2021 Frank Mong Interview - Future Of Helium, 5G & Halving

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hey guys so i just wanted to jump in real quick before the interview actually starts just got done filming the interview and you have to make sure you stay tuned listen to every single thing there has been so much covered in today's interview it's a little over an hour 45 minutes at least i didn't even edit it just yet but a lot of good nuggets in here a lot of stuff to listen to so grab your favorite drink grab some popcorn put this thing in bluetooth in your vehicle if you just want to listen and drive go somewhere this thing is epic so i hope you guys love this interview i know i did a sponge took everything in and i'm super excited for you guys to watch it so here we go take a watch take a listen and enjoy thank you for thanks for being here i mean i appreciate i know you're i know you're busy busy schedule um and there's a lot going on with helium that i think we're going to talk to you know a bunch of that today um but yeah just uh introduce yourself what would you do where'd you come from and uh what you're doing over at helium definitely yeah no so i've been at helium for now three and a half years um prior to joining helium i was in the cyber security world and i had various roles for about 20 years or so and just before uh joining helium i took a wrong turn and went to a company called hortonworks which is a hadoop open source company and just wasn't right fit both for me as well as for the company and was there only for about two months as their chief marketing officer but that was probably the best mistake i made in my life could have been devastating of course but instead it gave me a chance to look at other companies and i found helium and met probably one of the most uh pervasive founders to ever be to ever live just uh amir haleem's a co-founder of the company along with sean fanning but i think he's uh he's gonna go down in history books as a guy that really really built a new internet yeah i think so too i think so too uh so as the ceo of helium what is what's that role like like what exactly do you do there um just for a little bit of context sure sure it's uh most of it is outbound go to market sales marketing business development there's a little bit of it that's more internal hr ish although we're fairly small group so it's not too hard and we tend to do that by committee between amir our cto mark which is a chief product officer of i and i so the four of us you know will make calls together um so that's worked out pretty well for us um we all happen to get along i think sometimes it's rare rare but you know again i think amir's done a great job of setting the tone and creating a culture of you know really low ego to no ego in the company and it you know at the end of the day it really doesn't matter what my title is you know very clear on the mission and you know we're all rowing about the same direction so everyone's gotta pitch in and i gotta do what i gotta do it doesn't matter what my title is within the day good i like that yeah like i like that yeah i mean you know it's it's when you got a small tit you know tight-knit group like that it's like you gotta really just kind of do what you need to do really um sometimes titles don't really matter as much yeah no definitely um so for question two uh if you can just give a quick explanation of just the genesis like the the beginnings of helium like kind of where did it come from how did it come about uh and and things like that yeah helium has a very interesting genesis story actually it started about eight years ago so it's not a young startup it's quite an old startup and i know your viewers are probably you know varies in age group so for the younger audience you know they may not have heard of a guy named sean fanning but sean fanning is a legend i mean he started a company called napster and napster is the reason why apple itunes is worth billions and why spotify even has is a company napster started it all with music sharing and napster basically went to war with music industry and the intellectual property of music and so forth so sean fanning is a guy that wrote the code created the product called napster amir helene is a multi-time video game champion of the world i think quake 2 was where he dominated he sold a couple companies that built video games to ea sports or ea electric electronic electronic arts the game company i think amir was one of the guys that created 1942 so maybe some of the folks on your on your channel i watch your channel i've played that game um but amir and sean met because both were into video games they were both into the video game scene and in that world in a mirror competed competitively and so that's sort of how they met and i think sean fanning loved video games as well so they kind of like had circles that knew each other somehow they met eventually and when they were sort of together doing different things i think one of the one of the problems that kind of popped up and for amir and prashan they're both kind of that unconventional thinker i would say you know they don't they don't follow the path that's laid out they like to think differently and the problem at hand for them was at the time they had a bunch of friends starting iot companies back in 2013 and a lot of these friends were saying you know it's really hard because one of the main problems of internet of things at the time was connecting to the internet actually whether it's you know wi-fi in the home or bluetooth or cellular there was always some problem with one of those wi-fi bluetooth are really short in range at the time in 2013 wi-fi suck right we all remember that right never worked you know cellular certainly is out there but it's expensive and it's not just expensive from a data plan perspective but it's expensive from a battery consumption perspective it uses a lot of battery and we all know this we all have phones that we have to charge every day right it's because of the cell connection and the gps and a lot behind the scenes that draw a lot of power and so those two guys say hey why don't we try to solve that problem let's go create a way to connect to the internet that's like very open very cheap and it's ubiquitous and so the company started on that premise you know sean and amir raised a bunch of seed funding from all kinds of investors from mark benioff who's a founder of salesforce.com to sv angels these are like classics seed funding companies like digital garage and they landed a series a led by coastal adventures so no cosla has a reputation for being a renegade a guy that also thinks very differently and so he led the series a round for the company and the company's mission at the time which is still the same today on how we raised the money was hey let's go build an internet that's everywhere that's low cost and it's open source right and that's that's still the mission today that's what that's why we do what we do um the company then got funding of series b funding from google ventures and when google ventures led the series b round all the series a players followed and we have like first smart capital as well in there um munich re is a large german-based insurance company a reinsurer they're also an investor and so everybody just followed and and invested in in helium um and i think through those two rounds the mission was always the same it was just sort of how how do you actually achieve that mission was different we took a lot of twists and turns along the way we tried everything we tried like going vertical we tried you know building our own network we tried building the application then the network and we tried every combination you could think of and nothing really stuck nothing took off um there it was just always a problem with like the buyer like who's the buyer of the stuff and why would they buy this right and that's that was always the question and then it was always well the networks was not big enough even if they bought into this application the network isn't everywhere it's not pervasive so how do you do that and that was that was always a nagging problem that we didn't know how to solve then series c came around um which is the last round of funding that was about two years ago now probably something like that and prior to series c this is when i joined just before i joined i'd say like amir uh mark our cto bones professor jay raul like these these guys are like the creators of this healing blockchain all the technical folks they sat around uh the office and our office was in the dive in in san francisco on mission in venice basically when you walk outside there's either human feces or needles like drug needles just littered the streets and you know it's sad it's really unfortunate there's people sleeping on the streets and we we had to like walk around them and walk through them to get into our office um that's where we started and and um but we loved it i loved we all loved going to work because it's the people that matter right you don't really doesn't matter what your office looks like it was a nice looking office inside just the outside was pretty bad but we all love being there and the team was trying to solve the problem okay how do you how do you go to the network and this is in 2017 so if you recall 2017 massive crypto run and not just the run like bitcoin and ethereum became household names like cnbc started talking about bitcoin my mom was asking me what bitcoin was back in 2017. and so our engineers we're not we're not crypto people so we're just sitting around we're wireless people trying to figure out hey how do we how do we build a network globally without having any money and we in fact don't have any money we're about to run out of money so what do we do right we got like a year left this is our last shot what are we supposed to do and so the guys were drinking seriously obon 14. really nice whiskey and sitting around the table one guy i think maybe it was bones or or something like that he says what this this is thing called bitcoin like it's everywhere what if we could put bitcoin into it like a a hot spot or into a router and what if we could do that and people that plugged us in could then mine bitcoin and we're like oh wow that's that sounds like a good idea so we started researching bitcoin and ethereum and stellar and whatever was available at the time and you know you know i both know bitcoin that there's some costs there power like it takes the whole city's grid the power of miner right you can't can't support 500 helium hot spots with bitcoin mining happening that's going to crush everybody that doesn't make any sense and so we looked for other we were honestly looking for other ways of doing this we did not want to build our own blockchain like we really did not and so professor he's uh his background is distributed systems and he comes from uh distributed databases company called basho there's also public open source company he uh he didn't know anything about blockchain and he said okay well you know what i'm going to just go and do some research on blockchain and see if i can create a blockchain so literally within 20 minutes he built his own blockchain took him 20 minutes i know it's insane the dude's a genius and it was it's not the healing blockchain you know of today but he had no clue what he was doing he was just playing around he said oh it's pretty easy it's actually not that hard to build a blockchain it's just a really inefficient way of storing things it's super inefficient you know and he's like why would we ever want to do this and so we were really against building a blockchain because it was inefficient and we had never done it before um so it'd be another hurdle we had to figure out how to solve but the team really cracked down and it's like four or five six of them they just started writing the white paper uh amir led the effort you know all the engineers like professor and bones and mark raul did the math like we did so much work maybe i'm forgetting somebody i'm sorry if i am but they uh they did an amazing job and they pulled that thing together it took us months uh to get the white