I wondered why they focused on this protocol compared to WiFi or…

Exactly the reverse. Most IOT sensors suffer because of cost, battery, and engineering complexity for a cell based connection. Helium solves all three - even more important now that 3G is being phased out making thousands of IOT sensors obsolete
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