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Helium isn't your typical crypto company. Their vision is actually very lofty - build a distributed low data wireless network completely independent of phone p

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 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.

olsonjeffery 4y ago
>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 envision: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
- knowaveragejoe 4y ago
  Web3 folks spend a lot of time and effort on public goods, it's one of Vitalik's core visions for the direction of crypto as a whole.
- swamp40 4y ago
  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.
  - TomSwirly 4y ago
    > 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 will buy less than half the goods and services it would have half a year ago. Cryptocurrencies are almost as old as the smartphone. You can't keep promising something useful and never delivering, forever.
    - swamp40 4y ago
      >100% inflation Volatility is not great but it is not hyperinflation, where your money never comes back. >promising something useful and never delivering, forever. Forever is a long time. Still lots of progress to be made. Cardano and Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin are my top picks right now.
      - snicky 4y ago
        It seems that the Lightning Network requires some degree of centralization which defies the main premise of Bitcoin, no?
    - haswell 4y ago
      > 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 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.
- mindslight 4y ago
  When it comes to buying food, "everything is privatized, everything is monetized". And yet with robust competition, the market for food essentially works. It's worst problem seems to be price discrimination "sales", but those are around a factor of two, which may seem high but is actually pretty reasonable compared to non-competative markets. 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.
AlexandrB 4y ago
> build a distributed low data wireless network completely independent of phone providers and cable companies. 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?
- myrion 4y ago
  Indeed.
- swamp40 4y ago
  Yes, for now the internet is necessary to bridge all the gaps. But you can cover a 300 meter radius on each internet connection. 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.
PaulHoule 4y ago
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 it is really hard to get universal coverage.
- cyanydeez 4y ago
  I'm willing to bet the final solution will be between LEO satellites and wifi meshes, something like: https://www.inceptivemind.com/solar-powered-zephyr-stratospheric-aircraft-set-ultra-endurance-record/25564 https://www.inceptivemind.com/solar-powered-zephyr-stratosph...
liveoneggs 4y ago
isn't this roughly the business model of "Pied Piper" from Silicon Valley the tv show?
bksenior 4y ago
test
tibbetts 4y ago
There are already a handful of Lorawan companies that have built out networks or partnered with telcos. They have raised money from places like Comcast. They will probably exit back to places like Comcast. Governments are often their customers. And they are way too boring for a16z.
woodruffw 4y ago
> 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 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. [1]: https://www.nycmesh.net/ https://www.nycmesh.net/
- stephenhuey 4y ago
  I know a guy who worked on the NYC Mesh! Pretty amazing how much ground (or air?) they could cover with a few tens of thousands of dollars.
- josu 4y ago
  >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.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    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.

olsonjeffery 4y ago

>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 envision: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...

knowaveragejoe 4y ago
Web3 folks spend a lot of time and effort on public goods, it's one of Vitalik's core visions for the direction of crypto as a whole.
swamp40 4y ago
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.
- TomSwirly 4y ago
  > 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 will buy less than half the goods and services it would have half a year ago. Cryptocurrencies are almost as old as the smartphone. You can't keep promising something useful and never delivering, forever.
  - swamp40 4y ago
    >100% inflation Volatility is not great but it is not hyperinflation, where your money never comes back. >promising something useful and never delivering, forever. Forever is a long time. Still lots of progress to be made. Cardano and Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin are my top picks right now.
    - snicky 4y ago
      It seems that the Lightning Network requires some degree of centralization which defies the main premise of Bitcoin, no?
  - haswell 4y ago
    > 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 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.
mindslight 4y ago
When it comes to buying food, "everything is privatized, everything is monetized". And yet with robust competition, the market for food essentially works. It's worst problem seems to be price discrimination "sales", but those are around a factor of two, which may seem high but is actually pretty reasonable compared to non-competative markets. 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.

AlexandrB 4y ago

> build a distributed low data wireless network completely independent of phone providers and cable companies. 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?

myrion 4y ago
Indeed.
swamp40 4y ago
Yes, for now the internet is necessary to bridge all the gaps. But you can cover a 300 meter radius on each internet connection. 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.

PaulHoule 4y ago

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 it is really hard to get universal coverage.

cyanydeez 4y ago
I'm willing to bet the final solution will be between LEO satellites and wifi meshes, something like: https://www.inceptivemind.com/solar-powered-zephyr-stratospheric-aircraft-set-ultra-endurance-record/25564 https://www.inceptivemind.com/solar-powered-zephyr-stratosph...

liveoneggs 4y ago

isn't this roughly the business model of "Pied Piper" from Silicon Valley the tv show?

bksenior 4y ago

test

tibbetts 4y ago

There are already a handful of Lorawan companies that have built out networks or partnered with telcos. They have raised money from places like Comcast. They will probably exit back to places like Comcast. Governments are often their customers. And they are way too boring for a16z.

woodruffw 4y ago

> 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 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. [1]: https://www.nycmesh.net/ https://www.nycmesh.net/

stephenhuey 4y ago
I know a guy who worked on the NYC Mesh! Pretty amazing how much ground (or air?) they could cover with a few tens of thousands of dollars.
josu 4y ago
>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.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  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.