paper a couple months to get the white paper done and they started building and they landed on something called honey badger byzantine fault tolerant as the theory behind this a guy named andrew miller who's a professor at university university of illinois created this it was part of his like phd or something and so we actually took his theories in his paper and we wrote it in erlang turn it into code essentially that was the beginning that's sort of how we ended up creating a blockchain which we really didn't want to do we had much more we had a lot more twists and turns we were building hardware we were trying to do it on a different hardware platform a different chipset we failed we had like engineers disappear on us all kinds of crazy stuff so it's it's just not it's not perfect right and no one knows about these things but behind the scenes there was like some turmoil and you know engineers going rogue and a couple engineers just doing strange things and somehow we ended up with going with laura wan which is a syntec technology that's also open source i'm really glad we did do that they've got thousands of vendors that make the stuff they're just you know they got probably hundreds of private networks that run on lower land around the world they're very sizable but they didn't connect them all and so they they had all this disparate private networks that wasn't connected and helium's approach is completely the opposite right we're not private we're one public we're open source and anyone can connect and we hear everything like our hotspots can hear all those lower land packets regardless if it's ours or a private company's network packet we hear it all and so we we really you know kind of just went forward and thought hey if we build it eventually things will connect like things will come it's so weird right that they will come yeah yeah i know it's like it's one of those like leap of faith things and not a lot of people believed in us um we went to raise a round of funding two years ago and the crew two groups uh we're really really thankful that they met us two groups one is multi-coin capital a guy named kyle stomani he was like coming into office even before we were raising funding he was just meeting with amir chatting with him the mirror is sort of talking about the white paper talking about our you know what we're trying to do why we're doing it the problem we're solving and so kyle was like oh this is intriguing got his partner to char to do some more work with us and look at our system and tushar and his team really came up with our economic model like we're not economists we're not blockchain d5 people i know nothing about any investing let alone defy right and so tushar is a genius like kyle's like got it technically right away to charge the economic genius and created our you know with his team created our economic model which is a two-sided the two token system the burn and mint equilibrium just amazing you guys should read his paper uh if you haven't it's just a work of art and those two guys were like okay we should fund you guys we should you know we want to leave the round and in parallel we met uh nick from union square ventures that's so union square ventures multi-coin capital they co-led our series c round and so we got lucky uh both with uh nick at usv kyle and tushar for multi-coin capital and now we are where we are today um just a lot of hard work a lot of building by the engineers i think i was looking back at my twitter feed october of 2020 we hit 10 000 hotspots what is this april now we're almost may right by the time you air this will be may maybe yes yeah yeah so may 1st we'll be at uh i don't know over where i think we're already over 30 000 now right yep yeah i think we just hit 30 000 like just a couple hours ago a couple hours ago yeah it's insane yeah it's insane like we who would have thought that that that would be the case yeah i mean i got on you know mid like mid january and i think i was um like 18 400 something yeah yeah i joined with 18 000 people so we've already almost doubled since january yeah yeah and it's like i gotta and we gotta talk about this man which is like availability of hot spots it's like it's berserk i mean it's so difficult to get hot spots from anybody um and i know it's i it pains me because that number 30 000 hotspots live or whatever that is completely underreported like what it should be at is over 220 000 hot spots that's what it should be at but due to supply chain issues covid shortages on a6 uh the suis canal and the boats getting stuck it's just a series of like bad luck and in the world of hardware just so your viewers understand it takes time to build hardware from the chip to the board to the case to the packaging man when you order something it takes some eight to ten weeks to physically build it it's not this is not like magical um then you look at what why is apple got iphones in one they buy a crapload of inventory they just buy and hold that inventory that's one and two they have a history they can look at the past and go okay we sold a gazillion iphones last year oh we'll probably sell a gazillion plus some right easy well we never we've never done this before like who who who's going to buy a hot spot that mines the crypto hnt well why would they like i don't know like why would he would do it but yet it's happening right and so i think i think the forecasting is getting better for one just so that your viewers understand it's getting better it's taking time because it just takes time to build hardware rack wireless has got it dialed in they're going i mean they're building as fast as they can bobcat they can build a lot more because their background is high volume manufacturing like the factories they use for bobcat builds the xbox so these guys know what they're doing their problem is bobcat has never sold a thing to consumers because these guys are like they sell to industrial companies they're cons there's called odms they they build stuff for other people they don't sell direct to consumer and in our model where it's direct to consumer and bobcat has to go and figure out how to do that that's hard for them they've never done it before right so everyone buying bobcats like dude this could not be harder to buy a bobcat it's so hard i get it i know they know by the way they're trying to fix it we're telling them how to fix it but we made the same mistakes as all these guys when we were selling the helium hotspots that's why we don't do it anymore it's just ridiculous um so be patient if you're buying rack wireless from cow couch they'll come it's just everything is backlogged if you're buying a bobcat please read their directions it's like 35 steps i know it's annoying read it and then read it again don't get it wrong there's details in there if you mess it up it may not work so please just read and i know everyone hates reading i i'm guilty but you've got to read those directions and i think i mean this would be if i could just throw this in real fast is yeah i believe they added in to where it's usdc usdt only uh so it can actually be processed quicker they also added in a a chat bot so there'll be a bot that comes up on the screen if you have any questions everybody needs to know that you need to uh make sure that the transaction fee that shows you know every platform is different but whatever that fee is to send it just make sure that what is supposed to be sent is being sent with the fee right and then also make sure that it's the actual bobcatminer.com website so if there's one that's bobcat miner 300 that's a fake scam if you look at bobcat.org it's also a facebook so all the real links will be below the video inside description they actually emailed me today to let all my viewers know about those other websites so yeah the direct links are on helium.com website as well as the links below the video just uh yeah make sure all the the correct links are clicked on definitely and i i i just gotta like please whenever you're selling like you're sending crypto make sure the address is the correct address for that currency don't send usdt to a usdc address and don't send the usdc to usdt address i made that mistake before you'll lose it it's gone right me too don't do that right um that's my advice for folks read it's good advice triple check yeah right i always i always triple check for sure um so question three um would be what is your vision of helium six months from now and then five years from now or you can do three if if five is too far we know we know things should change so we could do we could do the the six months from now three year from now yeah maybe a good way for me to talk about this is to talk about sort of what we look at within helium when we're tracking our performance because that i think will give you a sense as to what matters to us short term and long term let's just call it short term long term right yeah we look at really number one our employees like are we doing what we need to do to support them uh are we hiring enough are we hiring too much so we do look at that quite carefully we're a very small team and we're very efficient so we're like 40 people we're not big at all we track that constantly we track the community constantly because because we are a small team we open source everything that means we have to have a community to support us that's why the people's network you guys jimmy as the influencers out there spreading the word for us super important um i don't know if you know this jimmy but you know when we started with discord i think it was like beginning of covid or something along like march or april maybe we started the discord channel in our discord server um at the time it was like 800 people in the community this is like la a year maybe less than a year ago like eight months ago nine months ago maybe we started this in june or something like that middle middle covid um now we're over 50 000 people on discord and if you're in the discord channel you'll see these guys are hardcore like you're technical man there's no joke there's no jokesters in there and if you try to like clown people they'll like they get like a little snippy they're very very technical and serious not like okay and they're very engaged right we need them like that's the kind that's we need that crew so we're 50 000 strong adding 1 500 per day thanks to you jimmy thanks to all the other influencers out there that's joining us it's crucial and so we track that very closely as well um community is very important to us our employees are very important to us and then it's really the the ecosystem surrounding helium and surrounding the network itself how how is that network growing right the issues with you know buying from bobcat or the issues of shipping from rack wireless and couchship and bobcat and nebra and synchropit and so forth we are very concerned because we want them to succeed we want them to to deliver in a timely manner and so when we when we can we get involved we try to unlock problems within the supply chain we actually do work very close with simtech the chip provider uh we i talk to their team every day we're on every day trying to solve some of these issues and so i know like the people outside they don't see the details and the things it takes to try to expedite something but every bit of this effort um moves the needle it really helps it improves it by day improves it by a week and that's what we're trying to do and so that supply and network growth is crucial that's why it pains me to where i'm happy we're at 30 000 but we should be at 220 000. and so it really pains me to sit here with you looking at 30 000 and celebrating when i know we should be at 200 000 on the network um you know so that that's important the the usage is crucial and this again i don't think the community knows this we don't talk about it very much uh but we we do things like webinars we do blogs we talk about and we highlight customers that join the network and use it use the network for different use cases different applications so you'll see some of that and you'll see some integrations that we have on that specific for internet of things for iot um and those are