Hello, everyone. Welcome back to episode two
of the Blockchain Bay podcast. My name is Chris
and I'm co -hosting with Network Bits. And today
we would like to showcase our interview with
Travis, who is a big member in the Helium community.
He gave his insights on everything that has happened.
And we talked briefly about the perfect storm
that was Helium and how it all played out. We
hope you enjoy. We have Travis, the man. Joining
us, Travis, thanks for being here. Always a pleasure.
Thanks for having me. Of course. So, you want
to start off with your background? Because we
have a lot of viewers here who haven't seen you
before. And like I said, if we get into anything
that you're not comfortable talking about, if
it's something you can't disclose, just let me
know. We'll shake it off and go from there. Yeah.
My name is Travis. I live down in Texas, just
north of Houston. And I run and have run for,
I guess, a number of years now, the Hackster
Houston meetup, which is just a group of hardware
hackers. We get together on a biweekly basis
and hack on hardware and got into LoRaWAN a number
of years back. And that kind of carried me into
my own kind of LLC firm and then over to Helium
eventually and then to Nova. And now I'm. Still
in the loreway game, just kind of looking around
at what looks like interesting things right now.
Excellent. And for those of you who didn't catch
it, so Travis did work for Helium. So he has
a lot of experience and insight in this topic.
Chris, you might as well give a background on
yourself. Real quick, Travis, can you get me
the link to your hack pages so I can post them?
both in the comments and once this video goes
up i'll post them in the description i want you
to you know yeah background for me i i started
out in crypto in like 2017 uh mining z cash and
ethereum and i thought ethereum sucked because
every time i i mined it the price went down yada
yada anyway i've been in the space for quite
some time but i didn't get into everything until
probably um January of 2020, maybe a little bit
later, I started watching Red Panda Mining videos.
Shout out to him. And Voscoin videos again, which
I started watching back in 2017. So it was nice
to see them making content. And it got me into
GPUs. And then I found Helium. And then I met
everybody in the community now and hoping to
just continue growing here. Yeah. Right now,
I'm making Joe's logos for him. Yeah. Chris has
a YouTube channel, Chris Bagnell. Be sure to
subscribe to it if you haven't already. And of
course, although many of you probably heard it
a thousand times already, I'm Joe. I host the
Network Bits channel. My background is Cisco
network engineer, infrastructure, and information
technology. I got into crypto in 2017, 2018.
when all that was it was a bull market back then
and died off and i didn't really continue to
pursue it over those coming years but right around
when wall street bets was happening is when i
started to get back into it and i knew after
the having it typically kicks off so like all
right i'm going head first got into trading was
looking for something of mine trying to figure
out something where i didn't need a gpu didn't
need you know um a6 FPGA is the crazy hardware.
And I found Helium. And I was like, wow, this
makes so much sense. I know what IoT is. We hear
about it at least on a monthly basis, if not
a weekly basis at work. So I was looking at all
sorts of YouTube content and just thought none
of this is really given the good technical detail
that's needed for people to understand. jumped
into youtube mostly covered helium brought out
other types of crypto projects and here we are
and i i enjoy what we do here on youtube we have
a outstanding community um i've made a lot of
friends i've gotten to experience a lot of things
firsthand and we've learned a lot that's the
most important thing and i always try to bring
what i learn just front and center and give it
to you guys for free i don't have courses to
offer you i really don't use affiliate links
so um i just appreciate when you guys share the
content that i make to get it out to everyone
that's the best thing that you can do to say
thank you all right i'm going to post travis
uh website link and pin it in the comments if
you guys want to check it out I would greatly
appreciate that. So where do you guys want to
start? I'll let Travis, if you want to pick,
you're the special guest of the hour. Thanks
for showing up randomly. No, thanks for having
me, man. Yeah, as far as that site, it's not
developed really at all. It's a site that we
use to share documents. Everything's been paid
for, so please don't reshare that or put it out
on the net. But if you want to use it like a
lending library, there's a lot of good books
on there that I kind of treat it like a bookshelf.
You're more than welcome to borrow them off my
bookshelf. Just, you know, put them back in order.
Cool. Appreciate it. As far as things to talk
about, man, I don't know. We've been working
on, I mean, we've had the holidays recently.
I've been playing around with Chirpstack a little
bit of late and playing around with, you know,
boxes that, you know, build, you know, these.
like pelican boxes and stuff. I've been working
with those and I'm trying to get those in good
shape where I can throw them in the back of the
truck and get out and put up a LoRaWAN network.
So, yeah, I'm down to talk about really anything
the callers want to talk about. Awesome. And
we will do some call -ins later on in the stream
if you guys are interested. Certainly, we'll
probably keep these ones to five, ten minutes
depending on the discussion. I'm not expecting
a lot of callers because we typically don't have
a whole lot of people watching, but we want to
make it through the content and keep the things
churning. So, Chris, is there a topic you'd like
to pick when it comes to lessons learned with
crypto? Otherwise, I'll lead it off. I'll let
you take it away. All right. A lot of the same
ideas. And I'll start it with what I would tell
most of my family and friends who aren't into
crypto. that we maybe would talk about it over
the dinner table or we're just general discussion
they know that um you know waist deep chest deep
in crypto and they might see it as kind of crazy
and i say well and they think a lot of it's a
scam or a ponzi i tell them look i think that
about 95 of the projects are scams are not really
worth their time not worth the value that you
see the tokens going for on the exchanges? And
maybe the ones that aren't a scam, maybe there's
a lot of good ideas out there you have to consider.
Is there actually market demand for that product?
Are they actually solving a problem that, you
know, it needs to be solved? Or are they looking,
they're a solution in search of a problem is
one of the best ways to describe it. um that
is that's what i really start off with and that's
why i'm very selective about the type of content
that i make on here and i do tend to think that
there are some projects out there that they are
even though they have like a company behind them
that's been in business for many years a lot
of these companies see the crypto craze and say
well how about we apply a cryptocurrency to us
to garner more attention and then we'll sell
our hardware and figure out something with tokens
and whether it works or not we're still selling
more hardware and if it fails it's just another
failed project who cares there are people out
there who do that and that's one of the things
i look for so when i'm trying to search for a
cryptocurrency project i'm going through all
this analysis thinking Is this a scam? Is this
legit? I don't really put a whole lot of weight
into the fact that just that company's been around
for years. Thoughts? I got to say, the companies
I look at now are companies that are driving
utility tokens or something that actually does
something besides allow. people to mine and to
make money or tokens off of the fact that they're
involved in the project. This actually reaches
out to a wider aspect of people who actually
get something out of the project, even if they're
not directly involved in the mining aspect or
in the building of the project. Yeah, I like
that. Now, Travis, what's your thoughts on the
term Tippins? token incentivized public infrastructure
networks? To be straight up, I don't know enough
about it to really speak definitively on it.
I know Sierra has a show that she's working on
now in conjunction with some other folks in the
industry. And it's interesting. It's something
I'm learning about, but it's not something I
can speak on. Yeah, I like the idea of Really,
I like anything networking. I mean, I like blockchain.
I think it's a phenomenal solution. It's certainly
interesting and solves an issue. But it's a solution
to a problem, right? You need a distributed ledger,
something that's decentralized and cannot be
easily manipulated or, you know, coerced. Yeah.
So that's enter Bitcoin. Now, blockchain technology.
has existed back to the 90s, but it's evolved
as any other technology. And that's where Bitcoin
came about. They've taken numerous concepts from
different technologies and combined it into one.
And now we have the resilient leader in the cryptocurrency
space known as Bitcoin. But when we say tip -ins,
token incentivized public infrastructure networks,
that is something that allows the general person
to use that solution, that product, for connectivity
or to solve some sort of issue or possibly host
some sort of service. So the tip -ins that we
think of, first one that comes to mind is Helium,
right? We have other ones, Pollen Mobile, XNet.
One that maybe you guys aren't as familiar with,
it's still in the infancy, but Foam. Foam .space
is their website. disclaimer i did some consulting
for them but i think it is certainly that one
is awesome very uh sophisticated group a solution
i think is needed um you have other stuff that
maybe is more overlapping with web3 right so
flux flux labs run on flux .io is their website
i believe so trying to rival what amazon web
services google cloud is doing where you can
host the Load for the website that you want to
run or some sort of service that you got going
on. You can host a game server if you'd want.
And other similar projects, threefold. There
was a few other ones that I can't think of off
the top of my head there. But ones that maybe
just do simple services like storage, like Chia.
C Prime. Yeah, C Prime is another good storage.
the storage network, and then you have other
data -based ones that are more data collection
or data streaming. So you have Streamr, S -T
-E, sorry, S -T -R -E -A -M -R. You have PiFi,
one Chris and I have talked about. PlanetWatch,
I'm not a fan, but I know a lot of you know what
it is and have looked into it. You could consider
HiveMapper one. That's a product I'm probably
participating in. So there's a lot in the space.
GeoNet is another one that's getting a lot of
talk recently. Definitely. And then you have
maybe decentralized VPNs, right? So Mysterium,
Deeper, not a fan of Deeper. There's the Boring
Protocol, Orchard. And a litany of other ones,
PKT, DEMO, someone mentioned in the comments,
another one. And for all of you who are just
showing up, welcome to the chat. We're going
to talk about lessons learned in crypto. It's
really just going to be, we're going to talk
about what we like about crypto, what we've learned
over the years. We have Travis T here, super
knowledgeable gentleman in the tech world. But
yeah, I like Tippins a lot. Now, there's also
Web3, right? So we've talked about concepts of
Web3 in a separate stream, Chris and I. So you
have that one identity, the autonomous identity
that you're in charge of. You're no longer letting...
apple or google manage that identity to buy services
you also have autonomy over your funds in your
wallet you have maybe nfts for verification or
proof of ownership or something and then it's
getting away from this centralized model where
it's the same companies that are hosting the
same infrastructure trying to bring back um well
trying to offload that to people who want to
host that infrastructure for people who want
to stand up tip -ins or host that service in
exchange for earnings, right? Yeah. Another part
that is not so talked about, but the tracking
and data harvesting that's done currently on
Web2, something that we're hoping to make a push
to go away in Web3. Because you are the product
in Web2. I mean, you are what is being sold in
Web2. That's why your Gmail is free, folks. Yeah.
I think what we're really seeing here, Joe, is
especially, and I'm talking from the perspective
of the Helium network now, but this network,
this LoRaWAN network has been built up that is
global and is usable by anyone. It doesn't matter
if you're setting up gateways or not. You can
use this network for a very low data credit fee.
And this is something that we're starting to
see companies really build upon this. And so
it's not just, you know, are you part of Helium?
But Helium is just the infrastructure that you're
building off of. And so we're seeing these great
ideas that are kind of springing to life that
are built on top of what's been going on for
the past three years, you know? And I think that's
important to look at at this point as we see,
you know, it doesn't pay as much or pay as much,
whatever. to roll out new gateways, especially
in urban areas. You know, most of the growth
and the H &T, you know, earnings are through,
you know, kind of more rural areas. And so these
companies that are building on top of this established
helium network using LoRaWAN and now, you know,
other protocols that they're building into is
really critical and important to look at. Yeah.
And I think one of the greatest feats of helium
was kicking down that door of crowd -hosted infrastructure
bringing it to the forefront of the crypto space
saying we have a new model in the business arena
that works for the people this is how you implement
it and for for whatever people want to say about
helium they were one of the first to to do this
especially at that massive scale yeah so You
know, there's going to be mistakes. There's going
to be misunderstandings. There's going to be
a lot of lessons learned that come from it. But
the important part is that they've opened the
door and it's never going back. The toothpaste
is out of the tube. And Helium and, of course,
you, Travis, you had a massive part in that.
