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 “normal” volume will crash 90%. And when you think it has stabilized, it will crash 90% more.
The number of investors who bought the top is hilarious. But then, this is also a field where risk management is treated like a sin.
Crypto projects are tough to value. Their sheer global scale means that they can ramp up revenue and even profits extremely fast. StepN, a move-to-earn app reportedly made $120M in profit in its first year of operation. That might not be sustainable, but what business wouldn't give an arm and a leg to make $120M profits in just one year of operation?
Imo, crypto projects should be valued on 2-3x multiples at max.
Agreed, web3 was a joke... but the same thing can be said about most of disruptive tech like ride-sharing or food delivery, and even FAANGS are experiencing immense markdowns after the immense amount of liquidity poured into the stock market these 2 years.
Being critical of the nature of this system also requires self-awareness; otherwise it's just projecting.
How would you build a decentralized, cross-chain asset exchange without a blockchain?
I agree there are far too many superfluous tokens. But there are plenty of real projects that are based on blockchain.
Sure, and all web2.0 tech can be built without AWS or docker. But in many cases, they give you a powerful advantage.
Same with blockchain. What now is happening in web3.0 is not that different from the dot com bubble. But it busted, and then a ton of new profitable companies appeared.
Blockchain tech will for sure have many legit use cases, same with tokens and tokenomics.
Will most of the current crypto companies go bust? Probably.
Does this mean that blockchain and tokens are crap? No.
That’s optimistic. Best case is orderly resolution and/or fire sales to Wall Street. Worst case: retail investors lose money while executives and senior employees see prosecution.
Maybe everyone just doesn't know where the volume is?
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 problem is that you need the entire network in place before people can build on it. So they have been subsidizing the miners. And it's a race of how much money can you raise and payout vs how much is a network like that is worth.
And right now everybody has cellular and cable and fiber and no one really needs another system. Most of the use cases (LOTS of sensor data) aren't really worth that much money.
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.
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 cryptocurrencies are typical for crypto companies.
> 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.
The government would probably get much more bang for its buck by funding something like NYC Mesh[1]. They also have an actual peering agreement.
Yes, that's how it currently works.
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 it is really hard to get universal coverage.
Don't the people buying the LoRa gateways just connect them their router, which is being provided bandwidth by phone and cable companies? Or alternately LTE, which is also being run by phone companies?
If the miner could pay each household for that coverage, it's a splendid idea - being able to grab information wirelessly.
It essentially opens up digital eyes into the real world.
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 envision: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
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.
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.
If you’re not familiar with it, what a Helium hotspot does is allow compatible IOT devices to share your Internet connection.
I suspect that allowing random third parties to use your Internet connection it’s explicitly forbidden by the terms of service of most ISPs, especially when you are being monetarily compensated/rewarded for such sharing.
Excerpt from ToS: “Customers may not retransmit the Service or make the Service available to anyone outside the premises (i.e. Wi-Fi or other methods of networking).”
I suspect that most people don't read the terms of service.
Except that an ISP will just suspend your account, and if you object they'll be the ones that go "OK, sue me".
I think these terms are pretty hard to enforce and not sure how your ISP would differentiate traffic.
1. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/217115/20110719-schwa...
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 cellular network technology. Which kind of devices are supposed to connect to Helium ? I suppose it is IoT devices, but most of them actually work perfectly fine with good old cellular networks
> However, this is only part of the picture. Data Credits are used when onboarding a hotspot, asserting a location, and processing a payment. Onboarding hotspots, in particular, is intensive from a Data Credit perspective. Since Helium is onboarding so many new hotspots, this skews results, suggesting greater customer activity than is actually present. Data from The Decentralized Wireless Alliance removes these three uses, demonstrating the size of the Helium economy’s customer demand. By this measure, DC usage was just $6,561 in June.
> Nova Labs’ Internet of Things network is one of crypto’s greatest achievements.
On the other hand, since neither Helium not The Things Industries owns their gateways (run by the community) and operates in an unlicensed spectrum (much less likely to discover and fine those who disrupt communications due to negligence or even on purpose), one might opt to simply use TTN (even less promises on network quality than TheThingsIndustries) or NB-IoT.
