if you're a new york times reporter and you got clued into some cryp†o project by your a16z media contact, please email me, or someone, anyone, first, before publishing

Are you subtweeting the Helium article? That project looks a little interesting compared to all the cryptoscams out there.

it's an interesting project, but the article gets a lot of details and higher-level basics very wrong in a way that suggests no skeptical outsiders or factcheckers were involved

Oh I'm sorry to hear that; it sounded so hopeful! I spent half an hour today learning about Helium and LoRaWAN and would have done more if I had any need for such a network. Is there something good I can read for balance?

the tech is cool, where it gets fishy is the economics. the article makes it sound like users of the network are the ones paying kevin. the reality is that, like filecoin, it's heavily subsidized helium.com/token the other thing is insider ownership & control

the actual practical decentralization of helium is doubtful - 35% insider ownership, w/ >$150m traditional venture capital. and the staid not-a-casino bit is just empirically not true. hnt has been wildly volatile and has a lot of speculation staceyoniot.com/how-i-made-1…

Thank you thank you. I naively assumed the users of the network were buying HNT to pay for services. Which made this 15x volatility over a year a little hard to understand.

it's eerily similar to the filecoin thing - you don't get the token for providing a service, you get the token for demonstrating the ability to provide it, and the value of that token rockets up and down chaotically. helium used to be a goldrush, now most miners don't break even

The Helium page seems to say HNT is used in order for buying network services? "To acquire Data Credits, network users convert HNT or obtain them from an HNT owner. Any HNT converted to Data Credits is permanently removed (“burned”) from the circulating supply."

yeah - there are two ways to make hnt, as a miner: proof-of-coverage and network transfer. the early goldrush days were all driven by the former, which is slowly adjusting down and being replaced by network traffic, which does not pay very well. helium.com/token#distributio…