Helium, Pump and Dump | Hacker News Reader

Helium, Pump and Dump

jeffreycarter.substack.com

80 pointsrmason27 comments

"What’s not part of it is insiders selling at the expense of investors."

I was surprised to read that quote. If you ask me, that's the defining characteristic of crypto...

I never understood why people were comfortable connecting these Chinese-made and backed black boxes into their Internet and also having them broadcast on wireless networks. Now it appears they want to mimic telecom networks as well. I am fine with this, but you need regulatory agencies actually hiring people checking the process and they should be able to be made out or standardized parts

so far as distribution, 25% to early investors and founding employees seems pretty close to market. a "pump and dump" would insinuate that founders/other management sold significant holdings during the run-up and made fraudulent claims about the business (they might have! but you arent providing evidence of that).

as for early investors, there is absolutely nothing wrong with those folks selling any amount of their stake as it becomes liquid. i generally agree it is scammy to give early investors short lockups on these token launches.... but the reality is that many of these projects do have short lockups and that should be part of your DD as an individual investor if you're investing in crypto.

Having recently been investigating Internet connectivity options for our product, I don't see what the value proposition of Helium (for enterprise) is compared to M2M/IoT 4G mobile plans, which are surprisingly cheap.

I think from the beginning Helium targeted people who just didn't know anything about wireless. The economics have never made any sense, and I'm fairly sure reselling your ISP's Internet is a violation of their ToS. So the second this saw any actual adoption, upstream ISPs would probably start coming along to shut down the busiest nodes.

Remember Fon (2006) [1] ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fon_Wireless

I remember them selling a bunch of access points at a local Linux convention for cheap, preloaded with their firmware. They seemed very happy about it, blissfully unaware that everyone else was happy at the low price and was discussing loading DD-WRT on them 5 minutes after opening the box.

I don't! I know Xfinity does this today, and I'm guessing copied Fon's model.

I think it goes to my point about breaking ToS: ISPs sell Internet. They don't want to compete with their own customers reselling that Internet. That's the business they're already in! Instead what Xfinity did is made it a value-add for customers: wherever you go, if you're near an Xfinity router you can get free wifi.

Helium didn't "sell internet" in a really comparable sense.

Sure they were. Really, really slow internet.

[edit] Unless you meant the fact literally nobody used it and all their revenue came from selling base stations, in which case you're right, they never really did operate an ISP.

They operated a Potemkin ISP.

If I can't send a TCP packet over it, it is not "Internet" IMHO. Combined with the extremely slow speeds these kind of networks really are their own thing.

The ability to send a TCP packet to any destination on the internet is basically the definition of the internet. There's no minimum speed limit for the internet :) what is its own thing is the physical layer.

Wikipedia agrees:

> ... LoRa and LoRaWAN define a Low Power, Wide Area (LPWA) networking protocol designed to wirelessly connect battery operated devices to the internet in regional, national or global networks ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa

It actually did make sense - not GREAT SENSE - but for the crypto space it was top of the tier, and for VC in general there was a model there. You weren't reselling your bandwidth, you were communicating with other hotspots via LoRA (and yes, using bandwidth to mine and sync, but I can use bandwidth for anything)

I'm not sure what the economics would have looked like in general - certainly not $100/month for a $250 miner that's for sure, but the idea of much cheaper transmission of very low-bandwidth data by incentivizing people to put hotspots all over the world was a good one.

Shame to see at the heart was another Get Rich Quick For Me and Mine though.

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.

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.

The M2M plans I saw have always been expensive -- ridiculous prices for hundreds of kilobytes. I was tempted to jury-rig some eSIM plans into devices, but it's not terribly easy to do that right now with any off-the-shelf hardware.

Very cheap for small amounts of data (~$2 per month for 5Mb), which is heaps for our purposes. For larger amounts of data, I have my doubts that helium is in any way viable, since you're piggy-backing someone's home internet, and the speeds are probably too low to transfer much anyway

I remember seeing advertised prices of around $1/month for 1MB, which depending on the application could be plenty of data (roughly 10,000 bits per hour).

If you want to successfully "disrupt" the mobile network industry, you need to implement one specific regulatory change: force the networks to strictly bill people per use, with no minimums or monthly fees. So if you are making 90% of the calls from a dense urban area and 10% from occasional road trips or hikes, you can place these 90% calls through a cheaper local provider, and use your major provider for the remaining 10%.

With the current "monthly plan" model it is simply impossible to launch a new competing service because your users will still have to keep their current subscription. You could argue that they would switch to a lower plan, but with the current plan prices, you could save like 10-20% by halving the amount of minutes/data you get, so nobody will do that.

No way the founders did not understand that and no way they expected an average retail miner to think about that and start asking those questions.

If you want an example how the below-inflation interest rates together with lack of antitrust enforcement create incentives for various grifts vs. long-term profitable businesses, you got one right here.

Carriers assume most people most of the time won't use their full allocation of minutes and data -- this is 'breakage' and is built into their pricing. If they charged on usage, the rates would look worse even if it was 'honest'. It is something I would love to see, but the market can never make it stick.

I don't understand your point about a 'cheap local provider' -- they are all using the same towers, even if you get better rates from a cheaper Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) like Boost or Mint. Their rates are lower because they buy data in bulk and just manage sales and support. You don't arbitrarily get to choose city vs rural coverage, it is the same network infrastructure in the end.

There actually are a few small local cellular providers with their own infrastructure. Then they have expensive roaming if you go out of their area, at least, that's how the local one to me does it.

Hmm, the pre-mine lock-in problem is interesting. How do other crypto projects solve that?

> How do other crypto projects solve that?

By pre-mining the majority of the coins to ensure that the project owners collect the bulk of the profit of any token appreciation.

Well that's the thing we want to avoid

Then you should stay away from crypto projects. Other crypto projects don't avoid this problem, on purpose.

Sure, that's one solution. I am curious if someone has solved this.

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