There are great use-cases for LoRaWAN, though Helium comes with more drawbacks than advantages for most.
It's in a photo attached to the first tweet: https://readthegeneralist.com/briefing/helium
> Data Credits are used when onboarding a hotspot, asserting a location, and processing a payment. Onboarding hotspots, in particular, is intensive from a Data Credit perspective. Since Helium is onboarding so many new hotspots, this skews results, suggesting greater customer activity than is actually present. Data from The Decentralized Wireless Alliance removes these three uses, demonstrating the size of the Helium economy’s customer demand. By this measure, DC usage was just $6,561 in June.
The problem I see with helium is much more of a commercial one; the big customers will need much better established network operators who can commit to operating such systems for decades.
The money is there, but equally for customers investing in the wrong platform is risky too- eg this happened with the UK’s first generation smart meters, where many became ‘dumb’ again due to lack of interoperability between operators. It’s still being having at a cost of several tens of million of pounds. The solution which is also relevant to Helium by way of contrast was to set up a ‘Smart Data Communications Company’ as a regulated utility, and have that operate and develop the relevant networks. It generated around £430M in 2021 revenue as a non-profit.
I can only guess Helium’s strategy is to subsidise it’s infrastructure until someone (really multiple someone’s) like ConEd can be convinced to use it but there are an awful lot of steps along the way I don’t understand their plan for.
You're right that there are some IoT applications where a cellular connection makes sense. If you need to know when a vending machine needs restocking, spending $5/month on a SIM card is good business.
But some things have more marginal benefits. A city might like to know which streetlights are working and which aren't. If they can get that functionality for $5 per light with no ongoing costs, that's worth it. But if it's an ongoing $5/light/month? It's probably not worth that much - after all, they get fault reports from citizens for free.
Whether Helium can support the latter use case usefully I have no idea. And it's not clear to me why they need a blockchain, or whether it's good business sense to target people too miserly to use a cellular connection. But there's certainly use cases out there for connections that are cheaper than cellular connections.
I wouldn't touch the stuff now.
The ability for regular people to invest in crypto back then made the ponzi-like architecture of it worth the risk.
Now the VCs are trying to push their agendas, and it's blatantly obvious it's vapor.
You’re complaining about VCs pushing vapor while simultaneously admitting you participated in pumping “ponzi-like” schemes on regular people?
You do realize those 7 figure returns you made were a direct wealth transfer from later-stage victims of the ponzi to you?
I’m astonished you’re claiming moral superiority over VCs while sitting on wealth you took from thousands of poor people in places like Vietnam, India, Brazil, Nigeria, etc. (whom were all later stage investors in these crypto schemes).
A lot of people think crypto are plain useless but that is just wrong in practice. They are de facto actual "currency", which is already a lot especially for people in third world countries whose national currencies have gone down relatively to the dollar (venezuela, lebanon, turkey). Any of these people have been better off investing in crypto than in their local banks. It's diversification.
VCs are in there for entirely different reasons, and 'later stage investors' are always at risk of having their hair cut if what they invest in isn't worth what they paid for it, after all, they too were trying to take money from later day suckers.
I never paid a cent for any bitcoin, but I did pay about $100 to my electricity company to mine some just for the heck of it (and ended up giving it all away).
That would be true if there is no value in what was sold but taking ETH that he bought for $7, in 2019 when he sold it was about $250 and is now about $1500 so people buying ETH then would have done just fine. Ponzi schemes are cons that collapse, not open source assets that go up for years and years.
BUT... that does not mean that the technology is fundamentally BS. It just means that it happens to be extraordinarily susceptible to the kinds of abuses we are seeing.
This year, Ethereum will become Proof-of-Stake based, and "Layer 2" solutions will be emerging which greatly reduce transactions costs, and sharding will be emerging that will GREATLY reduce transaction costs. It's a real technology with a real future. And to transact with Eth you'll need to own Eth, providing non-ponzi motivation to buy, and it will be a deflationary currency (i.e. there will be less of it over time rather than more). IFF the tech is successful, its price may still go up by a LOT. I don't know that it will be successful, but I've been following its development closely and I think this is a very competent team making good decisions.
