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The problem was always going to be coverage that made sense and an inability to be competitive. 'Decentralizing' just meant there were zero guarantees that the

The problem was always going to be coverage that made sense and an inability to be competitive. 'Decentralizing' just meant there were zero guarantees that there would ever be service in any given area, no guarantees on how long it would take to solve outages - and completely variable pricing that fluctuated based on hype, not demand. You know, the things that businesses care about. They wanted it to cover random far-out forests but there's no backhaul out there. If this model made sense, like any decentralized model, it would have been cheaper, faster and more reliable for a traditional ISP to just come in and offer the service - they were the backhaul anyways. Individuals had to pay their ISP margins to sublet the pipes when the ISPs themselves obviously had no such constraint - so the floor price was always higher than what an ISP could offer it at. This meant that no matter what an ISP could undercut this network on price with a better, faster, and more reliable service that actually had SLAs. It was just another crypto scheme, like all the others. It was never about the business. It was always about VCs being able to flip tokens for liquidity on day 1 instead of waiting for year 10 and at some point 'talking your book' and 'delusion' blend together.

llamataboot 4y ago
I hear you and don't exactly disagree, but I don't always agree that a P2P decentralized model is inevitably better served by centralized people making the hard decisions that make good business sense. There are different incentives in play, and some of them push towards centralization with a profit motive, some of them push towards decentralization with a profit motive and some of them push towards pure decentralization without a profit motive. Where the crypto space remains a cesspool of failed projects and snake oil it's usually because someone sold one as the other and no one understood (or cared as long as they were in the right part of the pyramid) about it. I'm not 100% sure that Helium didn't have an actual use case that could have made sense for some applications far better than say Verizon doing the same thing. Whether that was ultimately the intention of the people involved at the core or whether it could have happened in the token/crypto/ponzi/flipper domain, I don't know. I have seen a lot of decentralized models that may have made sense in a certain domain get crushed under the pressure of some people getting rich quick or using a business model for taken speculation.
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llamataboot 4y ago

I hear you and don't exactly disagree, but I don't always agree that a P2P decentralized model is inevitably better served by centralized people making the hard decisions that make good business sense. There are different incentives in play, and some of them push towards centralization with a profit motive, some of them push towards decentralization with a profit motive and some of them push towards pure decentralization without a profit motive. Where the crypto space remains a cesspool of failed projects and snake oil it's usually because someone sold one as the other and no one understood (or cared as long as they were in the right part of the pyramid) about it. I'm not 100% sure that Helium didn't have an actual use case that could have made sense for some applications far better than say Verizon doing the same thing. Whether that was ultimately the intention of the people involved at the core or whether it could have happened in the token/crypto/ponzi/flipper domain, I don't know. I have seen a lot of decentralized models that may have made sense in a certain domain get crushed under the pressure of some people getting rich quick or using a business model for taken speculation.

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