those are all crucials we track that very closely we we have a we have an amazing team of people doing that uh four full-time folks i've got eight interns joining this summer just on the sales and business development side to go after this to go and increase our our usage of the network uh these are all college kids um they'll get to learn about iot learn about crypto get it get it get a foot in the door in a tech and we get work horses you know it's a symbiotic relationship right and obviously we hope they love healing and we want them to be a part of the network as well so that's that age is our we had an intern program last summer and it was three and this year we've grown to eight so we'll see how we scale um and then the last piece is just you know we we we look at the complete package of the ecosystem of our employees the community the supply of the network the network growth in the usage network because if if all all three are humming or all four pieces are humming then you get the flywheel effect like the stuff this starts to feed itself the energy is just becomes more and more efficient and you get more and more people helping right and that's that's what's happening now the network is growing massively the backlogs on the on the hotspots and the orders are insane it's unbelievable um like everything was going well by the end of the year i think we would be at like 600 000 if everything would just unlock you know it's insane um the usage of network is great we're adding like 10 to 15 new customers per month now on a regular basis we never had that before and the bigger the network the easier it is to actually bring on new customers so that's working really well and you get a massive community of 50 000 on discord not to mention like all the other channels we have twitter and you guys as influencers are helping us with like youtube and tick tock i mean i think we're like closing in about 150 000 to 200 000 people now just very involved with with the healing community from all angles so those are things that we look at short term uh on a day-to-day basis and you know when you start thinking midterm long term what's next what's our vision i think i think we've proven to certainly ourselves and our in the community that what helium has created in this blockchain is truly a unique incentive that is the only incentive of its kind that can start a wireless network creation model without a whole lot of money it's pretty cheap and simple to do and that hasn't been done before and i think that incentive that's underpinned by the blockchain is truly unique and it's it's something that can be applied to all wireless networks and so you saw that release with freedom fi yesterday the day before time i came until time it was like two things just two days ago two days ago we crushed their website guys good job freedom fights websites down i don't think i think it's still down these poor guys they keep they keep trying to fix it and fix it and it just keeps going down uh it's like the floodgates the more the floodgate opens the more water just comes in there's so much demand it's insane um but freedom fi is a partner that we announced together that they're going to build uh the helium 5g which means they're putting the healing blockchain into their 5g technology and enabling every person individual to essentially become a cell tower it's insane it's awesome yeah i i can't wait and that's actually you know one one of the topics uh i think coming up here actually really soon actually uh it's the very next topic so that's a good yeah so that's a good segue so the next question i have here um so first off uh so what does hip stand for so i know some people may look on the helium.com website they might be going through the helium application click on a few things they might click on the reward inside the application takes them to another website talking about hip so first off what does it mean and then the next portion of this because it's a little loaded is what new important protocols is being added and one of these is the cbrs it's the hip 27 uh and you just talked and touched about it so this is where we'd be able to talk about uh 5g but first what does hip stand for just so people kind of know what that means yeah so hip or hip stands for helium improvement process and what the premise and idea of that is is that helium in the block blockchain in the helium platform and technology because we've open sourced most of if not all of it it's got it you got to have an open source community to to run it or to govern it to help improve it and so over time we slowly hand that off to the foundation and what the foundation decided is that you know decisions made on the blockchain really need to have community feedback community voice but also community vote and so hip or hip is a way in which anyone can propose something to the community and have a voice in that proposal it's like literally a written proposal okay and the community will look at that review it the person can can present it to the community have a conversation about it i think it's once a month there's a call by the community and and they'll vote on it and they'll either approve or not approve and so the helium improvement process is really meant to establish a mechanism for anyone to to make this blockchain better or make it work for them if the community agrees that it's going to benefit everyone as a whole right and that's what the hip process is where you can find this is two places right you can find most of the details if not all of it on github so if you go to github.com helium you'll see a bunch of repos which are containers that hold our open source code if you scroll down you'll see like hip is one of the folders and when you go into hip you'll see all the different helium improvement processes and the 5g example is is a hip it's a hip 27 that was proposed by the co-fo the founder of freedom fight boris he wrote a hip he had this idea that if he could put the helium miner the helium blockchain miner the hnt miner into his hardware built by freedom fi which is um also open source it's based off of something called project magma which was started by facebook and they transferred it to the linux foundation but magma is an open source stack that essentially allows anyone to build on and connect that stack to telcos so just so people understand like telecommunications companies are highly not open they're highly private everything's proprietary so for facebook to go do that work to make open connectors into that it's crucial for like everybody to survive and to have a hope of decentralizing right and so stumbling onto magma is crucial is a big deal and the fact that freedom fi with magma technology can merge and marry heliums blockchain that's a big deal it's like it's almost like we got lucky here because without magma we couldn't do open source 5g like we could not be cell towers uh without helium there would be no reason to do it because you would not be able to incent anybody to do this right so the merge of the two is crucial and that's what hip 27 is all about um and that's the process in which we do this you can also learn more about it if you join our discord server which you can put a link to down below right yeah so the discord i'll have below and then i just wrote in here uh the github so i'll just make sure i get the link from you just make sure it's checked that below the video as well too so everything everything important uh outside the interview everything uh will be inside the description for sure so yeah i mean i'm excited for you know the 5g because it was something i thought about because i came from wireless uh you know for eight years and so i knew about you know cbrs i knew about the radio frequency and the radio um you know service and things like that and i was just thinking to myself just what could we do with antennas and you know knowing about the 915 and and the other frequencies in other countries you know could there be something with with that or offloading you know the service or the radio frequencies or data or something like that and that's kind of yeah and i'm glad that that really came up and and and love that you know the hip is able to be something from the community which is another reason why it's called the people's network i mean it's that's right it's fantastic right yeah yeah the people that yeah the people's network was uh inspired by the rock the people's champ i'm a huge wwf wwf fan used to watch uh wrestling and uh dwayne johnson the rock he inspired that nice um so on kind of on this note yeah so uh with helium it sounds as if there's going to be two levels of mining so it's kind of like you know when it comes down to ethereum when it comes onto bitcoin you have multiple different levels of different machines you can purchase coming out with different uh you know the amount you can earn per day so it sounds as if helium is doing that so it sounds like you will be keeping two different types of machines at least as of now one that would be able to stay with iot the other one that can go into 5g so anybody can really choose which angle they want to go yeah there's actually a lot to this so let's try to break it down yeah so everyone understands there is currently the helium hnt miner or the compatible miners these miners like like the rack wireless the bobcat the synchro bit the nebras and the helium original ones though we call them the ogs internally they actually contain a full node of the blockchain the helium blockchain the full node is in that box and what's happening is because there's so many new boxes new hotspots joining a network all the time we're growing very rapidly it's the the amount of chatter between the nodes is getting to become too much it's not scaling the way we like it to scale that's why you'll see like why haven't i you get this question why haven't i mined for the last eight hours is anybody else experiencing slow mining like what's going on what's going on is the blockchain is trying to resolve itself but instead of like 2000 or 10 000 it's 30 000. imagine like 30 000 blockchain entities right decentralized they're just trying to reconcile records constantly when you do it between you and i jimmy just two of us it's easy it's fast right oh so here's my here's my record what's your record say oh cool yeah we're in sync awesome imagine if we had to do that with 30 000 people every 30 minutes dude that's what's happening is that things aren't able to resolve fast enough every 30 minutes because there's too many people involved too many cooks in the kitchen we're all going like hey my record's not matching your record wait wait wait hold on let me update my record right this is what's happening between all the hotspots on the network so we have to make a fundamental change jimmy and that's validators that's another hip right i don't know if we're talking about that but we should i think it's hit 25. i can't remember which trip it is now close up they're going to kill me i i invested it is 25. i was gonna say cyborgs and they kill me no i got it and 25 is validated what validators are guys right i explain right too much chatter between gateways right and the chatter is like proof of coverage chatter like the chatter could be oh jimmy sent frank some hnt or frank sent jimmy some hnt that's all chad that's all recorded right and that's just chatter and so what's happening is that's just too much for thirty thousand let alone remember i want this to be two hundred twenty thousand that's like insane validators have to happen because what validators will do is it will alleviate the pain from the network allow it to perform as we expect on a consistent basis that means you're mining every 30 minutes you don't have these spots where it's like not mining for like hours right and so validators will be servers based on the internet they'll contain the full node of the blockchain so that the edge hotspots won't need to hold it anymore the hot spots will just go and check with a validator like hey hotspot says hey i see something this is what i see let me hand it off to the validator look siri hey let me let me uh my watch through went off but let me