I'm bullish on Ethereum long-term. Once it's converted to PoS, it will have by far the largest market cap of any PoS chain, and the security of a PoS chain is ultimately based on its market cap (and how decentralized it is, something the Ethereum world is very aware of). So, it should be the most secure PoS chain, as well as having at least as much high-quality technical development going on as any other when you include the Layer 2 teams.
But it will take a few years for many of the practical potentialities to start to be manifested in the real world. It needs Layer 2 and sharding before it will happen. In between now and then, the price of Eth is anyone's guess. I don't think anything, in particular, should be read into any short-term price trends. Instead, the question should be whether the fundamental technology is moving forward toward its goals, and whether another technology emerges in the meantime that has the same potential benefits but somehow does them better.
I can dump sensors anywhere in the city and they should just work.
But
When I last looked, it was really convoluted to buy data, you had to either buy them off a miner, which sounded dodgy, or mine the tokens yourself. I just wanted to buy $25 worth of data transfer and have done with it, but I couldn't figure out a way to do it at the time
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 on a free-to-use band is brilliant: it will replicate Wifi except with a worldwide coverage + full control of the network.
Wifi may at first have seemed equally useless, but the network effects from the ubiquity of it's presence and the unification of standards have replaced so many things I've only heard of in tech history books like DECT
Why would that make any sense?
Marketing plays a big part in how much revenue comes in to a startup. The product also plays a big part, but if the product does what people need it to do, it becomes a marketing task to accelerate growth to justify the investments.
Startups are a balancing act, especially when there are multiple stakeholders involved. I'm not sure these crypto offerings offer anything "product wise" that is useful to getting things done, other than making more money.
Slight of hand models are tricky to evaluate.
With Helium, they need people providing Internet to other people. Helium's "offering" drops to being an exchange from the marketplace (which must be grown) to the user base (which must also be grown). This "burning the candle at both ends" approach requires many multiples of capital influx to achieve, and even then if the business model is not sound (we all already have Internet) it will fail.
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?
Relevant Silicon Valley clip.
I’ve really enjoyed watching the market reprice a lot of the names he drops as goals in that clip.
And an important follow up question: do they have enough dry powder to keep sustaining these things?
But a16z has such a strong brand in general tech and is so great at PR, I don't see them slowing down anytime soon. They're making way too much money.
So now with 900k hotspots installed Helium is pushing aside the lorawan network with less mining payouts in hopes/dreams people will flock to buying 5G cbrs implementations costing over $3k per site. Not sure what customers or applications will use this network, something helium still has to signup customers to create value. The network like 5G has range limitations, so you'll have to spend more to go further. If I recall amazon has a competitive cbrs product also. All I know is it's no simple plug/play.
Early adopters really made a lot of $$ with Helium but it's been decline since late last year. It's truly one of the simplest miners to deploy in 5 minutes, but to get value you need a good antenna setup. I'm sure the Helium creators have a huge stash of HNT coins and not really worried.
To the extent anyone engaged with this project and walked away with real live American dollars they came from either VC investors, or greater fool token investors.
That's the whole point of the article. Ostensibly the project exists to provide a valuable service, that's what is supposed to create the rewards. But that ain't real.
Zoom in, click a cell, click a node, click "30D" and you'll see the amount of HNT and how much that is worth at the current market rate. I didn't see any $6,500 nodes.
I've been thinking about building an IoT device for my mailbox, so I can get a notification when we get a letter. It could be fun to build something that uses the Helium network. Maybe solar powered, and using a weight sensor or something. (I probably don't need Helium for this but it would be fun to try it out.)
The people purchasing these hot spots, who find their bankruptcy claims against Helium being inhibited by intentional breach of contract.
> not like a packet that's a result of sharing/reselling suddenly "weighs" more
It does due to peering arrangements. Data transfer having value is also Helium’s claimed value added. It’s awkward to claim it costs nothing to implement but has value that can be sustainably charged.
Private funds can do whatever they want I suppose, but I wonder if there's a term for VCs that spend government-scale funds on things that look like long-term losers. Crypto and 'web3' are just the latest examples of this, and they're coming after a decade of equally uninspiring ideas like social networks, food delivery, Uber, Airbnb and WeWork.
And defense spending is less than 10% of overall government spending in the US when you include state and local spending.