What they did for the crypto space was it brought
us years into the future. Yeah, and I think it
opened up a lot of folks' minds to what can be
done here. And unfortunately, and I'm going to
bring this up, in Australia, there's been some
conflict as far as, you know, frequencies are
concerned. You know all about this, Joe. But,
you know, a lot of folks over there are looking
at other networks to move to. And I think that's
an important topic of conversation that should
be discussed out in the open. And I know I'm
involved in a lot of conversations kind of back
on Discord, but I'd like to see that out in the
open, you know? I see a comment here. New England
Crypto, are we playing? What's Joe going to smash
tonight? And that's in reference to... To a helium
competitor known as MXC, which is a massive Ponzi,
in my opinion. Now, one of the things I think
we should talk about, Travis, and like I said,
if we get too crazy, I don't want to get you
in trouble. I don't want to be negative here.
We're going on lessons learned, right? Yeah.
I don't know why people are calling me during
live stream. They should know better. What I
do want to discuss, I actually want to make a
video about this. And the mania that was induced
in helium, I believe because it was like the
perfect storm of events that happened there.
Yeah. Including the pandemic, honestly. I mean,
I've got to throw that in there. Yeah. And, you
know, I talk about the price. Yeah, all the events
that took place during that time for that price
to happen. Now, this is something that you like
pay attention to now because we know what the
factors are that you're going to look for in
other projects. But I'll go through the list
fairly quickly here. The first one is the Bitcoin
halving, which typically kicks off that bull
run, that bull cycle. That's where you see an
insane spike in prices across the board with
crypto. And it's all altcoins. Everything other
than Bitcoin follows the trend of Bitcoin. But
the multiples of it, like whether it's going
to be a 10x or a 40x, come down to a lot of the
variables. that happen with that specific cryptocurrency
it's potential use and this is where i'm going
to get into all the factors why we've seen i
calculated earlier i think was like a 45x gain
over that year to the all -time high with helium
which was up there i mean which was yeah yeah
i mean i'm not saying numbers but everyone's
seen it yeah and um just just to go through like
the The reasons why now I do believe that a lot
of these are just these reasons I'm going to
give aside from the Bitcoin happening in the
bull market when they happen unto themselves,
when you're not inside a bull market, they're
really like micro trends, right? There's a small
bump in price, but there is nothing significant.
But in my opinion, and of course, not financial
advice, and I'm not an accountant who has done.
All the numbers in an Excel sheet. So I'm generalizing
here. But I think those micro trends really become
more of a multiplier. They become a bigger factor
in that price spike because there's a lot of
speculation during a bull cycle. And those are
reasons people get in and bring that pressure.
The first reason I would say is the use case
of Helium. It's in a multi -billion dollar, soon
to be trillion dollar economy, IoT. That's what
people keep saying, yeah. They look for the utility.
This is a viable project because it has a use
case that is understood, that already has products
on the market, but doesn't have that contiguous
network. I can pretty much turn this on in any
major city in the U .S. at least, you know, almost
around the world. And it's going to work regardless
of if I have deployed my own gateways or whatnot.
You know, I can set up a free console and have
my data being fed through on the Helium network
for next to nothing as far as data credits are
concerned. That never existed in the U .S. Like
large public LoRaWAN networks just were not here.
And now it's almost ubiquitous, which is pretty
amazing, man. I think that is the main thing
that happened with Helium. I think that, yes,
a lot of people got in early and they were earning
a lot of HNT. And that kind of went a little
public, a little social. People started talking
about it and people started realizing you couldn't
get minors. I mean, miners would be six months
out to even pull one in. And I think the rarity
of those or the fact that people weren't able
to get them made people want them more. Yes.
And you bring me to another one of my points.
Because of that demand, people said, OK, I can't
buy the equipment, but I think this token is
going to go. It's going to do a moonshot. So
I'm going to buy that. more further pressure
on the upward pressure on this the price on the
exchanges because of that then you also have
um the major listings on the exchanges those
major listings cause more people to be able to
access that token it was it's really a coin because
it has its native blockchain and and um you know
it It has native blockchain. That's what you
mine for, right? But it calls itself HNT, Helium
Network Token. But it will be a token when they
move to Solana, right? Well, I mean, it was L1
network, right, on the chain. But it wasn't traded
on many exchanges at all. In fact, in Texas,
you couldn't exchange it until Gate .io finally
opened up. And then they're like, oh, wait a
minute. No, we're not going to do that. Screw
the U .S. Talk to us privately and maybe you
can get your tokens back or whatever. But I don't
mean to be slanderous there. I'm not meaning
to. I'm just saying that's kind of what happened.
They said that, yes, we will be starting up a
gate .us and that will support New York state,
Texas, a lot of the states that were not supported
by any of Binance, any of the other major exchanges.
Being down here in Texas, you couldn't really
sell it. Yeah, that's unfortunate. But regardless,
because it became listed on the exchanges, more
upwards pressure on that price. You also have
a large amount of data credit expenditure because
of assertion of gateways. Now, look, people can
make the argument about, data and data credits,
whatever. Look, the point is that, I mean, even
if you were on the Visa network, when you have
those, the point of sale devices installed, it
still costs you to get them installed, right,
in the system. So anyways, because you assert
a gateway and it costs that data credit, that
was spent into the system. HNT had to be burned,
but now... travis correct me if i'm wrong here
but there is what's called the hnt equilibrium
some people say the flywheel okay how much data
credit spent does have an effect on what the
oracle determines the hnt price is a couple notes
here um yeah okay yes as far as onboarding um
you know plays a lot or played a large part um
in this but a lot of that was kind of um absorbed
into the manufacturer of the units and so it
wasn't end users that were you know uh paying
to onboard at that point that was that was part
of the the hotspot price right yeah um what we're
seeing now and a a number that i believe that
uh either nova or helium foundation just released
was the largest, really the largest OUI right
now is actually another network roaming over
the Helium network. And which is amazing when
you're talking about that's where these data
credits are coming from, or where these are rolling
through the network is from other networks using
what we have built to push the data through.
And that's badass. That is awesome. Excellent.
The point I'm just getting at here is because
there was a significant amount of H &T burnt
and data credits spent into the system that did
have an impact on the price. So we're just going
down the list of what impacted the price here.
Okay. And who was burning those? It would be
the manufacturers because they were the ones
paying for the assertions. Okay. Correct? Am
I mistaking anything here? no i i believe in
almost all cases manufacturers did um did you
know cover the assertions um you know or at least
you know the initial assertion and then maybe
one or two initially two uh with with the helium
og hotspots you know you had two geo assertions
and then you know further down the line i guess
uh one geo assertion was typically included um
from the manufacturers yeah real quick new england
crypto i appreciate the super chat better Internet
fun for Chris. We need bandwidth. Appreciate
it, man. So just continuing on here with the
factors involved in that price pump, validators
coming online. $10 ,000 HNT on a validator. I
believe it was about mid -May that the validator
rolled out. That was a high point, I mean, for
HNT. So it was about $100 ,000, if you want to
talk USD, to roll out a validator at that point,
I think. I mean, it wasn't cheap. I don't know.
Yeah, and that caused liquidity lockup. that
and when people stake can you explain that when
you say lock up you mean there was a there was
a cool down time you know if i wanted to pull
out and you know it would which was what five
six months at the time yes i believe so so when
when you stake you take a portion of funds portion
of the tokens put it on uh typically a network
device right in this case it was a helium validator
and it's locked up while you have that device
online and you continue to earn, then there's
a cool -down period. If you want to take the
validator offline and get those tokens out, you
have to wait a certain amount of blocks, which
is, I believe you said five to six months at
the time. That sounds accurate. But one of the
points I'm getting at here is the price spike.
So people taking that token off the exchanges,
They've taken it out of their wallets and locking
it up in the validators. That caused more pressure
on the exchanges, resulting in a higher price
as well. Let me just clarify one thing while
we're on this point. During the cool -down time,
you also do not earn during that time. I'd just
like to make that clear. But yeah, as far as
pressure, I don't think it was necessarily just
having to do with that. I think there was a lot
of speculation. I think speculation was enormous
around that time, especially. And I think at
the time, Helium was getting more visibility
in a lot of, I guess, more normal markets. And
a lot of old players were coming into the crypto
scene and dumping money on it. I feel that had
a huge bearing as well. Crypto Craig, I appreciate
the Super Chat post -birthday beer fund. Of course,
I don't drink beer, but thank you. So, Travis,
you already beat me to the next point, which
was the speculation. And, you know, let me know
your opinion, but around the Open5G CBRS push,
there was a lot of interest because of that.
and because of the news around it. Yeah. What's
your question? That's it. What do you think?
Do you believe a lot of that interest came from
the CBRS push? Well, there was an article and
I guess a partnership announced around a time,
around that spike, which I feel had a lot of
bearing. But, I mean, as far as speculation is
concerned, who knows? I mean, I can't speculate
on that. But yeah, I think that when you have
a large media boom into a lot of markets that
you might necessarily, they may not have heard
about helium, about what's going on with the
network, how large the network has grown. I think,
yeah, that's got to have some bearing. I think
that when you have articles coming out of large
publications and getting in front of the eyes
of a lot of investors that may not have known
what the hell this whole fucking crypto thing
is, you know? Don't worry, you can swear. I mean,
it changes things, you know? And is that going
to change speculation by people who follow, you
know, these other investors who are now just
kind of getting involved with it? Yeah. And you're
going to see movement there. But shoot, I don't
know. I mean, it seems reasonable to me that
that would occur. Yeah, so these are the factors.
Just a quick recap of what we just covered. Once
again, the trend, all altcoins follow Bitcoin,
right? Most, most. Yeah. Yeah. You have some
inverted followings, right? Yeah. And the factor,
the multiple that they follow it, Buy does have
independent variables there. So you're not always
going to see the one for one following in that
trend, right? But anyways, Bitcoin halving, break
into that bull cycle. Then you have number two,
use case. Utility. It has a real world use case.
Number three. Oh, one we didn't talk about. The
halving. Okay. Of 2021, there was the happening
of HNT. Significantly less tokens dumped into
the overall public through earnings. That had
been planned since the white paper. I mean, it
had been known, maybe not publicized as well
as maybe it should have been for people, newcomers
who were investing into the network. Maybe people
didn't really understand what happening was.
They didn't realize how this worked. But it was
public and it was, you know, every network. It
happens on every crypto. Yeah. But the point
is, it brings more less supply, more and I guess
similar demand. I mean, it's going to be more
in demand because there's less available. So
that was, I believe, one of the factors in this
price spike. And it was voted on. I mean, all
of these things are voted on. I'm not saying
anything bad about it. No, no, no. I just want
to explain to anyone listening to this that,
you know, these go through HIPS or, you know,
a process that are voted on and then, you know,
proposed and go through. And so it is, you know,
people driven on how we want this network to
perform. So I just had to throw that in there.
It's appreciated. Data credit expenditure. Yeah.
So the burning of HNT. Whether it be data being
spent on the network or data credits spent for
the purchase of data to use the network or assertion
of hotspots, it still has some impact on the
price there. You have validators coming online.
So what are we at here? We're at number five.
Validators coming online. Liquidity lockup. That
confidence in the network that comes because
of. Staking, that's a generalized crypto thing.
People look at crypto and say, all right, there's
a lot of staking going on on the network. We
believe that signifies confidence in the network.
There was lack of availability of devices because
of the chip shortage, because of supply chain
issues. But that's across the board. That's across
the industry. Oh, yeah. That's something we've
seen from cars to gateways. It's still a six
-month lead time to get any Cisco switch or router
for me. So there's something going on. And we
saw a couple of, you know, like, hip 19 manufacturers
kind of buck up, man. Pardon my language. But,
yeah, they kind of dipped out. uh we're not really
um i don't know they didn't treat their clients
as well as a lot of people think they should
have i'm not naming names i'm you know everyone
knows who i'm talking about you know if if you've
been watching this stuff so um um i'm just gonna
get through this list real quick and then we'll
talk about what you want to talk about so so
validators liquidity right lack of um availability
reason isn't reason number six so people bought
the token rather than buying the hardware because
it was hard to get the hardware number seven
centralized exchange listings more people were
able to buy in leading leading to a price pump
and a the speculation not only because it's the
real world case but because you have more products
and because like travis mentioned you have a
news cycle that's covering it you have word of
mouth spreading so the reason i i want to bring
this up is because these are all things to look
for in a crypto project lessons learned with
helium it just all converged within the same
year which was very exciting but i believe that
there is good and bad to that and and i think
a lot of people didn't understand all those factors
involved they maybe they hadn't read up they
did not understand the mania behind it and they
feel like they missed out on a good experience
So there's a lot of thought that comes from that.