go check and the validator will tell me what the right record should be so i don't have to like hold it and then go talk to 30 000 people to figure it out or 200 000 people the validators if let's say there's 200 or a thousand even that's fine they'll just check and they'll make sure all the records are correct right that's the decentralized network and so having a layer above the hotspots called validators in the cloud that will constantly perform at the level that we needed to perform and be able to reconcile records at the speed we needed to do then all the miners and all the mining would be like on schedule you know i mean that's the best way to like think about it all right so right so if we have that right validators that hold the full node the edge iot miners the old you know helium h t miners are are doing its thing with witnesses and challenges and all that stuff and they're updating records and sending it to a validator to update great so now what about the freedom 55g or any any kind of compatible 5g mining right now it's still early but right now based on the hip hip 27 what we know is going to happen is there's going to be a 5g signal so a cell phone can now use the helium 5g network to make you know to just to watch youtube or text message and the mining related to that is going to be the same as the lorawan mining there's there's not going to be a difference because we're going to leverage lorawan in those 5g boxes essentially the 5g hospital will do both we'll have a 5g radio and it'll have a lower wind radio and it will use the lorawan radio to do all the blockchain stuff that it needs to do the witnessing the challenges and all that that's that's the thought right now of how we would do it and that by doing that it would get that product to market faster because it requires less change right so if you think about you know time to market how do we get it out there quicker leverage what you've got and leverage what you know works right get it to scale better with validators and boom add this 5g thing that's leveraging the same blockchain network and off you go the the difference here is the packet's gonna be different a cell phone packet like when we when we're text messaging with a cell phone or we're like you know watching youtube on that from our neighbors helium 5g hotspot that's a dif that's a big massive packet how do we handle that what's the data credit usage for that like we had to figure that out i don't have an answer for you today we need to figure it out um we have ideas and tushar is all over this the economic genius i talked about the economy guy he's going to help us with the modeling and he's he's been thinking through a lot of this the community is also making a lot of great suggestions as well if you go to the hip 27 channel there's a lot of conversations about this and so we don't have the exact answer but my my feeling is that we're going to attempt to do something that's just easier that exists so that it's less change so we can go to market faster yep so that means if you're mining hnt today you're still going to mine and if you want to mine both the 5g and the lower land no problem like you can do both you know what i mean yeah so it'll be mostly with the data packages because i've you know the portion that was with this one with this loaded question which was you know how will the new rewards break down look like so i know you probably didn't have the whole breakdown yet but it sounds like it's part of the data packages which yeah i have you know two smart i have the victor v link mouse and rat trap at the house and so i'm seeing you know every 12 or 30 or either 12 or 23 hours i'm seeing small data packages being sent just with those tracks speaking with the hot spots and i feel like in the future you know with with you know uh we'll be talking about the the having in the future yeah a little bit here but with the having with the witnessing um with the challenges and stuff i feel like those may go down a little bit but at some point the data packages will be giving us more of the rewards at some point in the future right right yeah okay that's right there's the equilibrium here right yeah it's like it's like a see-saw in the early days there's less usage of the network so you want to reward people more to just create the network first as more and more users pile on the data credit piece will start going up and then just typical tip to scales where now you know passing data is more important the network's built right so having data transmission becomes more a bigger part of the reward system because it's a natural evolution to that and so it's just like a seesaw where eventually it'll tip to scale yeah and this is the important portion of the video i think everybody's going to try to go to and i'll link it with timestamps but the most important thing is like i try to explain it where you know having is coming up which that's going to be the next questions number five you know speak about the having on august 1st and everybody's mentioning oh is it even worth it am i too late should i not even do it you know uh you know things like that and i try to mention that at some point you will mostly get rewarded by the data packages you're getting rewarded for what the uh blockchain is made to do you're getting rewarded what the network's purpose purposes which is internet of things package transfer not really just hot spots speaking to each other so as long as i'm correct here that is what we're really looking for in the future is we're not really looking at everything going way down and you're barely getting anything you'll be rewarded for the from the purpose of the the network which is internet of things and then soon 5g with the data packages for reward process yeah something i think something that the audience probably doesn't they glance over they don't remember perhaps is that when you use the network you have to burn hnt like you have to take the h t token out of circulation and make it disappear permanently so imagine like a big pile of hnt sitting here using a network takes away from that pile to create this data credit and it doesn't come back it goes away forever right and so now what you have is data credits and you're expanding the data credits on the network that's how this works so the more users we have whether it's a little victor mouse trap right or it's a parking sensor from from noble systems or it's a water leak detector from maui right like these things are these scenes by using network they're taking h t out of the supply forever imagine if you were imagine like a cell phone an iphone or a galaxy was doing that when they watched youtube watching you know watching jimmy's promo it they would have to take h t out of the supply burn it forever to get the data credits not only do does usage pull supply out when the manufacturer wants to stake their hot spot or gateway onto the network they need data credits to do that that means they got to go get hnt out of the supply turn into data credits and supply data credits into the hospital the hospital can join the blockchain right so these are all things that put a lot of pressure on hnt supply we talk about having the mining supply goes in half okay great now miners have less there's more usage taking away every time a new hotspot joins network more agencies getting taken away forever your supply of http is like dwindling but but there's a there's need for it's useful it's a utility people need it yeah i think i think the key here is it's useful like the the hnt is needed as a part of how you use the network whether you're you're watching youtube or you're sending some you know mouse trap traffic or you're trying to stake a validator on the network or you're trying to put a new gateway a new hotspot a miner on the network those all require hnt this is how the system works so the utility is there it's incredibly important to to use the hnt to go build a network and that's how this works so i i would suggest people look at the the mining uh we have a bunch of documentation online docs.healing.com talks about mining talks about the the economic model it's very important to actually dig into that and understand how this works yeah i mean i'm excited for it yeah i'm really weird i get goosebumps you know if i hear a good song and i get goosebumps if i'm in a good conversation so uh without getting too close to the camera it's it's there man thank you so okay so we've kind of touched on this a little bit this question number six uh 200 000 plus hot spots on order what does this mean for the network and so i mean the only thing that if i can just kind of direct it and you can take it however you want is you know some people are just getting a little discouraged with like oh that's gonna be so many of them but i think you've touched on it before too i mean the main purpose of having a good network is something you can sell to other partners who would want to join helium if i'm not mistaken yeah you know like yeah it in the beginning it was very risky i mean in the beginning when we were starting the network early days i mean who knew if this would work we didn't know we we thought we needed to build a global network and so if you joined us early on you were rewarded for the risk it was just riskier but we know now we know it works and we know that we've caught the attention of lots of other networks that want to just roam on the helium well great great that's exactly what we wanted right and as soon as we get other networks roaming on the helium that means devices need to use the network and again hnt is needed for that and even if you're mining if let's say you started mining you're mining like 50 hmt a month or something it's great and then you go have and all of a sudden there's 25 hmt what uh i feel sad but if if if the network and ecosystem is doing its job which is building a useful network and then getting others to to notice that we've built a useful network and trying it and using it then it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy it's a flywheel and an ecosystem that feeds off of each other because it's useful if it wasn't useful yeah you should be worried right if this whole thing had no use i i wouldn't be here i wouldn't even be doing this interview jimmy because that's not that's just that's disingenuous but like you people have to remember you're doing this for mining i get it everyone wants h t i get that of course but i think what's more important is you are owning and operating a decentralized wireless network don't forget that what does that mean that means you jimmy me frank all the people watching if you do this and you put a hot spot in your home you are going to compete with the telco you will become a telco this is your chance to own a piece of it that's that's how i see it and so i don't care if mining is you know one or half or if it's ten or five or two and a half it does it's irrelevant because what's important is that the network is useful and the more useful this network becomes the the more the bigger you'll become like the more important your network becomes and it's not helium it's we all own this it's all of us because we we're all doing this we're all trying to build a network we're all mining we're all providing useful coverage that's the key and so i think instead of for me i would i would advise all all the folks watching right yeah this is going to have it's going to be having all that that's not the indicator to look for right i think the indicator to look for is who's using this how much are they using and how much sure can we get more people to use this and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy like if you make this network global useful and your coverage is good then yeah people will come man it's already happening we'll have more news for you about about the roaming stuff it's it's insane like it will be great but we just we got to keep doing it we can't like don't give up like build a network and think think about it more like hey the time horizon horizon's long like i how long does it take for a telco to become a telco decades it's only for us it's only been like what it's only been like a year