Monday, February 28, 2022

Helium Concerns



The elephant in the room here is SpaceX's Starlink project which is looking to bring the internet to the entire planet via satellite. Starlink cannot provide the 5g speeds that helium is hoping to host and it's possible if not likely that the two could co-exist. Whether enough people would care to use 5g if a functional connection is available without having to use a complicated cryptocurrency.

Amazon sidewalk

In terms of IOT amazon seems to be dead set on becoming the king of the IOT industry with the Alexa devices and something tells me that it took a few pages from helium's playbook. 

Amazon: A 900MHz TELCO

Because amazon announced amazon sidewalk in October 2019 just a few months after helium's main net went live helium's code is open source which would make it easy to copy and helium must have been on amazon's radar too because google ventures was one of helium's early investors.




Helium founder Amir Haleem seems to suspect the same thing. Because in 2017 he was saying open source all the way quote almost entirely open source. 

What helium's documentation says today keeping secrets close to your chest is best when you're trying to topple trillion dollar tech giants but it could also create some serious issues for helium down the line

One thing that comes to mind is the classification of HNT as a security by us regulators which is almost certainly the case. Helium literally has security tokens that are held by helium inc and its investors. This could mean that HNT won't be listing on any US Exchanges anytime soon and that's where most traders and investors are located including the ones that invested into helium inc. The solution is for helium to become sufficiently decentralized and that's probably why Amir has been very hesitant to answer any questions related to a roadmap it would send a signal to regulators that helium inc has retained control of helium.

This does seem to be the case though and it's easy to understand why helium has been a massive success and helium inc could someday become one of the biggest companies in the world as a consequence. 


Handing over helium to the community would be nothing short of crazy for helium inc and its investors which is why i think the proposal to introduce on-chain governance will pass this will conveniently give control of the protocol over to HNT holders and it's likely that helium inc and its investors hold most of its supply especially since they've been running hotspots since the start. 

This ties into another concern i have and that's the potential privacy risks people could face for installing hotspot devices i'll start by saying that all of the data transmitted over the helium network is encrypted and helium ink's own hotspots protect privacy to the fullest degree as noted by Emea in many interviews.

However helium's own documentation seems to imply that this isn't the case for all third-party hotspots and it even recommends you do your own research so you know what you're getting into.






Helium is the chip shortage that's currently going on some experts believe this chip shortage will continue for years and this means hotspot costs could stay inflated for a very long time. Even though helium's decentralized incentive structure makes 5g feasible if the price tag for the hardware is too high then not many people will be willing to participate. This could put pressure on helium to increase HNT rewards going to 5g hotspots so they can easily make back the cost but this could then put a strain on the hundreds of thousands of people who jumped on the longfire train. 

The good news is that all these issues can and likely will be resolved in due course and helium will almost certainly continue to thrive. if helium's peer-to-peer networks managed to reach global adoption it will change the world forever and it will make cryptocurrency truly unstoppable.


5. HNT Price Analysis Helium 5G & Helium Roadmap


6. Helium Concerns

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Helium Concerns

The elephant in the room here is SpaceX's Starlink project which is looking to bring the internet to the entire planet via satellite. St...