But lesson learned. And this is what we look
for in projects, these type of events, these
type of happenings. You look like you have something
to say, Travis. Oh, typically. But no, I would
like to comment and just say I'm not trying to
interrupt here. But we did something called the
Alpha Program, which allowed you to have cloud
-based miners, right? And that was a very short,
you know, short lived program. It was something
that was an invite only. It wasn't open to everyone.
It wasn't where, you know, we wanted to test
this with everyone in the community. And I mean,
I was getting death threats. People were mad
when that got shut down and coming by my house
and stuff. And I mean, just everyone understands
that this crypto, it is it does at some point
come down to real money. and like rent money
and come down. And so we do have to be very careful
and respectful of how we treat this. You know,
it's not a video game. It's not a, you understand,
it's something that it's real people and real
people's lives who are involved here. And so
we do need to be very careful and critical with
that, how we handle it. 619OTA says every F -bomb
you've got to give away at Sensor. What kind
do you want, man? soon um travis would you like
to take this one and we've talked about this
i've talked about it a lot on the channel but
travis has a desk full of sensors and he is a
professional in this industry so i will let him
take this question crypto craig writes network
bits what are some of the more popular real world
use cases for helium network i have not seen
really any mention of those at least that i can
remember OK. Yeah, I'd love to take that. Thanks,
Joe. Agriculture is something I grew up in Texas,
up in the panhandle. And I grew up like painting
fences, stringing barbed wire, you know, working
longhorns. And what you can do with agricultural
sensors on the Helium network is fantastic. Seed
has a number of them. This one I showed just
a moment ago is an awesome company. Seed is amazing.
And they are. They are so, so, you know, looking
forward to working with anyone who has a project
idea. They have something called Fusion that
allows you to print PCBs, you know, through their
service. Like one of these devices, this is a
data logger, and this is a Modbus sensor that's
plugged in, and there's just screw -down terminals
inside here. So I can use 4 to 20 milliamp. I
can use Modbus. I can use 0 to 5. uh volts i
can use i can pretty much plug in any sensor
like normal quote sensor that i could find on
the market into this and bring it on to helium
for under 70 bucks usd that's cool as hell um
uh and just just yes seed did send me this but
i also work with seed pretty extensively i i
work with uh one planet education network um
or or open if you go to oneplaneteducation .com
We, you know, we're pushing down through Kenya,
you know, Congo, Australia. I mean, all sorts
of countries, France, you know, to get the helium
network into a position where they can all compare
this new agricultural system for regenerative
ag against, you know, each other's farms and
plots. And it's a cool we have a student, you
know. education aspect of it where we have a
Moodle system set up where you can, we're working
heavily with rack wireless and we have videos
on the system where it shows you there's a kit
which is based around the whiz block. uh which
we've built up uh it's very similar to the the
helium developer kit but it's based more around
environmental sensing and you know we have this
set up uh via open and all these videos to teach
kids how to how to go through this do it and
then you can have a farmer use his mobile phone
and flash it onto you know some device in the
field like firmware that these kids have written
right which is cool as hell, man. So it's really
bringing together. I mean, we're working with
ministries of agriculture, education. Let me
know if you want to advertise that group as well.
And I'll post a link to it. Just send me it.
Yeah, absolutely. But one thing I do want to
piggyback onto what you were saying. So LoRaWAN
is a standardized protocol that has seen wide
adoption in the Internet of Things space and
has been around for over a decade. So there's
certainly a use case here. This is not something
that is like novel in the sense of technology.
The only thing that has changed here is now Helium
has a ubiquitous and contiguous network. So unlike
if you're working with, like, say, an Internet
service provider that offers LoRaWAN as a package,
you're no longer stuck to a specific geographical
location. in the vast majority of cases now i
always people always say you know who cares about
this type of technology i disagree but once again
travis i'm gonna let you take that one because
okay you worked in lorwan before you had before
you came aboard helium Yeah, and what's huge,
and I'm going back to Australia a bit here, but
a lot of countries in Africa do not have an ISM
ban set aside. And so they don't have LoRaWAN
regions, right? And so you've got countries where
they don't know what to fix up. And so one thing
that we're really pushing right now is to get
a standardized both... both for countries that
do not have this established and for disaster
and recovery operations where you default to
a particular region and just say, okay, you know,
for this, this is what you use until it goes
through the war alliance and actually gets established
and you figure it out with your regulators, right?
But up until that point, this would allow, you
know, manufacturers of sensors to say, okay,
all these countries are opened up until they
figure out, you know, what's going on there.
And I think that's huge. I think that it will
help, you know, hopefully free us from a lot
of what we've seen happen in Australia, where
with the frequency change and, you know, going
to 923 and with the sub band change, you know,
just to say, hey, if you don't know what you're
doing yet as a country, you know, we're dealing
with ministries of ag, of ed, you know, et cetera,
in order to say, if you don't know what's up,
use this. And until you do and then go through
the alliance and then, you know, we'll figure
things out. But it makes sense to use EUA 6 -8
for most of these countries in Africa right now.
That's a lot of countries tend to look at who's
next door and what they're using. And I think
if that process is used a little more, it's going
to work out well. But I want to add on that point.
You made a living off of working on LoRaWAN networks
prior to this. Yeah, yeah. I'm just trying to
tell people, like, it's not like this is some
wacko protocol that came out of nowhere that
someone's expecting to use because there's crypto.
The Department of Homeland Security, actually,
you know, I was doing projects for them down
here at the Port of Houston and doing, like,
disaster recovery using LoRaWAN. So, yeah, it's
a real thing. And I was involved with it. I was
looking at some of my dates on some of these
projects. And we were talking, you know, 17,
18. I mean, so years back, you know, way before
I got involved and before Helium was actually
using LoRaWAN. So, yeah, it's legitimate. So,
yeah, New England Crypto, thanks for being here.
You guys in the comments, I appreciate. all the
writing that you're doing. Now, I love everything
that Travis has to add here. So we have a generalized
crypto audience as well. So we'll try to go back
and forth between the different topics at hand.
But I'm curious to know, Travis, and let me know
if you need a minute to think on this. What was
your biggest lesson learned in crypto in general
or lessons learned? Just entering in, and I assume
you didn't really have a lot of experience in
the crypto space beforehand, but you're still
a very technical guy. So you're able to pick
it up very fast. You do programming, right? You
work with computers. You work with radios. Yeah,
I think one of the largest things that really
hit close to home, and I'm sure a lot of folks
on this call know him, like Nick or Gristle King,
lost some crypto. And he was very public about
it when that happened. And I mean, that hit kind
of close to home, you know, just talking with
him and knowing that he's like, yeah, I screwed
up. You know, I should have known this. And that's
something that... i i saw that happen so many
times being an admin on the um on the helium
you know discord people would hit me up because
i kept my i kept my dms open man and um i'd be
hit up with someone and they're like hey someone
just stole i'm like i'm very sorry and that i
hated that more than anything else in the world
is having to tell someone i can't fix this the
whole system is designed so that can it's not
fixed that's working you know um you know the
problem is keys were leaked and keys own wallets
and wallets own hot spots and so you don't own
those anymore and i hated hated hated to tell
people that i mean it it hurt man you know but
that's because the system works and that's that's
how that's how the you can't beat math you know
You can't argue against math. Let me add to that.
Many of you here in this audience know about
DJ Minds, another big YouTuber. He's been doing
this for years, but he got hacked. It wasn't
necessarily his fault. And he lost a large sum
of money in it. And that's actually, when I ran
that poll, if we want to talk about security
or lessons learned, et cetera, that's what I
was going to get into is a lot of the best practices.
for people so they can understand better how
to protect themselves and set things up um which
i will make a video about that in the future
for sure but that's a great point and you know
i there are so many sophisticated scams out scams
out there and targeting their sophisticated targets
amongst people who You know, they own crypto.
Oh, no, but they'll hit your parents up. They'll
hit your sister up. They'll hit. I mean, they
will do like, you know, scams against everyone
related to you if they're trying to get at you,
because honestly, that's the best way to get
at me. I hate to say it. It sucks. It really
does. Yeah. So there's something I will talk
more about later, later on in another video.
And Chris, tell us about what you've learned.
One of the biggest lessons are what you looked
at. Sorry, we're taking it away. So I've been
scammed a couple times on projects that have
just not been sustainable. Time Wonderland was
a big case where I pretty much got into the project
right when it was at its peak and it started
to go down. And I lost about $1 ,000, which is
a lot for me. And I, you know, from that point
forward, I ask myself what I'm looking into a
project. And a lot of them offer some sort of
return, whether it's a token or interest, whatever
it may be. I don't know if I'm cutting out at
all. No, you're good. Is my connection good?
All right. Yep. So the question I always look
at now when I look at a project is. is is it
sustainable and what we've been talking about
recently is what project or what problem does
it solve because i've seen um you can take a
lot of the examples that's happened with the
ftx bankruptcy and the fallouts that have happened
block five fell for bankruptcy they had a very
high apy in comparison to traditional bank accounts
and you have to ask yourself is it sustainable
there was a point in time um i want to say in
January of last year where I was looking at taking
out a loan possibly through my bank account and
then putting it onto BlockFi because I would
have actually earned a higher return than the
interest rate that I was getting from my traditional
bank account. So it's just, I'm glad I didn't
do that because obviously it wasn't sustainable
and that's a big issue a lot of people have to
ask yourself. And this is like a... a traditional
thing that i think most people have been taught
is if it sounds too good to be true it usually
is you just have to keep in mind and there's
some leeway in the crypto space because things
a lot of times are a lot better than uh they
would be in a traditional the traditional world
that we see um but there's still gonna be situations
where it's gonna be too good to be true and it's
not gonna be sustainable that's what i've found
very true I agree. Now, I'll give you my biggest
lesson learned. And something that I did struggle
with prior to the YouTube channel, especially
when I was in the military for learning all this
stuff, was relating to the average person, but
also like my technical understanding is typically
better than most people. So I lacked patience
with people's understanding. And when I came
in, it's always kind of been like this. I've
learned to loosen up and lighten up after some
of my employers said, come on, you have to you
have to show a little bit here. This is a service
we provide because these people don't understand.
But coming into this and starting a YouTube channel
and having a face out in the public explaining
hard to understand technologies where I get tons
of questions. And I have people who they like
this. They want to participate. They want to
understand the system, but they don't necessarily
have the background that I do. And they don't
necessarily understand what's being laid down
by the developers, by the community members.
And I got to understand like their point of view,
got to see how people see things differently
and what influences. their opinions, their thoughts.
And that has been eye -opening to me and something
that I stress here. And I try to make it like,
I try to hit this one home with a lot of people,
especially engineers, because there's a lot of
engineers who are very technically savvy and
they're correct about their statements. They
are logically correct about their factual statements.
However, they fail to understand the way that
the average person sees it. And I think this
is where one of the biggest disconnects with
Helium was, was getting that, you know, explaining
to people who are not following this at the same
speed, who are not dedicating the same amount
of time, who don't have that background, they
still want to participate. And that's really
been my goal here with the YouTube channel. Yeah.