I'm speaking in terms of things like government equity stakes in a fledgling, or failing industry, the same kind of direct invrstment a VC would take on. The numbers are much smaller at that level because it's politically risky.
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.
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.
I realize that's an unfair comparison but I think there are many many people who want to throw shade at crypto because a majority of it is rotten and has weighed down on the positive attributes.
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/22/1113115868/little-house-on-th...
A house that mines crypto ... or the reality, a house with a tiny crypto miner in a corner of the house.
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 thereof is up to them. They'd have a real chance of building a very large network if they had hardware partners.
Ideally, this stuff should be "too cheap to meter" anyway, and could even be ad supported, at least for very low bandwidth best effort stuff.
There is so much talk and focus on miners, but they need more cheap, easy to use, and functional sensors.
Where the y-axis = Utility To User, the Traditional Network Effect can track all the way to the upper end of the scale, and tracks perfectly with the Overall Utility, as an ideal outcome of course.
But with the Token Network Effect, no matter how much of a boost there can be at the beginning, the ultimate Overall Utility is about halfway as high by comparison.
By design you're building for mediocrity.
One of the "secrets" when I was implementing exponential growth strategies was to "prosper better overall, by persuasively giving the customers more of their money's worth".
Interesting how that tradition compares to "persuasively give the customers more of our money than it's worth, since our current product isn't really worth money to begin with".
Its negligent for an analysis to not mention that
Third pivot's a charm.
To figure out how they are doing, the first thing I would look at is a chart of Helium's usage growth.
And Yahoo and SGI were both behemoths, and look at them now. If you had stake in these companies and cashed out in time, you'd consider it also a great investment.
> To figure out how they are doing, the first thing I would look at is a chart of Helium's usage growth.
No one cares about Helium, and even fewer people cares about LoRa. I'd guess a good chunk of the nodes are run by people trying to make money out of it (I know personally people that invested in this), not by people interested in maintaining a network or that actually have any clue about LoRa. Me, as a hobby electronics tinkerer, I do care about LoRa (so, I'm one of those fewer people), but I don't care about Helium, because it adds nothing of relevancy to it. Yes, increasing coverage is good, but not only the LoRa market is quite narrow, any other provider can do the same without too much hassle. And there is no actual real money in it(beyond the hobby space) and never will be. No company is going to build products on a super-duper-easy-to-disrupt public network, when alternatives are available.
Google was founded in August 1998 and they they hired their first sales guy in May 1999. AdWords launched in October 2000 but before that time they had revenue from backend search deals where they powered other sites search engines for a fee, like Netscape which launched in June 1999.
So it's not really the case that Google had no revenue for years. They were able to generate revenue very fast by selling their tech to other companies.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/08/what-a-1000-dollar-investmen...
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312505...
The contrast with Helium is glaring: statistically nobody uses it and if it shutdown overnight nobody outside of cryptocurrency speculators would notice.
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.
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.
https://docs.helium.com/blockchain/proof-of-coverage/
It has nowhere close to the density for this to work, and there's nothing to stop the Beaconer and Witness from being the same person.
If the goal is to enable renting out of WiFi, then the sensible thing is to make a system that automates payment in ETH/USDT/USDC/DAI/BTC/etc... Or to put it another way, use the money cryptocurrency that exists and works already. But no, that was never the point of this. The point of Helium is to mint and dump the shitcoin.
I find the concept of tokenization as a better way to redistribute equity.
I think about the tokens as money with superpowers which can act like equity , API keys and loyalty card too.
Think of tokens as a 100x version of managing equity table in a company.
Crypto is at a low point right now. If you time it right, it's like reporting that investing in the stock market is bad after the '08 recession.
It relies entirely on someone else coming along later and paying more. It’s not a productive asset in any meaningful way.
Yes, just like any part of the economy. Scarcity and/or productivity is why someone pays: either something, or more for it.
If it's BTC, the theory is it will be scarce, like gold.
If it is one of the other crypto coins, it has to be productive like e.g. this app enabling sharing internet with others.
But assessing the success of a web3 product by the ability of selling a specific product is akin to assessing the success of a country by its ability to sell passports.
The cost to offset the operations should come from the activity in the economy it encompasses -- these should not be assessed as traditional companies.