and a half we're babies this is the beginning i don't care if it's 50 000 or 200 000 or 300 000 hot spots it's the beginning the earth is massive we're nowhere near done guys you know this is the beginning and you guys are all in it early like this is early i you know when we're talking uh two years from now or three years from now and the network's at one and a half million to three million hot spots or 5g gateways i'll still tell you it's early because 5g needs even more so you know we're not done i mean i've talked to like our team internally you know i've got i think we need 10 to 20 more years of this man we just got to keep going build a network people will come the usage will come well obviously it's funny you keep saying that because i'm from i'm from iowa originally where you know i think that's where they filmed some of field of dreams yeah and so that's where they kept saying you know if you build it they will come um so yeah it's i mean i i am 100 on boat i i'm excited that's why i'm a part of it um and that's also why i keep talking about on my channel and you know i have a whole background with with samsung and the videos and that was where i grew the the the channel and when i find something else that gets me more interested i mean that's where my focus is uh and so i'm still gonna do both but i mean the amount of growth i'll tell you the amount of growth from doing the helium videos is is insane like my my subscriber numbers daily have actually doubled and tripled the amount of yeah the amount of questions i get i mean i should be hired for a consultation or something because i get like uh the amount of questions in one week from the dms and twitter and instagram is is insane i've never had so many questions or people asking for their time and i've done like several zooms with people just to answer questions and and i respond back with it and that so many so many people reaching out with so many good questions that in one week's time i've fulfilled everything i've done for the last eight years on my channel from anybody reaching out about any questions about any product any thing i've done uh that whole eight years was just done in one week uh which i feel like the you know it's it's exponential and i feel like i'm i'm growing just as fast almost as like the helium network is when it comes down to yeah i'm super happy i'm super happy for you um not surprised jimmy thank you yeah at the beginning when i was like yeah it's changed my life it's it really has with with interest and and shooting videos and running into people and doing new things and yeah a lot of stuff has definitely opened up and i feel like that's going to be the same for a lot more people so i i think so i mean when you when you know when we put all the pieces of this technology together um and we make it digestible usable by anybody like our goal is to make you imagine like telecommunications is extremely old it's an old industry right no one's been able to go tackle it because it's got it's an old industry that's very private and very proprietary and rightfully so yeah i don't blame them because for them to build phone lines and and put in fiber and copper it's expensive they're doing it around the united states is a big big piece of land to do that across the u.s costs a lot of money right and so i get it 100 years ago that was the way to do it but for your viewers this is probably they're all at the right place at the right time with the right technology coming together wireless technology with its open source stack happening lorawan to to magma so the stuff that the freedom fight guys are doing the stuff that rack wireless and bobcat uh never are doing like putting that together is they're they're they're coming together the right time and then helium open sourcing the blockchain where opens we've open source our app the interface that user experience has to be super simple right it's like your friends and my neighbors need to be able to look at the app and go oh it's easy it's as easy as like instagram right it's as easy as i don't know whatever the app du jour is it's just got to be super simple and what i found is you know working with you jimmy and some of the tick talkers he's like it's it's the gen xers it's the kids that are like finishing high school going to college they're the future of this country they're the future of the world they get this it's like boom they get it wait i get to be a telco sweet like why wouldn't i of course but they you know so we got the right generation with the right technology the right combination of open source which was traditionally very complicated and the fact that we've made it brain dead easy so that it's as easy as you can tick tock all right this should be on fire and it is right this flywheel should be like going nuts it is things are going warp speed now dude i love it yeah um let's see so next question this is question seven um so reward process how will helium uh so how much helium rewarded monthly goes for the miners and the vcs and then how is this going to change over time uh so because i know that some people may know that there's 5 million hnt a month where exactly does all the 5 million go and does that slightly change year after year yeah so in the in the beginning when we first started the blockchain in the first hotspot that was the genesis block that's when the first token was mined so we're very different from other crypto projects we did not like pre-mine the term is called pre-mine where we created a trillion tokens out of thin air and then we unlock it slowly we didn't do that we actually did the reverse of that like we were like bitcoin in a sense where the first miner mined the first bitcoin the first healing hotspot mined the first healing token and in that genesis block we defined for our investors and the founders how they would be rewarded for the work that they're going to open source and give away and that reward system is baked into the blockchain so you mentioned 5 million per month there's a cap of 5 million tokens mine per month there is a cap on the supply 223 million in its entirety is it is mineable essentially and in the 5 million per month in the very beginning 35 of the 5 million was distributed to the founders and the investors of the company of helium and each year that percentage goes down by one so we're now in year two and so it's now 34 next year it'll be 33 and it keeps going going going until you hit 15 and when it's at 15 it stays flat to 15 percent until the mining zero that's that's how the reward system works and so the the founders and the investors we didn't we didn't pocket any tokens in the beginning that's that's like crucial we didn't say oh let's just make up a number like the us government let's print three trillion dollars and keep half of it and let the others have mine the other half we didn't do that we're not printing money all right we we said let's tie the mining directly to building a network so that this has incredible utility it's incredibly useful and it has a shot of becoming a fully decentralized network so we we had to do it that way but that also means that the investors and employees and founders we didn't we didn't get anything we didn't get anything we're just like everybody else we didn't we didn't like you know we're not like pocketing a bunch of tokens and you know hiding it we don't have any we have what we have we have what we have from the distribution model that we created right the 35 of mining rewards which aligns our interest with everybody else's interest people want to mine cryptocurrency we want a network build right we both win everybody wins when it happens we get a network everyone gets tokens we're all happy that's how this system is built no one has more or less than anybody else yeah so we try to be as fair as we can yeah i mean i think it's fair i mean i don't feel there's any other better way to do that um okay so question eight how many partners added to the helium network so far and uh so i watched an interview with you speaking back in january and i really that was when i was like i really want to have you on my channel because i want to know updated since january so i believe last year you got quite a few i believe in january you got maybe 10 right and i guess i'll just curious on any uh partners you're working on at the moment and how many you've added in 2021 yeah so we've been adding about 10 to 15 per month so i think we closed a year out with 40 or 50 in december i believe and then we added 10 so we were at 60. so we're roughly in the 80 customers or so range now something along those lines um and you you know you're using one of the one of the yeah the bigger customers we've added victor mousetraps right i think you've even caught a mouse already within hours yeah i i set it up and it was uh i believe i got it up at uh 10 30 or 11 30 at night and then yeah it it let me know that it there was one there's a rodent caught i believe at like three in the morning so it was within five hours and i knew i knew i had one i don't know if there was more um but yeah so i i it was a amazing i woke up the next day and i started actually recording me walking downstairs taking a look at it for the first time oh that's awesome and so i walked downstairs like all right let's make sure it doesn't jump out at me and let's make sure it's not a false you know false alarm and there it was and yeah check it outside i mean it's fantastic i mean i i understand the fact and the usage and using helium to notify us if something is used and caught and um you know i i wasn't really into getting the uh you know aggressive swing arm all the way down you know hurting the thing um so go into something that would not only do it humanely it was able to notify me so then i wouldn't have to wait a couple weeks to notice oh it there was something there or i would prematurely just keep looking at it when there's nothing there so the fact of if it's a massive company that has a big building with 15 floors and you're able to identify which floor it's on which room it's in and you can know exactly like oh this building room 15 on the second floor has something without them having to manually look at all of them is brilliant um yeah i'm i'm excited for that yeah and victor victor's a fantastic product uh woodstream is the company that built it it's they're the guys that invented the mousetrap uh and they figured out how to make a better mousetrap literally a better mousetrap they the the victor mousetrap they they've had it for uh for a bit i think they've had that product for a year or two but no network until helium helium's expansion was big enough you know so now that the ecosystem and all the community have really gone out and created this network victor can see success in this now that's like a huge example again of the usefulness of this network victor mousetrap is perfect it's a great technology that would not work if there was no helium network without the people's network and everyone becoming essentially a cell tower that thing won't work because it needs to connect cheaply right it's a mouse trap for christ's sake why have a data plan to help right makes no sense right so that's that's a great one airlie is another one airlie is a air quality sensor um i i don't know if you remember like last summer parts of the country were on fire maybe most of the country it was insane and air quality becomes a real issue like you should you go outside or not should you wear a mask or not wear a mask um because breathing in particles in your lungs too much probably bad for you i'm not i'm no doctor but it doesn't seem like a good thing to do well if you had air quality sensors out there telling you the aqis and you know it's severe or really bad then don't go outside or prepare yourself before you do that that's also a sensor that needs a low-cost network that's everywhere and then we've got some pretty cool um use cases that i i i really like like nobel system especially in cities where parking is difficult so in la there's a uh there's a neighborhood in l.a called huntington park near huntington beach they're the the public parking system structures now all have these