No, no, that says it so well. And a couple of
responses on this, at least personally. Real
quick, one second. We're going to bring Patrick
Nguyen in, and you may continue. Patrick, thanks
for being with us here. Howdy, howdy. Hey. I
just wanted to respond and say that, you know,
running the YouTube like you're doing and whatnot
and helping people, you know, get up to speed,
at least on my part. I learned so much by doing
that, you know, by talking with folks who aren't
necessarily on the engineering side of things,
because on the engineering side of things, you
can get too close. And if you're too close to
something, you don't see it right. You don't
see the same picture that that a lot of people
coming into into the ecosystem see. And so I
think it's absolutely beneficial, both, you know,
Joe, for you and for everyone watching your shows.
you know, to interact and to come to a point
where, you know, hopefully everyone does at least
get, you know, an initial understanding of kind
of what, you know, how things go in and out,
how things work. And for me, it's been, you know,
I guess therapeutic in a sense of, you know,
helping to understand people because this is
something that I love doing. And I've never related
to people emotionally before. And I'll save you
my life sob story. The point is, I've not always
been personable my whole life. I mean, you guys
know my personality. I'm a little bit crass.
I am a little bit vulgar, but I've failed to
understand because I really look at things logically.
And that's not always the cut and dry case when
you're dealing with people. And you have to come
to terms with that. If you want to be successful,
certainly in the public eye. Patrick is saying
you're a sandpaper. Yeah, you could change your
grit. You can change your grit, man. You know,
so. Yeah. Yeah. So no idea what you guys are
talking about. I guess I heard that. Learn in
crypto. I heard what I thought. I just thought
you were saying that engineers have no soft skills.
Some of them. I mean, look, I've worked with
some engineers who they put together a fantastic
technical manual. and they can explain all the
ins and outs, but making that manual easy enough
to follow for the regular person and trying to
understand what the regular person is going to
take away from that and trying to catch where
they're going to maybe fail in that setup, that's
something that maybe they missed because they
know it inside and out, and they don't know exactly
what they're missing. They don't understand they
already have that context behind it when maybe
someone else doesn't. that can be hard for engineers
man and i think there's there's a whole skill
set of of you know jobs you know for people to
basically you know kind of go between engineers
and and people who aren't dealing with it that
closely um and i think those people are extremely
extremely valuable to the industry um i a lot
of engineers and i i know you probably read a
lot of reports about about, you know, levels
of OCD among engineers or different, you know,
I guess people on the spectrum. And if you work
in the field, you see it. I mean, everyone sees
it. Everyone knows that. And maybe those aren't
the best people to, you know, be doing, you know,
the... Yeah, I get what you're saying. Yeah.
No, certainly. And sometimes one of the go -to
phrases I, you know, when you're trying to change
someone's mind about something, I've learned
you just can't come out hot immediately and say,
no, you're wrong. Look, you have to help them
understand and be tactful about it. And help
yourself understand as well. I mean, because
every situation like that, it seems to me, is
always a two -way street, man. And both people
are wrong, but they're both right. We don't want
them to crash. Sometimes I give them a compliment.
I'm like, look, you don't understand how smart
you are. Because these people are smart. They're
intelligent. They are very particular and precise.
But if you're trying to explain this to other
people, hey, we got to dumb it down. You are
outstanding in your presentation, but the other
people don't realize that. I'm just saying, you're
so good looking. But I mean, how smart are really
if they can't communicate their thoughts? It
can be tough. I mean, intelligence is not just
remembering something from a book or doing a
piece of math. Wisdom. So is where that's where
wisdom comes into play, man. Yeah. So I think
I think the culture of education is where this
goes wrong. And so for me, I think, OK, once
the kids get out of high school, you make them
leave the country for two years, go to a country
that doesn't speak their language, force them
to learn it, have them live, have a job. Do things,
participate in society, figure out who you are,
then go to college. Because then you'll be a
more rounded human being once you start to kind
of chisel down what it is that you want to do
in life. Instead of like, oh, you're 18, go to
school. I'm like, you're still a fucking kid.
I think we're seeing a huge change in education
now, though, especially with the pandemic, where
it doesn't necessarily mean go to college or
go to university. I think that a lot of new venues
and forums are available where you can get a
quality education without just going to the local
college or going to some Ivy League college.
I think it's changing. I'd like to present something
from the audience. Ursa Prime, one of my dedicated
subscribers, brings up an excellent point. cryptocurrency
lessons learned the terra ustc stablecoin d pegging
was a painful lesson for me i assume that all
stable coins were safe after that i took the
do your own research phrase more seriously and
i believe the point to be made here is that and
look i know people who are intelligent and who
been in crypto for a while and they lost quite
a bit yeah i don't fault anyone for that situation
But the point to be made here is that we're working
with code and we're working with also we're working
with organizations who have a lot of out there
ideas. Some of them, you know, maybe maybe something
potentially novel, like a stable coin that is
not necessarily backed by dollars or so they
say, but an algorithmic stable coin. So code
may fail. There may be a cryptocurrency project
that overnight, whether it gets hacked because
of an issue in the blockchain, how it was coded
because of the infrastructure, maybe a smart
contract doesn't work with the token. There is
always that chance that it goes to zero. So not
financial advice, but I personally think I would
diversify in as much as possible. So how do you
fend against that? I mean, by all of this being
open or open source to the community where it
can be evaluated? I wouldn't necessarily say
that. I like the idea of open source because
you can always have other parties audit it, whether
it's open source or not, but you can have the
public audit it. all the code is known and there's
possible exploitations it gets exploited sooner
than rather than later because it's much more
easy to pick out but it's also more easy for
a white hat to say here's what's wrong with your
code all right give me my bug bounty what do
you think travis i know you have something here
i want to hear it um no no well i don't really
have anything lined up but i i would say that
i think that um A lot of times you don't see
people just lighting up to work on your GitHub
repos. A lot of that is still done by the company
and the people who are doing exploits aren't
sharing that, you know, out of your source, right?
And they find an exploit and then they start
hitting it. They start hitting it. And so you've
got to have a whole another tool set in order
to identify when, you know, when gaming, you
know, happens like this. um do you have you know
white hats that step in and say hey uh this should
not be done this way yes you do and do you have
prs you're coming through github all the time
yes you do and um you know is the community a
vital part of you know of these projects of course
and uh i i think if if anything a lot of times
there may not be enough folks internally that
you know are able to process a lot of these prs
or and you know validate them and make sure that
that's what needs to be uh pulled into the code
base so um excellent points uh can i say with
tara they collapsed because they were over leveraged
right they they had uh it was i forget like the
percentage but it was like they had one one dollar
for every 100 that was leveraged out or something
something absolutely absurd so it was like the
code isn't the part that failed it was the organization's
actions that caused them to not be not have what
it takes it's the same thing that just happened
with ftx is they the organization was the ones
that were at fault the code didn't do anything
the code functioned well the code created a ponzi
scheme It functioned to a nefarious end. It functioned
the way that it was meant to function. Yes. Exactly.
Yes. All right. We're going to continue on with
the points here. Like I said, in the audience,
if you have any lessons learned in crypto over
2022 or even the years prior to that, go ahead.
Let us know. I have a lot. I've actually thought
out this content. So there's plenty that I can
pull from. Now, one of them that I do want to
bring up is with this crowdsource model, if you
want to call them tip -ins, token -incentivized
public infrastructure networks, mining, et cetera,
it's very hard to get everyone on the same page
and to do things the right way, even when there's
high stakes involved. give a small example i'll
give a large example and then you guys give me
your opinions so with hot spots there were plenty
of hot spots that other cryptocurrency miners
got in gpu and asic guys who they do have a technical
background but do they necessarily understand
the rf portion of helium not so much they left
it somewhere in the middle of their house or
maybe they put in a window but they didn't really
understand it and Even like getting them to get
to that point was a struggle, although they're
a cryptocurrency miner. Now, one of the things
that I'll say, and Travis, correct me if I'm
wrong, of course, when we've seen the validators
go online and then we've seen the move from regular
hotspots to light hotspots, there were some issues
in the first days getting people to open up the
ports. There's not really a line of communication
directly to everyone who owns a validator. They
don't sign up for an emailing list. They do have
notifications through Discord. They can subscribe
to validator information on Discord. But the
point I'm getting at is many of them dropped
the ball and that hurt the network for a little
while there. Even those who are responsible in
their administration of validators, just because
they are doesn't necessarily mean that hardware.
I'm just saying this in general. I like using
Helium as an example because we know a lot about
it, but this is for all networks. It doesn't
necessarily, even if everyone's doing everything
right, there may be technical issues. behind
the scenes that might not work out but or could
be an administration thing but the point is there's
a drawback to this crowdsourced model and it's
that not everyone is going to do things the way
that they should do they're not always going
to abide by best practices they're not always
going to have the best interest of the network
and other people may suffer because of that and
we see that in other networks as well this is
not the only one um You need to have a way to
kick those out, to recognize and kick out outliers,
you know, who are not participating. I've seen
so many people, for example, and I got to call
them out by name because, you know, I know that
I've seen them up at four o 'clock in the morning
so many times. But the folks over at Stakejoy,
which their API is used by a number of other
services, you know, in lieu of the Helium API.
They're on top of the ball and I've seen them,
you know, do four o 'clock in the morning work
every time it needs to be done. And so many people
are, yes, you know, straight up on the ball on
this. And the outliers need to be identified
and be publicly kind of exposed, I guess, and
just said, hey, these people are not are not
playing ball the way that this needs to happen
in order for the community to function properly.
And I think that needs to be public. It needs
to be done. That's by two cents. Yeah. And when
it comes to crowdsourced infrastructure, there
is going to be... A lot of this comes from the
mining community. People are here to turn a profit.
And if they find it to be too much of a hassle,
if they find it to... They just think it's no
longer worth it. There's a chance that... a part
of that network is going to go offline. Now,
it doesn't matter if it's helium and your device
is using their hotspot or connectivity, or maybe
it's flux and your load is hosted on their server
or their device. That's just the reality of this.
I think the drop -dead point is when it crosses
the electricity cost, where it honestly costs
more to run it than it's, yeah. Excellent point.
that is certainly true we saw that in europe
um this past year um in in certain areas so and
let me let me continue off of that another lesson
learned there are going to be events that take
place in other major cryptocurrencies i mean
minor ones but major ones that have an effect
on the market overall a massive effect in some
cases and the example that comes to mind when
you mention electricity It was GPU mining where
when they went, when Ethereum went to proof of
stake, there was so much hash power that went
on to the other GPU mining networks. They were
too competitive and basically not profitable
anymore. And we actually seen, I believe was
Ergo, where you've seen this massive spike in
hash power come on and then drop off. And it
made block time so long. that they were struggling
i don't think they got to the next epoch which
is where the difficulty would be adjusted so
those block times would shorten up and adjust
for all the hash power that they lost when a
bunch of people just brought their brought their
rigs offline so there are going to be black swan
events but like events that come in from other
spaces in the cryptocurrency and affect your
project sure and you know, economy events in
general. Yeah. Like what we've seen with FTX,
what we've seen with Tara, what we've seen with,
what was the other one in the beginning of the
year, Chris, we talked about Celsius, Celsius.
Yes. And this is something you have to think
about prior to getting in. I mean, assess your
risks. Yes. Yeah. And, Another thing I want to
add, and, you know, I see a lot of people who
started businesses around mining and not just
helium, but we've seen so much with helium. They
really they dump so much money in and a lot of
them had great spots to put them. They had a
lot of good ideas. And as it became no longer
profitable, it no longer as profitable. I mean,
there you go. Yeah, I got to tell that correction.
But yes, it no longer is profitable. It became
really they may have not broken even on their
equipment or they might just be left with a device
that they can't use and maybe don't want to sell.
I shouldn't say can't use or just not using.
They don't have a place to put it. So plan accordingly.
