Comment by Aurornis
7 days ago
> Senders pay a small fee to send a message. • Relaying devices earn a micro-payment (could be tokens, sats, etc.) for carrying the message one hop further.
The Helium Network tried something like this, but with a fixed infrastructure: People were incentivized to run Helium network nodes and could earn micropayments for running nodes and handling traffic.
It revealed a lot of problems with structures like this, such as the incentive to cheat through various loopholes that were discovered.
It also became apparent that the monetization/tokenization aspect overtook the network functionality as the primary motivator for the project. After a while, people started looking at the traffic and payouts and realized that almost nobody was using it for real communication, it had become one big shell game for collecting the payments designed to incentivize nodes to come online and relay traffic. Then the token itself had become a speculative commodity that people used for trading more than anything.
I think it would be interesting if someone could invent a stable coin cryptocurrency with low overhead that enabled some of these use cases, but it seems the allure of generating a new token that the founders can sell into a speculative market to raise funds for the project is always too alluring, so every project goes from having good intentions to becoming a veiled pump and dump. Maybe some day there will be a stable coin that escapes these issues, but I haven’t seen it yet.
> I think it would be interesting if someone could invent a stable coin cryptocurrency with low overhead
Like the US dollar and Postgres?
For like $200 anyone can start a business entity in the US with a tax ID and a bank, I’m still yet to understand how crypto is better other than for circumventing regulators
Cryptocurrency transfers are irreversible, publicly verifiable and pseudonymous. For a privacy focused application, these attributes make crypto a better choice than USD and the traditional banking system.
Only pseudonymous so far as you never accidentally link yourself to a wallet then everyone can know your entire transfer/spending history. It gets people all the time just look at the investigations into various alt coin rug pulls or other fraud.
Irreversible is also not a good thing just ask anyone who had their NFTs stolen during that craze. If someone hacks my bank account or skims my card and transfers the money out the bank can reverse a lot of those transactions. Irreversibility wipes out decades of consumer protection advances.
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> For a privacy focused application, these attributes make crypto a better choice than USD and the traditional banking system.
So is cash. What we really need are ways of scanning a piece of fiat currency that instantly transfers that money to an account while then disabling the physical copy from the registry as valid. That's how silly I see crypto for anything other than illicit transactions
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How?
Irreversible is bad because mistakes happen. I lost ~$1,000 in a bad transfer because of a typo.
Publicly verifiable -- not good because I don't want the public knowing what I buy.
Pseudonymous is the worst of both. Is it or is it not me? them?
I am thinking digital cash using pub keys on a network run from space on something like starlink sats.
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Handing someone a $1 is irreversible if they won't give it back. All transactions are anonymous and private when using a physical dollar. Crypto has the primary advantage of allowing you to launder money by converting the "Coin" in criminal friendly countries to a fiat currency (dollars) that actually buys stuff. Especially useful when hackers hold your data ransom. Usually what people mean by not like "traditional banking system" is unregulated/lawless.
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Most crypto, no.
The one to look at for that is Monero: the closest thing to private(anonymous) digital cash that I've found (so far).
Circumventing regulations is like half the point of crypto... either you use it to circumvent regulators, or you hold it while the price goes up because of the people who are circumventing regulators.
I think Bitcoin has become a typical fiat asset ouroboros now, because the people who actually want to circumvent regulators are using Monero (which is why Monero is banned in most countries), while the Bitcoin price is supported almost entirely by speculation and a little bit by people doing only-slightly-shady things with crypto who haven't noticed everyone else moved to Monero.
Where's the API for sending and receiving USD?
https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/wires
https://achdevguide.nacha.org/
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Cheating may not have helped but it was doomed to start with. I did the math for my local city and to have full coverage you needed 5 nodes there were thousands. Also the main customer: utilities companies would risk getting rates of transfer hiked. While startup cost would be around 500-600 to keep the control.
Many such cases with crypto. Moderately good idea powered by a token becomes a Ponzi.
I legit did not know helium was intended for communication. I thought it was a way to mine crypto via the airwaves or something.
The OP's idea is an improvement: if you have to use crypto, then the only way a token is generated is when a sender buys one with fiat, so that they can transmit their message on the network.
Yes Helium was a terrible net negative for IoT protocols. It only caused a ton of very wasteful useless traffic that interfered with real purposeful networks like The Things Network. I'm glad it's mostly gone now.
Personally I think everything gets perverted when monetisation becomes the primary goal.
In helium there was no input revenue. OP mentions payment to send. This is a very different scheme.
It's the same scheme. You had to purchase Data Credits to send on Helium too, there was no input revenue because no one was choosing to use it but it's largely the same as the scheme behind the Helium network. 1 DC/24 Bytes sent and successfully delivered.
>>I think it would be interesting if someone could invent a stable coin cryptocurrency with low overhead that enabled some of these use cases
We are thinking about this and building in this direction with Paygo.wtf
https://x.com/0x_Osprey/status/1925299005191577921