little i want to say pucks they're like hockey pucks on the parking spaces that's all lorawan and they're just talking to healing hotspots and telling you know telling the the digital displays if there's parking or not parking on that level very tight it just saves time everyone's always fighting for parking in cities i don't know if that's a problem in kansas city it's a problem everywhere else in cities downtown yeah yeah right especially during football games yeah i love that and then the the last one i think that's crucial is is water water as an application water management water leak detection so a company called nowi has a really smart water sensor that checks boilers and water heaters for apartment complexes even toilets because and we found this to be true globally water seems to be the most precious resource that we kind of take for granted we only talk about it but there's a finite supply of drinking water clean water and if we just let it leak away and evaporate that's a shame because we may not have that water forever and so water conservation at least ensuring that your boiler is not leaking your water heater is not leaking your toilet's not leaking i mean that that's wasted water just if you can prevent that right that's half the battle and the rest is everything else related to the environment but water management is crucial in every single city every town that you know we talk to so many companies that's that's been the number one application for a network like this is that we could we make it so that a water sensor in any apartment complex anywhere on any floor like your mouse traps just connects and it just works super cheap runs on battery for years and you don't need to think about it worry about it until it alerts you right change your phone all of a sudden know what's going on oh there's a water leak on you know third floor you know room 22. well great go fix it yep yeah and i mean it saves a lot in damage as well i mean water damage is pretty massive definitely um so this one is uh i think we kind of covered some of it but i guess if you can just like sum it up in a in a quick way so um how would you respond to those that are on the fence or not fully understanding helium so it could be in the sense of you know why do it support it or i'm on the fence i don't know if i should get the miner yeah i think i think fundamentally you you have to ask yourself a question which is do you want to own and operate a cell tower if it only costs you 400 bucks like would you want to do that um yes it mines there is an incentive tie to it right there's there's certainly some excitement about that but that's not that's not the end game right that's just that's just an incentive um the fundamental question becomes do you want to do this do you want to do it long term because once you do it like we all the people's network need you to be there like you can't just do and disappear right you need to keep doing it and like anything else it takes commitment you know learn about it watch youtube videos from jimmy like you got to learn how to maintain and operate a network because that's what you can become you're going to become a self a cell tower and so how how do you do that well the better you do it then the more rewards you get and it's just like anything else in life right no no different and so you'll see on the on our discord channel under antennas i mean there's some rigged out antennas some souped up systems right people on roofs people putting up like massive towers and putting antennas on top i mean there's some hardcore people out there that's awesome because those are the folks who are committed long term and they get it beyond like the incentive right but the incentive gets you going but they're committed because they want to be they want to be an independent cell tower they want to provide roaming services to at t and verizon and get a cut of all that right why not what why this is the people's network right this is the right type of technology at the right time with the right audience and the right need to do it and so i think i think that's fundamentally what they should think about forget about all the other noise i know there's a big crypto component to it it's exciting but dude crypto it was like very volatile man it goes up and it goes down who knows honestly who knows i don't even know like i'm not a crypto person i i appreciate it because it gives us the ability to create networks that we're very specific this whole thing is very very specific to the utility of creating wireless networks using the people like leveraging the people right so that everyone owns it you got to decide that is that for you or not because it's not for you then don't do it i hate saying that but if it's not for you it's okay it's not for everybody if you don't want to do that you don't want to manage and operate a network and you don't want to offer roaming services to large telcos and get a cut of that you don't do it it's okay if i can go do something else there's lots of stuff out there exactly if i could put an antenna in my house that i place that i can look at that would help the service of my phone throughout the house yeah that's the bingo game for me exactly bingo yeah yeah and i think and that's why jimmy we try to make this super easy we try to like helium when we first started with the helium hotspot i don't know if you ever got one of those the white one with the black ring like we try to make it look look cool right the app i mean our engineers that built the app like bones and coco and the team man it's beautiful like the app is beautiful it's we try to make it as easy and as intuitive to use um our guiding our north star is always like hey could could my mom operate this thing like was she know what to do like we try to simplify complex technology into like super simple you know processes like intuitive and we we're like really trying to strive to be like the iphone or the you know the apple of of tech and we want to be like the couple of crypto just super easy you know um because we do want everyone to say gosh that sounds intimidating i don't know if i want to operate and maintain a cell tower it just sounds like mind-blowing like i've never thought i'd want to do that but then they see the product oh that's a cool looking product check out the app oh it's so intuitive it's not that hard right if we can get there bridge the gap of technology make it super intuitive our hope is that everybody's moms are like oh yeah i never thought i could do it but i can right that's the point we need everything like that yeah um okay so question 10 this is one that i kind of added in a little late just because i actually merged two questions um and this is one that you know i thought of it's something that a few people have brought up and asked me in in past questions and it's when you when you set up your hotspot you assert the location and so i know that mine are usually they're always accurate within 50 meters 100 meters you always want to be within the 50 meters um but when people notice other locations performing fantastically is there's can people spoof or mislocate for personal benefit without the actual benefit placement for the network uh is there an actions in place for that to has it already happened where you can't do it anymore and to make sure that it doesn't happen in the future for spoofing yeah exactly yeah and this question is a good one because it's related to people who've been trying to game the system or cheat the system by not you know not actually putting a hot spot where they claim it to be but it's just like a pile of hot spots in their like living room or in their bedroom or in the closet i would say you know early days we really struggled with that it's a very hard problem to solve but having said that the blockchain system itself has gotten a lot smarter since the early days it's learned quite a bit about what signals how signals really operate it's really physics driven and how to interpret those things in a way that has high efficacy that hey this is actually legitimate or hey this is actually cheating and so our anti-cheat code in our anti gaming code that's in the system that's built in is learning it's a learning system and i have to say it's done a fantastic job with its efficacy we don't we don't want to penalize people inadvertently right and so that that's gone really well i think it's it's an it's a never-ending battle to stop cheaters i don't you know cheaters are are cheaters and they're smart and they're gonna constantly come at us i i fully expect it um but you know we have a bunch of smart people too and you know we're focused on anti-cheating and anti-gaming so stuff is built in and once once you develop things that are built in and it's able to learn over time you know you might be able to game the system for a little bit but eventually you're you're going to be weeded out and so it's already in there okay so all you cheaters beware all right so um we've actually kind of touched on this a little bit but there's only one portion of it that i kind of want to focus on so this is question 11. it was it was pertaining to continued growth so does helium have room for growth for years to come for the use cases the partnerships the network competition is a big one and then minor so i was looking for the word adaptability i was looking for how adaptive is helium when it comes down to really we'll talk about the last couple because we already talked about everything else with partnerships network things like that competition and and the miners themselves people were curious if the miners would need to be replaced need to be updated and i've personally actually been asked to show something off that is a competitor of helium for which i'm not interested so what is your adaptability for the competition and then the miners if they need to be placed a few years let me talk about the competition first and then talk about the miners so when it comes to competition i have to say like a year ago year and a half ago i don't think helium really knew what our role was other than building a network and getting a bunch of people to do it with us with this incentive model we didn't really know like well what are we going to do like what's our role in all this and that didn't really hit us until like i would say like eight nine months ago when things really started taking off we realized for this to really work helium has to be truly open source like we can't be rent seeking like we can't go oh you want this i got to charge you for it you know oh you want to you want to build a healing compatible gateway oh you got to pay me and i'll share my designs with you we can't do that because those are barriers for adoption in that case a barrier for spreading supply right and so we we really had a change of mindset like you know like revelation like hey don't forget the mission the mission is to build the biggest ubiquitous open low-cost network in the world because we got to do that but we can't do it alone we need the people's network we need the community we also need other manufacturers we need other people to do it that's how we stop building the healing hotspot because i think by building a healing hospital like we had to do in the beginning because no one believed us honestly people we talked to others hey would you want to build this they looked at us like what cryptocurrency get out of here you're a scammer did you do an ico no we're not that kind right but no one believed us and i i don't blame them because of all the bad rap that happened early days in 2017 but we really we really kept trying we said look guys we might have to build the hot spot to go just to to get started because nobody believed us and we just had to do it but once people believe us we should stop and we should open source at all like we should just stop building it because we don't we don't want to compete in that business but there are others that are good at it that's what they do is build hot spots let them do it like give them everything they need help them along right like our app are i don't think in the world of laura wan there's a consumer-facing product an