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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

#331

Post by nottorp »

mcculley wrote: post #284
nottorp wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That’s a chicken and egg situation. The costs are fixed because they have no incentive to build more infrastructure. 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.

The real fix is to take down some barriers to entry for new ISPs ;)

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

#332

Post by oblio »

smoldesu wrote: post #294
oblio wrote: 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…

My argument was an sarcastic "conversation" so I guess we agree.

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

#333

Post by cuteboy19 »

cjg wrote: post #326
cuteboy19 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is it zero sum though? Finance in general isn't - it allows people to invest and manage risk. If I bought a bitcoin at $100 and sold it at $1,000 - who lost money trading with me? The person I bought it from because they could have kept it and made the money I made? No - they were happy to realise their own returns. The person I sold it to? Assuming they still have it, they hold something valued substantially above $…

Cash flow analysis allows us to sidestep thinking about utility and price by drawing a circle around Bitcoin and calculating cash in minus cash out. The only cash in is new investors and the cash out is miners+old investors selling.

The only way the current crop of investors can make money is by getting even more newer investors (ie greater fools). Eventually such a scheme will fail because of the same reason that ponzi schemes fail.

Compare this to something like apple which has an additional cash in (ie the company's profits). So the apple investors can make money without needing more investors.

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

#334

Post by 1123581321 »

karamanolev wrote: post #325
1123581321 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t mind the bluntness but I think my analogy threw you off. When Helium says things like: “The Helium Hotspot is a small hardware device that creates a large wireless network for devices that use Helium's network. Think of it like a Wi-Fi router, but for devices sending small amounts of data over long ranges.” Is the $6k/month revenue from sending data through a “Helium Hotspot” or something else?

Yes, the $6K/month is for paying people for data transfer through their networks, so through a Helium Hotspot. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

No problem--thanks.

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

#335

Post by hansword »

landemva wrote: post #314
hansword wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wut? The prices have risen since? surprisepikachu.png

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

#336

Post by ChadNauseam »

smoldesu wrote: post #313
ChadNauseam wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

You're not wrong that what IPFS and BitTorrent have done is impressive. I'm not a zealot, and I'll be the first to admit that there are lots of things that don't need a blockchain, including things like a hypothetical decentralized Google Docs. But the difference is that those tasks can be solved using clever tricks that make it so you don't need to be too concerned with the order of events.

For example, when designing a google docs clone with collaboration, the naïve way to implement that would be to have all the users' computers be sending messages like "insert character 'a' at position 43", etc. The problem with this approach is that it makes the order of events very relevant - you'll get a different result depending on the order you process the messages. The trick is to give each character a unique ID, and then send a messages like "add a character `a` after the character with id 29239810", and then the order is irrelevant.

It happens that not every problem can be expressed in this order-independent way. In general, the ones that can are those that can be expressed in monotonic logic. For some problems, there's no way not to care about the order of events.

If you're unlucky enough to have one of those problems where you have to care about the order of events, you need some degree of coordination between all the nodes in your network to make sure they agree on the order of events. For a high-security project like uniswap, you also want the additional guarantee that the order of old events that the network agrees on is unlikely to change - it's bad if an event that happened yesterday gets reordered or dropped.

Additionally, we're talking about something decentralized here, so we don't want to assume that everyone on the network is honest. If there's a way that a dishonest person can easily stop the network, or cause honest nodes to get out of sync, or cause the order of old events to change, that's really bad.

It turns out that all the good ways to do that look a lot like a blockchain. I'd be eager for you to prove me wrong here.

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

#337

Post by tradertef »

KaiserPro wrote: post #38
tradertef wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. The amount of spectrum they use for their application is so small (15 MHz?) that there is really no good use-case that can not be addressed by cellular or Wi-Fi. Helium is just a toy project with good marketing. It is really a scam.

> no good use-case that can not be addressed by cellular or Wi-Fi. Cellular is power hungry, and Wi-fi is range limited. Long range low bandwidth, that is both cheap in power and money to use, is really useful. Cellular is a pain in the arse, expensive to miniaturise, difficult to power longterm.

You know WiFi can use the same spectrum and get better range? Check out Halow. For IOT applications, power during transmit is not a big deal. Battery life is limited by the leakage (sleep power). Also those "miners" use lots of power.

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

#338

Post by tradertef »

Canada wrote: post #19
dzhiurgis wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I'd love to move away from "you must have a cell number to do ANYTHING in life". It's super inconvenient if you move between countries. Example - local taxi app (Bolt) wouldn't even let me register. I'm guessing their SMS gateway doesn't support new number ranges I've got assigned. Engineers don't give a fuck to enable my mobility. I've spent weeks trying to get on.

I'm not saying that the Helium idea of having this network of access points is bad. That's actually great, I wish there were such a thing. What doesn't work is their token. Instead of having that they could have used a whitelist of acceptable payment... eg. ETH, USDT, USDC, DAI, WBTC, BTC... But no, they had to have their own shitcoin of course, because if they used a cryptocurrency with actual value they wouldn't be…

Agree 100%. Helium and similar project could very well work with other tokens or even with regular payments in dollars or whatever. But they choose to come up with their own shitcoin so that they could dump it to others with marketing.

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

#339

Post by davidguetta »

mikeyouse wrote: post #156
davidguetta wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is true for any currency

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.

So what about gold ? I'm waiting for your vlog where you go buy a starbuck with a pound of physical gold and they give you change.

The point is that when there's liquidity smoewhere (on an exchange), any security have "de facto" act as a "money", or at least a "saving account", because there's always at all an actual value defined by the market. whether it's stock, crypto etc... It doesn't have in practive to be tied to a central bank / governement. Even historically, currencies have existed well before someone tried to regulate them

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

#340

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

kevingadd wrote: post #113
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Tweet seems to claim that $6.5k is the total monthly revenue of the network. The explorer seems to claim $2M (under "DC spent").

Right, and the tweet thread explains that the 2m number is inflated by the hotspots that are being activated (activating hotspots is expensive, but the activation fees are one-time)

Thanks!
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