And this goes across the board. Same thing with
with. hive mapper okay you know when when people
are buying 20 devices at once and thinking about
setting up this massive fleet of of hive mapper
devices you have to think is it always going
to be profitable enough for you to have that
overhead and have to manage it and then you have
to have to manage it that's huge man yeah manage
the taxes that because you're paying out to other
people you have to deal with people being unreliable
and how they're going to administer the advice
in some cases you have to think about um all
the factors that can go wrong equipment getting
lost stolen stolen yeah yeah look those those
um people that are hosting for you they might
not be happy with the outcome and you could lose
friends it's a real thing you can sour relationships
over money when it comes to this kind of stuff
Question for a poll. I mean, just a general poll
on your call here, Joe. Out of how many miners
you have in the field, how many are online? You
want to do the poll of the audience? Honest question,
man. So one network. I mean, I was thinking helium,
but I mean, just whatever network you're involved
in. For miners on the helium network right now,
it would be. So I have three that. took a crap
out of 14 regular hotspots. But I also have probably
another three that are offline because hosts
have turned them off or because I haven't collected
them yet. Or SD card issues, maybe. I mean, there's
a number of issues that things may be offline.
I believe I have at least seven online right
now. Okay. And I get about one. 0 .3 hnt every
day so i have a couple good really good setups
i'm still out in the suburbs okay okay but um
as far as other miners i have some other things
that are going right now threefold i do this
thing with the hive mapper dash cam there's something
else i do but i forget exactly what it was match
x i don't do that anymore match x was stupid
That was a project I thought, and we can talk
about them because there are a lot of lessons
that came from that project. That's a project
I thought had a lot of potential, even though
it seemed odd in a lot of ways. There's really
no development, and everything about it screams
of Ponzi, in my opinion. PocketChangeXD, thanks
for being here. If you want to get your husband,
Chump, to call in and share with us some of his
lessons learned, he's more than welcome to. But
I don't know how much you want to talk about
match -ups, Travis, but I have a whole video
dunking on them and how many things were wrong
with that project. And I actually just posted
another video on it. with 30 seconds because
we're on a live stream. Actually, real quick,
I want to do your poll, Travis. Okay. How many
videos, I mean, how many minors do you still
have online? I'll set up a poll with the audience.
Okay. I was just curious, you know. Because I
know with the HNT earnings dropping this past
year, a lot of folks, yeah, I know that one's
down. Do you just want to do HNT or do you want
to do GPU rigs as well? Whatever you're involved
in. I know mainly helium because that's what
I'm involved in. But yeah, I'm just curious across
the board, really. People who are still in the
game but have some rigs that are down. Let's
word it a little bit differently. How many miners
do you have offline? All types of miners. Out
of how many you have. It needs to be a percentage.
It's tricky to do a poll on this. I'm not sure
it would work. I have three, but I've been through
a bunch of helium miners whether it was just
like getting them and selling them just because
it was the better option to do at the time or
uh just like i had a bobcat and i got rid of
that because i got sense caps and i like the
sense cap uh firmware better yeah so i have uh
three sense caps i have uh two m2s and one of
the data only hot spots and they're all offline
right now um so yeah i haven't heard anything
in the past past 60 days i just moved so i had
to take everything down Then I had one at my
friend's apartment and he he doesn't live in
that apartment anymore. So it's like he moved
from I live in Pennsylvania. So he lived at Westchester
area, which is just outside of Philadelphia.
Then they moved into Philadelphia. And if I had
a hotspot in Philadelphia, it wouldn't really
make much sense because it's so over concentrated.
Yeah. Yeah, and all of mine that actually burn
are in the middle of nowhere or in what used
to be lone wolves, you know? Yeah. Those are
the ones that actually crank HNT. I'll give my
numbers. I've got, and some of these are dated
only, I understand, but I've got 32, 18 down.
Wow. All right. Yeah. It's going on with all
of us. I've had some that I need to send back
and I still have yet to do it. I'm procrastinating
a little bit. Or you have better things going
on that make more sense to concentrate on that.
I do have the poll going live. Votes are coming
in right now. We have 14 watching, 11 votes.
Thus far, it's about 55 % saved from 0 % to 25
% of their miners are offline. Okay. Can't you
see on the Helium Explorer the percentage of
hotspots that are up versus not? Yeah, and some
of those are going to be blacklisted. You have
to take that into consideration as well, I think,
when we're talking about these numbers. Hey,
fellas. Sorry, I got to get going. I only had
a couple minutes here. Patrick, it's good seeing
you, man. Patrick, I appreciate it. Thanks for
letting me just stand around and have the screen
look a little more complete with four squares
and not three. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that we're,
you know. You're good. We're all over the place.
It's good seeing you, though. I love it. Wish
I had some more time, man. Catch you guys later.
Thanks for being here. See you on the next stream.
See ya. So, do you want to talk about gaming
of the network at all? travis or we can i think
it's a enormous concern uh both i mean so all
parties involved you know i think it affects
everyone yeah yeah so what i've learned from
from uh the insight that i got into helium but
other networks as well look at pollen mobile
it was even happening on flux anything that can
be gained anything that can be cheated will be
even in the most tedious of manner because even
though you get past that little tedious part
when it comes to manually doing it you can automate
it it happens it will happen to an endless extent
and um you know i've never cheated the network
i would not feel good about myself doing that
but i could also not stand here and tell you
that um you know i'm this great youtuber People
would find out and my reputation would be soiled.
Right, right. Regardless, I've screwed up in
my past and I do not want to go down that road
again. So I did not cheat it. I've had people
message me on email saying, hey, how much do
I have to pay you to show me how to cheat the
network? Ignore. Fuck that. I've cheated the
network. And it was not intentional. And, you
know, it was something that we fixed that issue
because of it. But it had to do way back in the
day where it wasn't a one -to -one DC transfer.
And so you could have a virtual device that was
running tests against something and it would
just be cranking through and you would actually
be earning off of that gateway because it wasn't
one -to -one at that point. I'm like, oh, shit.
Would you like to explain that? Now, we're talking
about data credit, so it's a very, very minute,
it's a fraction of a cent, but people did cheat
the network in that manner. I want to use this
as an example of how... For a couple days, for
a couple days, until, yeah, it was taken care
of, yeah. And it made to be a zero -sum game,
yes. Yeah, so even where people could find...
fractions of a cent to exploit. Oh, people are
auto -creating thousands of accounts just to
get the free 800 data credits on console now.
So yeah, if you can automate something, people
are going to do it. If it's for money, people
are going to be doing it then. One of the things
you kind of have to understand about the internet
space is that Not all hacking crimes are prosecuted
because so many happen so often. And you really
have bots that do it quite often that are just
good. Yeah. And the point, the point is there's
not always going to be legal ramifications for
these people. So a lot of this can run rampant,
especially on crypto networks. Yeah. Lesson learned.
Yeah. But the links people will go to the game
and network. Yeah. Are. extraordinary you know
what you see every day is someone um impersonating
an admin or impersonating a moderator you see
that every day i mean on youtube if you go to
the youtube comments of pretty much any youtuber
in the crypto space there is a response on someone's
comment says like dm me on whatsapp so we can
chat more it's Yeah, and what they do, they'll
use like a Cyrillic character. They'll change
one character in a typeface, right? And so it
looks identical to the name. They have the same
avatar. They have everything else that looks.
And they DM you. I had someone DM me as myself
one time asking me, and I'm like, oh, come on.
You got to up your game a little bit here. This
is ridiculous. But yeah, that's a daily thing,
I'm sure, on every network out there. Yeah, and
that's why we have blockchain. to begin with
now look when it comes to the utility cases that's
a different story because that can be gamed we're
still figuring out in each individual case how
to stop that but blockchain itself bitcoin was
meant to be resilient against attacks and just
be open and transparent as possible while still
having that that armor that hardening against
network attacks Your poll has answered. Osvaldo,
welcome to the stream. Crypto Hunter, welcome
to the stream. I didn't see you before. How many
miners do you have offline? All types of miners.
40 % say between 0 % and 20%. 33 % say between
71 % and 90%. Wow. 20 % say between 21 % and
50%. 6 % say between 51 % and 70%. Geek of all
trades, welcome to... Welcome to the chat. That's
pretty just wild that it's 40 % is zero to 20.
And then the next closest is 71 to 90%. So it's
both ends of the spectrum there. So that doesn't
include people who have completely pulled them
off, right? I mean, that's, that's, I don't know.
That's wild. Oh, well, one person messed up on
the poll and said it was online. They thought
it was online miners. Okay. It's still kind of
wild numbers, at least from my end. For all different
reasons, I'm sure. Chris, lessons learned. You
got any? I thought we were already talking about
lessons learned. With helium? with any crypto
well i i think the sustainability thing is one
of the things i look at first and just being
so aware being uh with all the scams that we've
seen in the past it kind of makes you more hyper
aware of what to look for and uh specifically
i spent a lot of time over the summer looking
at smart contracts and how they work and i don't
know if you guys know what um stable fund. It's
a massive, massive DeFi project and it was built
on, I believe, Binance Smart Chain. Just a smart
contract, but it had a function to rug and they
ran away with millions simply because of just
a small thing in the code that people didn't
see. They just invested into it because... there
was other people investing into it. And if it
had $8 million in it, surely it couldn't be a
scam, right? So that's the issue a lot of people
also see is that because there's a lot of money
in it, it has to be good. There can't be anything
wrong with it. You saw that with SafeMoon too.
Everyone was buying into SafeMoon and look what
happened. They lost their money. But it's kind
of this, the fear of missing out that a lot of
people get. They want to be a part of something.
regardless of it, they lose money. And it's just,
it's unfortunate. It's something that people
have to be aware of. And going forward, I mean,
you have these issues without cryptocurrency.
You have this in the real world. People make
mistakes like this all the time. It's just something
we have to be more conscious of. Yeah, you're
right. And there's a lot of good people in this
space. And I think there's a lot of good communities
that have been built up around this. And, you
know, I think that they're, I think that's important.
I think it's important to know and be able to
trust someone. Because one thing, Joe, you brought
up is like identity and anonymity. Those are
two things that, yes, we can get through through,
you know, a chain. But they're both, I believe,
equally important. But I mean, are those mutually
exclusive? Can I be anonymous and approve identity?
And how do I do that and establish that on chain?
Well, you can actually do stuff similar like
that with like signing transactions on with MetaMask
and stuff. So you can choose if you want to share
this data, share that data. And I think that's
kind of the route that they're going to go on
because signing transactions, it doesn't cost
anything. It's pretty much you go on a website
and they actually have some of these bots in
Discord. as sort of a verification bot where
you'll sign a transaction and it verifies that
you are a legitimate person you're allowed in
the discord server but i think they have it on
openc and a few other really large uh crypto
projects you're just signing it or you're you're
um yeah it's just like a very small um amount
to sign that there's no crypto yeah as far as
i know there's no transaction that goes through
it's just uh you know it's pretty much just like
an approve button Gotcha. Because I think anonymity
is something that is about to be huge, especially
in South America, especially in a lot of countries
where monetary systems aren't very stable, where
it's almost impossible to operate financially
anonymously. And I think we're starting to see
that. blow the hell up right now. And I think
it's critical for the development of a lot of
things in these countries to have that type of
utility in place. Yeah. Travis, any other thoughts
you want to add as far as lessons learned or
whatever you'd like to discuss? I don't know,
man. I consider all of this stuff funny money,
you know. I mean, if it's not something that
you can, you know, wash down the toilet or, you
know, throw down the sink, don't go into it thinking
that it's still going to be there tomorrow. I
mean, just you got to be careful. There's a lot
of very volatile things out there right now,
even to have a ton of support behind them, you
know. And so if it's not something you can really
afford just to throw out the window, be fucking
careful, man, you know. Be cautious. Think about
where that could be. And yeah, you're not going
to make a ton in normal investments at a bank.
I mean, your interest isn't going to be huge,
but it'll still be there tomorrow. And I know
I'm probably on the outliers to say something
like that, but I mean it. Be very cautious with
what you're playing with nowadays. No, I agree.