app that's that slick that intuitive and easy we we probably could have kept it and like charge people for it but we didn't again we're not competing we we want everyone to do this because we have to make it frictionless right we have to make everything buttery don't put up barriers right that's the mindset shift and so that's not where the that's not how we make money like we you know we can't do that so okay open source the app make it available for all of the manufacturers especially the lorawan folks and the laura folks who haven't sold to consumers before like imagine like i hate pointing bobcat like this but imagine if bob had to build an app also for consumers dude no all right let's give them the app it's cool man like just do it for them make them successful right and now it's been our mentality and that's really that's really helped us i think see the light on all the other components like working with victor mouse traps making the onboarding on to use the network very simple in open source like we have something called helium console helium console is a back-end tool that people that want to use the network for transmitting data it is an easy tool for them to actually just go and use and get devices like victor mousetraps onto the network in a matter of minutes super simple right that that doesn't exist that readily in the world that we are in iot and telco so we open sourced it make make give it everybody give it away anyone can just take that code and build up build their own onboarding provisioning capability we want that we're not competing in that and by like having that revelation we have other what they call traditional like competitors these private lower way networks they're coming they're going to use the healing network why because we're not competing we're not trying to charge people money to go use our network it's not even our network jimmy it's your network it's the people's network so really open right just really be open source about it and so i think a year ago that wasn't sort of where our mindset was and we really had to shift like we really have to understand that for this to really take off we really have to embrace open source and we have to live it meaning that we can't charge people anything like there's no charge it's the blockchain the fees are all within the blockchain and that's what it is we can't change that it's based on the community it's based on the hip we talked about right like that's how things change we can't change it we got to give it up and that's really made a world of difference for us jimmy because that has disarmed all the competitors that once thought we were trying to compete because really we're not we all we've done really is created a lorawan network that's usable for anybody even if you have your own private network or you have another public network like things network use art you use ours it's it's all open take whatever you want we're not charging a thing we'll help you we even help you technically out on onboarding all of it you know and that's the message you know if they're watching i hope they hear this because we want you to use a network it's available it belongs to the people it belongs to everybody everyone's excited and they're in it for the long haul because they want to build a network they're incented to do so and they're going to do it for the long haul and now now that's that's enabling us to go and try to get people to roam get existing technologies just to roam on that network and that idea i think is really clicking really taking off and that's going to drive this so from a competition side i would argue on the wireless networking side we don't really have any competitors i've seen some like crypto competitors out there i'm not going to give them any airtime so i won't talk about their names you know who i'm talking about but they're charging people five thousand six thousand dollars for like a lorawan gateway or whatever they call theirs in the mining is the rewards are like split equally and there's no proof of coverage it's just this random time split like what is that dude come on that's garbage man well you can quote me on that dude that's stupid like why would anyone do that why would i pay five grand for something and i think i'm mining ethereum or mining whatever their thing is it's not it's not network creation right remember this is a utility like it goes back to purpose what is the purpose of doing this guys purpose is you want to actually create a network that's useful and the better you do it the guys with the towers and on the rooftops the more you earn like you put the effort in you make yours more useful then the more you are rewarded that's just like i don't know what is that that's fair that's just how it is right but unless you've got a true purpose and your system and your incentive model is built for that purpose and it's digestible and it's like you can read the docs and it's open source i mean you know i just look guys people have ulterior motives everyone does and just be careful you just read read the stuff and get educated and make make the right decisions yeah okay and then so for like the miners is there any type of updates these would need to have or yeah people are just wondering like if they would just crap out after five years for continuously running things like that yeah some of the old miners have sd cards in them that's the only part i would say could crap out everything else is sort of electronics and probably there's no moving parts really so i don't see it crapping out but sd cards sd cards by the way guys are a solid state memory solid state memory when you read and write on it a lot eventually wear out it's like it's something that just wear and tears like breaks just wear and tears and when that occurs you need to replace the sd card so if you have an og hotspot and you're not sure what's wrong with it just email support helium.com and we'll help diagnose it and if it's an sd card issue we'll tell you what to do it's not that hard there's a way to go ahead go and upgrade all that um i'm gonna get crushed for talking about this probably but that's truthfully that's that's the only thing i can think of is um yeah but but again i can't like predict it is that going to be five years or ten years or or one year i don't know because i don't know i'm not an expert on solid state you know memory i don't know and really when it comes down to sd cards with my with my years of experiences it's really depending if you're moving that sd card you know from something that is this powerful to something that's this powerful to this powerful and as you move it from phone to phone to phone the internal storage is getting so much quicker faster than what that sd card was and that's what corrupts the sd card and makes it spin too fast so if it's in the same machine it shouldn't really crap out like what the micro sd cards did with let's say in samsung phones if you bought it two years ago if you're on a brand new phone from today it would be toast in five minutes oh i see yep yeah i mean you're not no one's moving sd cards in the helium hospital hopefully yeah for sure and the machines are staying the same so yeah they'll be okay um yeah so yeah well you know what the other thing is the plugs just just to be like i'm just super transparent the plug like the outlets like the plug like if you find that you have power like problems like it's not powering on check the plug because those those are just random plugs you can buy on amazon or aliexpress or whatever i didn't know where we sourced it um and that those could go out they're like two and a half watts not not much but you know i i would i would say check that first and foremost if you're if you have if you had a original og helium hotspot for over a year a year and a half and all of a sudden it's not powering up anymore my first guess would be it's the power the the actual brick so look at the sticker go follow the specs on the sticker and order one on amazon it's like two bucks it's cheap guys if you want email support to make sure and they'll tell you if it's okay get that exchange that see if that fixes it if that doesn't fix it email support um maybe it's sd card no no got it um so question 12 we talked about it so if you if you feel that it's all covered then we can move on uh so staking with validators it's it's huge news um so what exactly does that allow and open up yeah so think i i think the best way to think about this is staking on a validator moves it removes a lot of processing work away from the hot spots and into in like a cloud server to store the entire blockchain and that by the way if there was an sd card issue that solves the sd card issue because the og hotspots won't need the blockchain on the sd card anymore they just it won't it just you'll go and look it up on it on the closest like validator server right that's the genius behind all this i can't wait for the validator to show up guys because then you'll stop emailing support because i just caused the freaking support storm probably but but that's important right so imagine like like like i said again 200 000 hotspots trying to talk to each other all the time to reconcile the records goes away moves it to the cloud with servers that are beefy right and they're predictable and they're connected to the internet on you know fiber and they're just they're talking to each other and it's not 200 000 it's like 200 to like 2 000 i don't know how many right whatever at least it's not 200 000. so it's a lot faster it's more predictable which means your mining is better so validators are crucial for all of us because the mining will be on time no more like hey guys anybody else notice the mining hasn't happened in the last you know two hours i hate it i hate not the question i hate that that happens right so we all want validators please it's it's on testnet right now they're doing a great job all the all the volunteers on testnet thank you without you we wouldn't get it this would not happen because all the stuff they've been doing the testing is incredible they're breaking it all the time which is what you want you want to break in the test net not the mainnet so question 13 and then we just have two more left so uh any plans to make the network more decentralized than it is now yeah great great one so there's a foundation today decentralized wireless foundation um that that is the foundation that is taking custody of all of our intellectual property we open source it all um they are the custodians of it now they are the custodians of our community and they drive the governance and regulation and the um the votes they they like put together the rule sets for all of that so the community feels like they can be involved all the time um more needs to happen and part of it is helium migrating more of it to the foundation the other part is the foundation staffing staffing up accordingly so they can take on more um and that's just the process that we're going through it's going to take some time it takes time to hire the right people it takes time to move you know to move a function from healing him to the foundation so that just takes it takes time i would expect to see over the next six months a lot of changes where the decentralization of the blockchain itself of the intellectual property that we've created that we've open sourced you'll see a lot of a lot of rollouts that's happening i'm kind of tipping tipping some stuff here hiring on the foundation side they're stacking up moving all the components you'll start to see a lot of that in six months let's see this is a journey i'll tell you that so far there's two questions left and this is this is a journey that i am enjoying um so question 14. uh this is just we dug so deep with so many things with this so this is really something that's a little bit more fun so what is the biggest tip or the biggest knowledge nugget about helium the miners antennas placement just one thing that you can share with everybody one little nugget of anything that you want what would you say yeah i i would i'm gonna try to like help all the newbies and the folks that are thinking what do i how do i do this in the