And I mean, we talked about code failing before,
but you will see from time to time in this space
that there are projects that they never started
off with bad intentions, but they end up being
an unintentional rug pull because developers
quit. There's issues with leadership. Maybe like
we've seen one cryptocurrency, which was. i think
kind of funny but kind of sad also they took
a vote and someone just wrote an improvement
proposal where it's like send all the money to
so -and -so's wallet and a bunch of people voted
yes and i'm sure he had some weight on that vote
and screwed the entirety of the project things
happen there's all there's still a sense of having
to run a cryptocurrency project with best practices
as a business adhere to the Legal or lack of
legal framework and clarification in a lot of
instances. And having to have that PR, having
to have that name, reputation, and deal with
events that, related or unrelated, have impact
on the project. And the unknown. A lot of this
is unknown. It's a very new space. But excellent
point, Travis. And I like that. Cool. Well, you
know, Joe, thank you very much for having me
on tonight. I appreciate that. Thank you for
coming on. I appreciate it. We're probably going
to go for at least two hours. You're welcome
to stay or go whenever you like. I don't want
to hold you up. You carry on. I love having you
on the guest because you have amazing insight
and a lot of people actually watch a stream after
they see you on here. So, you know, it's great.
I sent you something on Discord. Let me know.
But I'll keep talking a little bit here about,
you know, some of the things that I found. And,
you know, one of the takeaways, one of the lessons
here is you find, is that a yes? All right. So
we are going to take call -ins, and I will pin
the link in the chat. You're welcome to call
in. Please keep it civil. We may have a little
bit of a debate, but look, don't try to make
anyone feel uncomfortable. I don't care if people
swear. Just don't be too entirely vulgar. Other
than that, you're welcome to call in with your
topic, your lesson learned, whatever you want
to ask any of us. You are free to do so. Now,
what I was going to say here is you're going
to look at cryptocurrency projects and there's
going to be aspects about them that I don't think
are they're really in the gray area. They're
not necessarily black and white. And whether
you agree with them or not, there is going to
be you have to wait it. And when I'm looking
at a lot of these cryptocurrency projects, one
of the things I look at is the staking. behind
it and not just validators not just proof of
stake when you have to stake tokens or coins
on a device on the network and if there's penalties
behind it the amount that needs to be staked
how long it's locked up for the reason behind
staking it and i'll give some examples something
like a helium validator is an example of why
we need to stake tokens right because you want
those people to have they don't really get dinged
on their hnt if their validator screws up but
you want them to have skin in the game you want
them to be committed not just to allow their
infrastructure to go off and affect the rest
of the network um systems like ethereum where
you can get slashed if you try to game the network
you can you know You don't make as much if you're
a poor validator. That makes sense. There's incentivized,
so it's the carrot and the stick. But then you
get into other types of staking, which I really
don't like staking in the vast majority of cases,
but I think something like, so the deeper network.
I think it's stupid that you have to stake to
earn. Now, the reason I say that is because this
is not a critical network device. It's not hosting
blockchain. If it goes offline, someone is not
catastrophically affected by it. If you're doing
a decentralized VPN hosting, you're a VPN server
for them. If it goes offline, they reconnect
to another VPN. That's it. So why do I have to
stake my Deeper to earn more Deeper? There's
not a clear reason to it. But other projects
do have a good reason for it. There's pros and
cons. So something like that I look at. But if
you look at something, let's say like flux nodes,
okay? Similar, you have to stake to earn. If
you go offline, you don't get slashed, but you
don't earn more. And those are just the regular
nodes, not the GPU miners for the blockchain,
just a regular load hosting like server or Raspberry
Pis or home devices. And it makes sense from
a tokenomics standpoint to an extent because
when you have to lock up those tokens, there's
only so many tokens in circulation, right? So
it has a scalability factor to it when it comes
to supply and demand and how many nodes will
entirely be on that network altogether. and also
people who are really dedicated, who believe
in the network, rather than just some woohoo
that's going to do anything and maybe not maintain
their nodes and affect someone who wants to host
the load on that server. Like if I have to pay
into a server, you'd think, you'd think, now
it's not the case for a lot of people as we find
out, but they're going to have skin in the game.
They're going to want to maintain that node and
optimize it. That's one of the reasons for staking.
So there will be more Ponzi -ish type of things.
I call it Ponzi -nomics, where with smart contracts,
you can manipulate how payouts happen to anyone,
how, you know, staking works, how returns are
made. But you can do artificial pump. And that's
what I think happened with MXC. incentivized
to stake every which way for no reason it doesn't
make sense there's really nothing that you're
doing that's a critical infrastructure device
on the network and if you sell off your tokens
that you supposedly mine you're penalized and
can no longer work you can no longer reap other
benefits so sorry for the tangent Things to look
for. Lesson learned. I think it's a really good,
you know, food for thought. Not black and white.
It's a gray area. Up for debate. But let me know
your thoughts in the comments. Also, Paul and
Link has been posted. If you'd like to call in
and chat with us, you can do so. So I got a question
for you, Joe. Yeah. Are they still requiring
you to kind of do a drive -by on all of your
own stuff daily? Yes. I'm fairly certain that
from last time I heard, I don't keep up with
them as much as I probably should, but I don't
have any of their devices. I actually have a
really good location here in the southwest Chicago
suburbs. It's a 100 -foot building. Those are
my main earners on the network, the Helium network.
I have two directional antennas. So I wanted
to put a pollen device up there, a helium 5G,
and it never could happen. Look, I'll admit it
on stream. I'm broke. I got baby mamas to pay,
so I'm not forking out any more money for hardware.
But I've tried to get people to look at the spot
and be like, yeah, I'll put my equipment there.
We'll split it. I offer to do those drive, you
know, the mapping with pollen. You need equipment,
man? If you want, send some. I'll have it hosted
for you. But we do have bandwidth. You do have
minimal bandwidth there. So if there's something
you want hosted, sure, we'll talk about it. All
right. Yeah, hit me up offline, man. Cool. Sounds
good. Jaden Blader writes, locked supply is important.
Can you elaborate? Because I think it's a good
point. But, no, back to what I was saying about,
like, pollen. Well, lack of being able to get
hands on that equipment. And, you know, that's
kind of why a lot of these fell through was because
of those requirements. And with gas prices. I
hate to, you know, say that, but honestly, I
think that has some bearing. Yeah. And you know
what? So another lesson learned here, which was
very interesting with pollen. And this is what
Max and Gristle King brought up. was the mapping
when it comes to a wireless network. A lot of
times, and I think this applies specifically
to the networks that have very high costs for
the physical infrastructure, you're going to
get a disproportionate amount of people who buy
mappers but don't buy the physical infrastructure.
And that's not necessarily good for the network
because they're not providing more. coverage
they're just trying to earn but it's a crypto
community this is something that does happen
now oh we lost uh we lost travis i think his
device um came unconnected because he's still
here in chat so he might be um anyway let me
message him back i'm sorry about that guys um
good um I was actually just looking into like
for the future for 2023, I think OpenGPT is going
to be a huge player because I was experimenting
and you can actually tell it like exactly the
parameters that you want to build smart contracts
and it will completely build it out for you.
And it's going to be there's not going to be
errors. It's going to be written by a machine.
uh with input or like kind of like just light
direction from a human so i think it's going
to be like real real uh changing revolutionary
technology i think the smart contracts that are
going to be coming out like the heavy d5 projects
if they start launching on opengpt they're going
to be a lot easier to um analyze a lot easier
to to follow and there's less errors so Kiko
says, you see OpenAI chat GPT falling behind
a paywall very, very soon. Well, honestly, that
makes total sense. If you have a program as good
as that, why would you give it away for free?
Especially with the massive onboarding that you
already see. I think it's a perfect storm that
they have set up right now is they're going to
have this beautiful technology. And it's going
to be exposed to the world for free. We've seen
this tactic happen with a lot of projects and
companies before. Once they get a massive consumer
market, then they'll say, all right, now we're
going to start charging for it. And the people
that want it are going to stay. And when you
see people that are using Spark contracts and
making millions of dollars, they're going to
have no issues paying. $30 a month. I mean, you
could really pump up the price on that and there's
going to be thousands of people that still pay
because they're still making way more than it's
worth. I'm glad you guys brought this up because
this is massive. What we know AI can do has reached
a tier that I always thought going into coding
and going into tech would be you know more sustained
i don't want to say more sustainable but you're
because it's scalable it can make you a lot more
money than doing like soft skills like say being
a therapist or maybe even being a nurse you know
like so you have to think about how now it's
possible that all these coders might be out of
a job because someone with minimal coding skills
like myself. I'm not the best coder. I can do
it, but it's not going to be complete best practices
and as efficient as it would otherwise. I can
throw it into GPT or some other AI type of device
and it works. One of our friends, Steve, he's
been on the show before. He was on the show two
days ago. He's very technical. He wrote a script.
I believe it was to pull DNS records. And he
put it through ChatGPT, he used, correct? Or
he used one of the programs, OpenGPT. Sorry.
What it did, it shrunk it down to like less than
a quarter of the size it initially was. Travis
says chat GPT on open AI. So that it shocked
me. It was crazy. And I thought to myself, okay,
my job is still somewhat safe because I have
to analyze like floor plans. I have to do a lot
of manual work that AI can't grab. And I have
to use best judgments and assumptions where.
AI wouldn't be able to do that. But who knows?
That might not be the case. So in the future,
for a lot of different fields, even the technical
ones, they're going to have more than enough
talent that comes from AI to get rid of the people
that are doing the coding. And then you're going
to see that. I believe the emerging economy,
it's going to be a, what would you want to call
it? You know, interacting with a human being
from day to day is going to be the premium. What
would you call it? I'm drawing a blank here.
It's going to be like what you want. You don't
want to interact with devices. You're going to
want to go to the store. to talk to cash care
you're going to want to see a therapist because
you don't want to talk to ai about your problems
so human touch you know like the human emotions
you can't recreate that it's something so precious
and unique um so i wanted to say um with your
like with your industry i'm thinking about with
my industry with accounting like blockchain quite
literally is a ledger and you can track it and
that's accounting technology accounting terminology
whatever you want to call it um what i tell people
that i'm an accounting major yeah all this stuff
they're like oh that's a safe degree you know
they're always going to be needed but me looking
at how the crypto industry is is just like turning
it just turned over uh year over year with this
massive growth i could very easily see accountants
uh And like the need for all this stuff being
replaced and kind of like sunsetted, they're
still going to be like, you know, I feel like
humans at a certain point are pretty much only
going to be there to review and approve things.
And the technology is just going to kind of automate
it. And it's a little scary, but like you said,
it's going to be the premium to deal with humans.
Travis is back. However, I think he may be having
a small issue with his camera. Travis, are you
there? I'm going to remove him for a short minute.
Chris, would you like to hold down the fort or
we can play a short commercial? So I need to
use the washroom. He wants to share something,
so I'll let him do that. You can go to the restroom.
I can take care of this. Alright, guys. Don't
start. No, I'm not doing anything. How is everyone
doing on this evening? This is the first day
of 2023. Did you guys do anything? festive for
new year's eve uh travis is back uh i'm gonna
add him back to the stream are you good can you
hear me good all right i think he's still figuring
a few things out all right cool cool cool cool
start plugging your affiliate links chris no
no no no it's 2023 you have to be okay it's 2023
you have to uh I can't be plugging my affiliate
links anymore. You did a face reveal pocket change?
When did this happen? Was this today? Or, oh,
I guess that would have been last night. Was
that on your channel or Trump Change's channel?
Or some live stream? Geek of All Trades says
it's scary, but it forces humanity to push past
the basics and work harder to be a contributing
part of society. Yeah, I mean. At what point
do we just kind of not like accept defeat, but
like AI is designed by humans to make our lives
easier. And it's not the worst thing that it's
coming around. You seem like all the all the
Terminator movies and all the movies about robots
trying to scare people and saying, oh, this technology
is bad. But, you know, it has a lot of a lot
of perks here. Pocket change last night. SNL
with Misfit Mining. Is that on YouTube? Well,
it's okay. I joined the Misfit Mining Discord
server very, very late last night. Did you do
anything for New Year's, Travis? Oh, yes. I stayed
at home and played with computers. Nice. Nice.
Nothing better. I mean... Yeah, apologies for
dropping out there. I had a little computer suicide
or something over here. So, everything's good.
I'm getting a blue screen at death right now.
Uh, every time I turn on my computer, it's throwing
me some watchdog error and no, I'm going to have
to look into that. It's going to be great. Everyone's
having issues tonight, huh? Yeah. I have to turn
on my computer. It blue screens two times and
then I can use it. It doesn't make any sense.
Are you on windows? Yeah. I tried to, I updated
it to try and make it like the latest version
of windows 11. It didn't, it's not working, but.
Oh, well, I have everything backed up. Pocket
Chain did a face reveal. I did not hear about
that last night. Apparently, for backups, these
things are rad, dude. These are the, what, the
T7 shields by Samsung. It's a two terabyte drive
SSD. Oh, wow. That is very kind. It's like hardened.
USB -C? Yeah, yeah, it's USB -C. um they're pretty
cheap on get them on amazon it's a t7 shield
uh this is a two terabyte i've got a couple of
them and uh i could dunk them underwater i can
um you know throw them around they're uh and
they're almost as fast as the really fast ones
um i mean they're fast enough man they're pretty
quick for an external ssd yeah i'm in no way
associated with them i just i use them and i
think they're badass Man, I've had this Toshiba
for like, I don't know, maybe seven, seven, ten
years because I bought a I dropped my laptop
and I've dropped my laptop before, but I dropped
it and had a disc in it. It just it just destroyed
it all. I've never had an issue like that with
a with a hard drive failing. I'm sorry, guys.
I did not pin the link before. That's my fault.
But now you're welcome to call in. pocket change
xd writes yes joe i trolled chump that's her
husband wearing a mask at first because people
always give him crap when he wore a mask while
recording that i took it off after a few minutes
lol it's funny i only seen a little bit though
was he wearing a mask to protect his identity
or was it a covid thing doesn't matter i mean
you know i think i mean just stick with it honestly
going forward you know I don't blame people who
don't want to show their identity. I don't either.
Yeah, I mean, if your face is on the internet,
they will figure out who you are. And come to
your house. Yes, I know. I get those once in
a while. All right. See ya. Good luck. Are you
giving away any free stuff? Am I giving away
free stuff? No, if they're stopping by, they
might as well bring a gift. Yeah. Although, I
will say that people have started giving me pistols.
There you go. Because they heard people were
just dropping by my house. So, so like community
members are giving me pistols. I'm like, I'm
not going to argue here. That's a very good gift.
Yeah. Yeah. It's a very, very nice gift. Yeah.
I would be pissed if that happened to me. Well,
yeah, I would not, I would not be happy if I
was getting that. I mean, I kind of say it now
and occasionally I'll get something, I'll get
a threat or I'll get a call or whatever. but
over the alpha program i would yeah this oh i
thought you meant giving me pistols no stopping
by my house was uncalled for yeah oh yeah it
was four in the morning they're like can you
chat and i'm like yeah sure what's up and they're
like come outside i'm like um what um yeah that's
insane man yeah please deal with it no no i live
in texas Yeah, I guess you guys have a little
bit different of a thought of, you know, law
enforcement there. So it wasn't a big deal. It
really wasn't. You know, did he actually want
to chat or was he just there to badger you? No,
he wanted to chat, but it was four in the morning.
I mean, you know, just yes, I was up. I was up
and I was working on stuff. So it was just a
misunderstanding. And we write it off to that
and, you know, consider it done. Just don't do
that to people because it's kind of freaky, especially
to their wives or significant others, you know,
kind of freaks them out a little bit. So speaking
of today, I actually met the first person. Well,
I would consider him the first one I've met off
of YouTube as Crypto Bedell. He's been on the
live stream before. He lives in Illinois and
he took away the server and brought me a case
of Red Bull. So once again, I already gave him
a shout out, but. That's neat. I like meeting
people. Under the right circumstances, it's awesome.
I think we have some great communities going
here. Just call before you come. If all these
crypto events like Bitcoin in Miami or the Bitcoin
showcase, if they happened in June, I'd be able
to go to every single one of them, but everything
happens in May. Right when finals happen, it's
so difficult. I want to go to these things to
meet a whole bunch of people. Looks like he's
going to have to wait. Unless there is some summer
events. I went to the Helium House in Austin
and New York City. And those were both pretty
cool events. Austin, actually not a pretty cool.
It was a really freaking hot event, actually.
But we were up on the roof for most of that.
And it was ridiculously hot. But met a lot of
good folks that I hadn't met before, you know,
from overseas. And they were able to attend the
event. So it was pretty tight. How are the Helium
Houses? I hear they throw a pretty good party.
Well, there's after parties that are pretty cool.
You know, some, I guess, sponsored, some just,
you know, not sponsored. I think there were a
lot of people purchasing marijuana with H &T
up in New York. Nice. It's nice to see that,
you know, integrated into the local economy.
UK's, really? With crypto at the dispensary?
No, no, no, no. People to people, yeah. Like
some people, yeah. I don't have anything against
marijuana. I think there are some good uses to
it. I've experienced the benefits, but I no longer
do it. Do it for long enough, it'll make you
stupid. Yeah, but you shouldn't throw people
in jail for it is my two cents, man. I think
that it's ridiculous to throw people to imprison
someone. When they're not a big player in the
marijuana game, they just have a quarter on them
or something. You're going to throw them in jail
for years, take them away from their family.
Sorry, I don't like to get political on this,
but that's something I feel pretty strongly about.
I don't think that's a political issue. Honestly,
it's kind of ridiculous. I think it's still categorized
as like, what was it? I don't know. Anyways,
we're going to bring in Jules. Jules, thanks
for calling in. How you doing? Hey, guys. Hey.
Yeah. It's good to see you. You've been joining
us a lot lately on these live streams, so as
always, thank you. Do you have anything you want
to talk about, Jules? Do you want to talk about
lessons learned? Do you want to talk about another
subject? No, not really. I'm not going to bash
helium. Now, look, contrary to what some people
think, I still have a lot of hype for Helium.
And that's why I've been so outspoken with what's
happened here is because of the fact that I want
to see it succeed. Yeah, I think a lot of the
folks in Australia, they wouldn't be participating,
you know, still at this point if they didn't
give or care about, you know, the Helium and
the Helium network. So, no, I think it's important.
I think that something has to happen here. I
think with the testbed, you know, a lot of good
has come out of that. And I think we are seeing
at least a little bit of a coming together, you
know, between Nova and Helium Foundation and,
you know, everyone in Australia. But the reason
behind that is because the Australian folks are
providing data. They're saying, look, this is
what is going on. and, and help us, you know,
I mean, what do we do here? How do we move forward?
And so, um, no, I think it's awesome as a community,
what Australia has been doing or what the Australian
like Laura, when folks have been doing on this,
uh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel the same way.
Um, I mean, I'm critical of, of healing from
time to time. Um, but I'm also supportive and
I try to call it like, I, like, I see it. Like
I, try to stay as factual as possible and give
people the best information. And one of the things
I, like my difference in opinion from most other
crypto YouTubers is that I'm not looking at what
the mining community is saying or what, you know,
the Joe Blow who showed up yesterday into crypto
and has a, you know, massive following and all
of a sudden wants to talk about LoRaWAN. I look
at what the community is doing, who's using the
network, people who are serious in the industry.
And you guys are still here. And the Australians
all, they are and they have been. I mean, that's
been one of the strongest, like, LoRaWAN, like,
groups in the world. Way before the U .S. had
any LoRaWAN, like, really, foundation. You know,
that foundation came through Helium. It didn't
come through GTN in the US. Australia has had
that for years now. And like I said in the chat
earlier, I mean, Helium's, what they've achieved
is nothing short of amazing. The network they've
set out is fantastic. The one concern I have
in talking about lessons learned is that they
don't seem to want to admit when they make a
mistake. And that's kind of the first step to
learning a lesson. How do you see the foundation
leading things as opposed to the alliance? Hard
to answer. I mean, Scott, with the hit, hold,
hit 45 thing, when this dual plan first sort
of blew up, I was impressed to see Scott step
in and do something about it and have the town
hall and really hear us out and say, look, yep.
In that case, they admitted. things hadn't been
done properly. Let's fix it. But there was a
second town hall after that, that you held over
there, you know, following that, right? There
was one prior to when I was involved. So I was
involved with one post HIPAA 45 that Scott sort
of, he spoke to a few of us, the one -on -one,
agreed that, you know, there'd been some issues
and agreed to have the town hall. So that was
when I got sort of involved in this whole thing.
And, look, I understand Abai's feeling new in
the role, but I'm just kind of missing that kind
of leadership of stepping up and saying, hey,
look, yeah, we have messed up. Let's try and
make it right. I don't really think that's happened.
And Abai, he is new to that particular role,
but he has been involved, you know, in the network
for quite some time, you know. Sure. But he is
new to that role. And I'm hearing a lot of positive
things about his involvement in the foundation
and how he's kind of gearing things. And so,
you know, I really want to see the situation
worked out. You know, I know, and I'm from Texas,
and I know Australians can be kind of, you know,
hard in the head like Texans can, man. No offense
meant there, but I get it. I get it. And I think
there's been animosity on both sides. And I just
want to see that. you know, kind of, you know,
worked out, man, because we all want this network
is awesome. I mean, we haven't seen a network
like this built before and it's out there. I
don't want to see this destroyed because, you
know, some of us are stubborn or some people
just, you know, can't let go of some ideas that
they had thrown back in the past. So let's just,
let's figure out how we can do this and make
it happen, man. I've got, you know, I'm involved
with a lot of schools over in Australia and I
need this to work, you know? I mean, I need this
network to happen. And it's working, which is
amazing. And it's so cool to see all these schools,
like all the data feeds coming through. I love
it. And the positive side is that there is an
indication that they're going to release this
fix in the next couple of days. They don't have
an exact date, but I know the embargo finishes
in a couple of days. So I'm hoping they've got
a priority on it and it gets out soon. And hopefully
we can start rebuilding from there. Yeah, absolutely,
man. Absolutely. Travis, I have a question for
you. Yeah, what's up? What is your opinion on
Wi -Fi Dabo? This is the laser stuff? Yeah. I
was on the community call the other day, and
it looks like they're hiring up, I don't know,
for local jobs over there. It seems like, I don't
know how close they are to... Actually, implementation.
And that's my own ignorance. I'm not quite sure.
But the technology seems pretty rad. You know,
I'd love to play with it and see, you know, see
where they're at on that. I think that, you know,
being able to do especially like line of sight,
you know, network distribution to kind of far
off places is critical, especially when we talk
about like Africa, when we talk about Australia,
when we talk about, you know just in the middle
of nowhere places that um you don't have a lot
of elevation differences with that if i could
do point to point and and connect to a network
that's huge man and i may be getting a lot of
this wrong but um no um i don't know it entirely
in detail so i if you're saying something that
might be wrong i'm not going to know okay i'm
hugely interested yeah yeah i mean i'm a wi -fi
guy but i have not looked into that which i probably
should Another thing I wanted to ask, since you
brought up point to point, have you ever looked
into the Althea Network? Someone else mentioned
this to me recently. I think it's Althea .network.
No, I know nothing about it. All right. You'll
have to watch one of my videos on it. Here, let
me send you a link on Discord. I think that's
actually where I heard about it was from your
channel. It might have been. I know. Amir Halim
has mentioned it in Twitter posts before. But,
yeah, they're a crypto -based product, but basically
it's like you bring in internet, you resell internet
to your neighbors, and the method that you use,
you can use point -to -point radio shot, CAT6,
fiber. But it's LTE -based. Backhaul is what
most of this is? Yeah. Okay. Point -to -point
radios. It can be. It doesn't necessarily have
to be. But let's say that someone in the neighborhood,
they've decided to buy a reseller circuit. All
the traffic from everyone who buys into this
network is going to be encrypted, and it's going
to be sent over the handoff from the ISP, but
back to a data center where there's end nodes
being hosted. And those end nodes take care of
the public IP assignments. They take care of
NAT. They take care of content filtering and
moderating and any legality that comes with it.