world of signals radio waves all right that that is the thing we're dealing with here whether it's 900 megahertz with lorawan or three gigahertz with 5g i know these are like terminology it's a lot of terms a lot of technical terms but in the world of radio waves and signals you can google this the best outcome like the best results are always higher and unobstructed the higher you can go when i say unobstructed first and foremost no metal like you do not want a metal fence around your house or around your hot spot metal is like the kryptonite to wireless technology metal mesh metal metal fences mesh like meshing bad aluminum foil bad all right so if that's the kryptonite to wireless signals to what we're trying to do then you want to make sure there's no metal and then you want like think of like an airport like an airplane the airplane needs a runway right to take off signals need the same thing it's physics they need a runway to take off so if you can get it high and you can give it like a clear runway you've got a better shot of hearing other hot spots to do proof of coverage witnesses and challenges or picking up a lime scooter or like a bike down the road that's sending a signal he'll hit you like you'll hear it and you'll get the credit for that so hire and think like runway that means like don't put a wall don't put don't put obstruction no tree no wall like like give it like the ability to see the sky like just you know so we always suggest higher windows glass is okay like windows are okay also water don't put it in the water because water is an insulator however water reflects signals so if you live near a lake you live near bay the thing of beauty guys so if you're liking for example manhattan's a great example if you're in middle manhattan or you're in brooklyn and they have those rivers whatever you call them next to it forget the names hudson river or something dude it's insane it's awesome like it's great because the signal will hit a water and just bounce it just keeps traveling so it gives it more distance it's like a runway for signals all right does that work is that cool i like that all right that's really good and then so question 15 this is yeah this is the last one this is actually one that was asked by a viewer from my hype video uh so again thank you for everybody who asked a lot of questions i don't know if you went through any of the the questions but there's a lot to dissect there a lot to the digest a lot to go through there's a ton and there's so many good questions and i wanted to go with one that wasn't really in the whole theme of everything that i've written down with all the other 14. and it came from what so it came from nicodemus robles i've already emailed um so he knows that he won so thank you for the question the question is if you're able to go back to day one of the project what's the biggest thing you would do differently that's a great question and ah you know there's there are moments in time you know when i when i think about this and i chat with our co-workers um friends at work there's several things i wish we didn't you know put our shoes into like stepping on poop or something but i have to tell you everything bad that happened to us like all the mistakes that we went through is really what drove us to where we are now so we can't like if i say i wish i didn't do this we wish we didn't go down that path maybe maybe we would have saved ourselves some time some grief maybe some money but i don't think we would end up where we are now maybe and so i i would i would have to say nothing you know i wouldn't change a thing because the right people are with us today the people that should be with us that want to be part of helium is with us we have the right community um we had lots of debates as an example like all the other crypto guys are doing icos all the other crypto guys are like pre-mining they all seem to be driving lambos who who doesn't want a lambo right but it just seems so sketchy it seems so scamming like that's not us and so we didn't do it and i'm glad we didn't we're not like that we're not that's not why we're doing this right um i'm glad we stuck to who we are we we're not gonna you know we're not gonna drive lambos and we're not gonna be you know be like them and wherever they are now on the beach somewhere that's okay like i said this is like we got 20 more years probably it took like you know 1800 years to become a big company well if we can do it in 10 or 20 dude we crushed it right with 40 people and 50 000 community members that's insane we probably hit a couple million by then but you know maybe maybe 100 million people i don't know but like i just feel like you know what it's like i don't think i would change anything because i think if we change something in the beginning we may not be where we are now uh and a lot of decisions we've made are fundamental to who we are like the moral character the the ethics in which we believe in we don't ever talk about that stuff you know as as friends and colleagues but we just it's just how we behave this is who we are you know i get i get mad sometimes on discord and i'll go off and blow up on people who you know are rude i i met poor showing on my part but that's who i am i get very passionate about what we do and i don't like it when people are rude to us or disrespect us without without like checking their facts without checking the data right it really pisses me off when people claim oh we're scammers or in the early days i'll tell you facebook we had some facebook ads running because we're trying to sell hot spots right we're just trying anything we could to sell hot spots and i see the comments like oh you guys are scammers you're trying to scam us out of our money why does this thing cost 500 bucks or 400 bucks i'm like good lord i and i i engaged you know i'm not a social media influencer jimmy i don't i don't know not to engage like don't engage with those right i did and got these like battles for what you know at the time you know what i can't blame them we were nobody we didn't know if this would work sure maybe they're not so wrong to think that maybe we are scammers but we weren't but fundamentally it's not who we are and it hurt it hurt my feelings i shouldn't have let that hurt my feelings but it did and you know i made those mistakes making those comments and fighting with them online is stupid you know i would i regret doing that that's probably the one regret if anything is blowing up on you know on facebook comments or discord you know it's not who i am i'm sorry if you're rude to me i should just let it go you know if you call us a scammer i should let it go but man we're not and it pisses me off when people do make those claims without doing their homework and there's no facts behind it just like to say say stupid things they really that that i'm getting angry even talking about it now yeah welcome welcome to the internet welcome to uh the comment section i i try to stay out of it i i go in it just to make sure that everything's fine and see if there is anything good but a lot of times you just gotta you gotta move on it's yeah it's the comment section is crazy and and i just wanna end this one you know this is the closing i just want to end it with something that just came to my mind before we came on which was the names where do the names come from i feel like it's it's a rap generation like a rap name generator you know what i mean i'm like looking at all my names and my hot spots i'm like where is this coming from like yeah this is so cool i think this is bones idea um bones is one of our developers i call him a designer because it's beautiful he developed he develops beautiful things he's not a designer he gets upset when i call him that so he watches this to this point he'll hear it um right but he what he did was this he thought to make it fun like in the beginning like instead of just making it hotspot 1 or hotspot 2 hotspot 3 every hotspot has a unique address on the blockchain and so when i say in the unique address it's like a hexadecimal thing it's like h 5 4 it's just long numbers right so instead of showing those numbers because our goal was to make this so that our parents like a mom and dad could install this dude they're not going to know what the hell a hexadecimal address is let alone be able to write that thing down so so bones that is a great idea why don't we take the hexadecimal or these unique numbers the strings break them apart because they are unique and assign them two adjectives in an animal name you know two adjectives big blue bird right white you know stingy eel like random names right and and if we he thought if we did that and it was it's randomly generated by the blockchain if we just built that in there it's kind of a cool like thing like you have your own pet like your hotspot is like your pet essentially and everything everyone is unique and if you had a little pet you might care like you might just care more about it you know you might be more engaged and more involved is that that's the whole premise behind it just give it a cool you know two cool adjectives in an animal name and maybe you'll be happier with it like you just it's you know i i use the analogy of uh tamagotchis when i was growing up there's this little keychain it's from japan it's like a little egg and you have to push buttons and engage and they would hatch from an egg to like a little chick and then you have it on your keychain and they just kind of live with you and they have a chirp and stuff it's like a little tamagotchi but it's a helium hot spot so that's why it's it's i love it yeah i'm glad you guys enjoy it i love it people love it um it's it's it's a it's your pet it's part of the family you know then you care about it well yeah i thought it was hilarious i mean i you know when i think of where all mine are at i i can imagine and visualize the name at that location so yeah yep it's definitely working um but yeah that's that's it man i mean this like i said it before it was a journey you know it's been a good hour 50 minutes jesus but anyways thank you so much for being here answering all these questions i mean there's 15 questions uh and i mean i'm a sponge soaking it all in hopefully everybody else liked it as well picked it all up um but thank you so much for the time and and to uh to be here on channel hey my pleasure jimmy thanks for having me um i hope to be on again and when i look at your sign next time it's probably a million a million subscribers behind you there i hope so i'm sure i'm sure it's gonna happen i hope so thank you thanks for the chance to tell our story all right thanks man i appreciate it well thanks everybody if you guys do appreciate this video give it a big thumbs up uh write any questions comments below the video hit the subscribe button if you haven't already subscribed make sure you guys check out helium.com i'll have all the links below the video inside description if you guys are interested with you know anything that we talked about a lot of the docs a lot of the information will be below in the description i'll make sure it's all there um but outside of that i'll see you guys [Music] later [Music] you

Channel: Jimmy is Promo

Views: 141,290

Rating: 4.9333491 out of 5

Keywords: Jimmy Promo, helium hotspot, helium network, the peoples network, helium hnt, helium token, helium cryptocurrency, hnt mining, helium news, hnt news, internet of things, helium blockchain, frank mong, frank mong interview, helium and 5g, helium 5g, helium 5g miner, helium 5g hotspot, helium halving, Helium half, 5g Helium Hotspot

Id: ETObssOnoOA

Length: 105min 37sec (6337 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Obvious-Mode-1451]

I've done a lot of research and reading about helium, but I've never heard the whole back story on the how the company really got started! Here's a great interview really worth listening to. It definitely makes me feel like it's a great company to invest in to. 👍☺️

[u/Freewash007]

I agree. Great interview with COO of Helium Inc. what about drinking every time he said dude. I love his laid back personality. Video is only 11 hours old and it runs almost 2 hours.