But the essence of it is like this shared model.
It's, you know, crowdsource infrastructure, but
like you're incentivized to bring your neighbor
on board. And let's say I get a point -to -point
shot to my house. If I can provide internet to
my neighbor somehow, My bandwidth costs are offset
by me allowing them to have a link to that. And
they're doing it in crypto. Now, I've seen this
done with routing protocols in other similar
ISP type situations where maybe the ISP out in
the middle of nowhere sucks and the people have
to come up with a solution, but it's done in
fiat currency. So it can certainly be done. Now,
I've had some additional thoughts about... their
follow -on plans with validators and tokens,
because you don't need tokens. You don't necessarily
need your own blockchain if you can do the same
thing you're doing in fiat. But we'll see. Lloyd
Christmas, my favorite troll, asked, why are
your cheeks so red? And let me counter that with
another question. Why the F weren't you here
for the year -in -review livestream, Lloyd? That
was an amazing livestream. Sponsored by FTX.
Yeah. So with that bandwidth sharing, you're
effectively getting around the problem of having
potentially incriminating or what's the word?
Yeah, problematic traffic on your link by having
the encrypted. If it's all encrypted, then you're
not responsible for transit. That's what you're
asking? Yeah. So it is. They have people who
have big routers in a data center, and basically
that has an IPsec tunnel to every end device
in people's homes. So if you're a transit node,
like I provide a Cat5 link to a neighbor, and
they use my connection, I'm not responsible for
that. I can't see what's going over that. You
don't want to see. You don't want to see what's
going over it. Yeah. And if they violate the
law. That is taken care of by that node that
unencrypts it, provides a public IP address.
So why does another node unencrypt it and they
don't unencrypt it? Can they run another layer
of encryption on top of this? Well, yeah, you
can do just a regular SSL VPN if you wanted to
or another IPsec VPN through it. But the whole
point is... The people who have a lot of experience
in the ISP realm are going to take responsibility
and abide by the law. Right, but it's our responsibility
to say, how can we tell our dirtiest secrets
in private over a network? Our roles in this
industry and what we do is we have to build the
infrastructure that allows us to have complete
end -to -end privacy. And no one else, no one
else can, can violate that in between me and
my partner or me and me. Right. That's critical.
I agree. I like that thought process, but just
explain the way the system works, you know? No,
no, I got you. Yeah. Yeah. So that's interesting.
And that's kind of like, you know, we're saying
earlier on helium opened the doors to a lot of
these tip and network. That would be considered
one of them. There's more people interested in
this kind of infrastructure because of, the massive
success that helium had in standing up a crowdsourced
network now this is the thing another lesson
learned with this type of model the crowd source
model and i'm always open input but i believe
that you know like harder you rise harder you
fall is very potentially possible Because when
it comes to something like Althea, where it's
going to take a lot of research, a lot of funding
up front, or maybe another project like pollen
or even helium 5G, you'd think people are going
to put more understanding and more commitment
into the project itself and their infrastructure
and their involvement because they're spending
that money, because they're spending that time.
as opposed to maybe something really simple like
a hotspot where they don't have as much skin
in the game. So I think the FUD that is spread
by people who have that type of commitment because
they have that type of time and money investment
is a lot. It doesn't exist in the mass that it
would otherwise with a project that has a lower
bar of entry. Any thoughts? Yeah. I don't do
business with anyone who doesn't know who Philip
Zimmerman is and what he was doing in the early
90s with PGP. And it doesn't really understand.
Yeah, yeah. Pretty good privacy. And what Zimmerman
was doing and then GPG, I guess, you know, looking
forward there. But yes, privacy is critical to
everything we're doing here. And if you could
not have secrets, if you could not have anonymity,
if you could not have proof of identity as well,
like I was talking about, these are all critical
aspects of this infrastructure that we're building.
And if someone doesn't know what the fuck we're
talking about, I just say, it's nice to meet
you, you know? No, I like that type of mindset.
Um, I'll add, I, all the conspiracies that we
laugh about, you know, government spying, all
the things we joke about. It's just that bad.
It is true. We know it. We've seen, well, not
only what's going on in the Twitter files, Edward
Snowden knocked the fricking hinges off the door
and, um, WikiLeaks, I've drawn blank on his name.
Um, Who ran WikiLeaks. He's on the run. Julian
Assange. Yes. I mean, it's all been exposed.
It's all out there for you to see in plain sight.
And you see what's in the terms of services in
these technologies. Is Web3 going to change that?
Do people even care enough to? I think it's the
science that's going to change that. And I think
that it's because I always say you don't argue
with Matt. I mean, math's solid, man. As far
as we know, math is solid. It's a hard battle
to fight. I think this is going to play out more
politically and more in the public spaces than
it is in the math spaces. Until we hit singularity,
and then we're all fucked. Definitely going to
find a way around all these data breaches constantly.
being being done um and yeah your ids and that
kind of stuff but um i can also see the balance
in you don't want to allow bad actors to be able
to communicate and organize without any here's
the thing about data breach but they have to
everyone has The right to secrets. I mean, you
cannot say that some bad actors or some people
cannot tell secrets and other people can. It
violates everything about what secrets are. I
mean, everyone, it comes down to math. We can't
say that I can backdoor them because I think
that their skin color is wrong or their idealism
is wrong. You know, I can't backdoor them because
of that. Everyone has a right to secrets and
that has to be universal. One thing I will say,
since you brought up data breaches, Jules, there
is, I think there's always going to be data breaches.
My biggest concern with them is how much fricking
data these, these companies take when we sign
up for their services and then they get breached
and we get screwed because of them are going
to happen. Data is worth, it's worth money. It's
sold. It's going to be sold on the dark web and
tumbled into the tumbleweed of, everyone's data
that you just people go to google takeout and
go to google takeout and download your whole
profile bad ideas to bad people on here i don't
know what you're gonna say but if it if sorry
travis i don't know no no don't be sorry but
that's that's something everyone should be aware
of what google holds on them google takeout will
give you every piece of information that google
holds in all of their services and allow you
to download in like in encrypted. You are correct.
I'll add on to that. Go download your Facebook
history. You're going to find every phone call
at every time and every text message, not the
text maybe, but the people you texted at any
time in the history of it because it's linked
to your account. Your account's on your phone
and they have that data. It is outrageous. One
of the big things for Web3 though is the whole
methods of proving identity without having to
release your driver's license, your passport,
et cetera, et cetera, to all these companies
that have, in some cases, very poor security.
And we've seen some big ones in Australia recently
where, again, millions of people have had their
data released. Yeah. Yeah. Is anyone playing
with these? They've been making kind of a global
splash recently. What are they? It's a Flipper
Zero. Little pen test device. Can you explain
what it does for the audience? For the audience,
it can clone RFID. It can NFC, IR. It can open
gates, pop the gas cap on Teslas. It can allow
you to clone entry devices. They kind of get
held up on U .S. Customs. I think 10 ,000 units
did. And people were like, yeah, I don't know
if I trust those after they get held up for,
you know, a month or so, you know. But there's
different firmware. You can program for them.
They have extensions. They have GPIO on the top
there. So you can break out and really hack around
on them. This is a, sorry, not safe for work
maybe, but this is a different firmware running
on it. These are getting extremely popular right
now and kind of breaking pen testing into a lot
of the popular media. And I think that's important
that people understand that, yeah, you're not
nearly as safe electronically as you think you
are. Yes, correct. And I want to make a whole.
So I have a good amount. of information that
i've already put together especially when it
comes related to crypto and people staying safe
but like i want to do some cyber security stuff
on here but the problem is i have um a crazy
look someone who is in my past that thinks i
am obsessed with them and when you work with
computers i know People are going to think you're
behind every tree and every corn. I know, I know.
Down in their soup, they're going to see your
face. And when they screw up online, you're going
to get blamed for it. Especially if you teach
it or if you talk about it. If you bring people
together to discuss it, then yeah. I mean, you've
got a bullseye right here, man. And now I've
been exposed to the same stuff. It sucks, but
it's reality. I understand that. Fuck it. Teach
anyway. Talk about it anyway. That's the only
way to go forward. Just say, look, I'm trying
to educate you on how to protect yourself. That's
what we're doing here. What I try to do is avoid
giving the deliberate script kitty type of tools
away. Just because you can prove a point doesn't
mean you should. But they're going to be used
against people, and so they should be cognizant
of what's going on. I try not to give bad people
ideas. I promise anyone that I educate and teach
with or work with that I'm not going to hack
you. You don't hack me. That's the deal. Handshake
deal. Unless it's in a controlled environment.
Yeah, sure. We're here for education and we're
here to educate everyone on how this works because
this is in play. This goes on every day, all
day, every day, everywhere you can imagine. Don't
plug a cable that you don't recognize into your
phone, into your computer. I mean, because you'll
get your ass owned. Oh, yeah. I'd be surprised.
Yeah, look on Hack 5. Hack 5 is a really good.
The OMG cables. I mean, yeah. And then another
really good YouTube channel I like is Aaron Jones.
You'll have to look up Aaron Jones Security,
but he is awesome. Travis, maybe you're the person
who would know this. Something I wanted to. start
doing because i stay in a lot of hotel rooms
what device would you use to like sniff out hidden
cameras you would you know one off the top of
your head yeah i'd use like a like a firmware
modified um like just a sdr like a hack rf um
i you could use those for for camera detection
they work pretty well honestly but um on your
notebook uh get gnu radio set up And, you know,
get some good modules set up and where you can
go from the HackRF and through the GNU radio
workflow. And that's the way to do that. I can
send some stuff over for you, man. All right.
Yeah, I'll let you know. We'll talk about it.
We've got a comment from Lloyd Christmas. Today,
I read a piece on CNN that Joe Biden signed the
Omnius bill, which included a ban on TikTok on
federal employee devices. I had my ass off. Imagine
having to legislate that. And yes, I hate CNN,
too. But that is some progress. I mean, you think
it's common sense. And another thing that I don't
like, and I understand that Huawei is competitive
and they're good products, but they rip off our
patents and they have backdoors. And we know
that they're a player, a known state actor for
the Chinese Communist Party. Why do we have to
why? I just don't understand what these telecom
companies are thinking other than about themselves.
Telecom or every company, every company. I mean,
where does Apple make its stuff? Where does I
mean? I mean, it's I mean, you don't put things
over into Shenzhen to expect your IP to be respected
because everyone knows it's not going to be.
And I mean, in a lot of cases, you're going to
have night runs. you know running what you're
building over there at the same time like simultaneously
so everyone who does that knows that um i i don't
know what to say stop doing it if you don't want
that to happen i mean and then don't make any
of your deadlines don't make any of your go to
market dates i mean just be better is what i
say just just Be better. And that may be PR.
That may be customer service. That may be any
other aspect besides, you know, the actual product.
Be better and get there from that. But I don't
know. I don't know the answer. That's my two
cents. I seem to kick off a discussion here.
Pocket Change XD says, dude, cameras are one
of my biggest fears, and I can see why. And they
are one of mine, too. I have kids. I don't want
them being recorded. You can jam them. That's
illegal. And everyone needs to get your radio
license. I'll say that right here, man. I wish
they would have classes that teenagers, high
school and stuff would teach safety on the Internet.
Yeah, that scares the shit out of me. We might
have to do a safety course. For parents as well.
For parents. How do you deal with kids that I
want to allow them to have access to this huge
wealth of information, but I don't want them
seeing DP or weird stuff that may not be age
appropriate. Yeah. Chad, Dawson, Bobby from the
Helium Discord, thanks for being here. Thanks
for the comments. You asked about the future
of Helium and 5G and Wi -Fi. We talked about
that earlier. If anyone wants to take Take the
question, but I don't think, you know, there's
a lot of speculation. There's no definitive answers
here and really don't know what's going to happen.
And he asked about the future of Hive Mapper,
which you're going to get a video from me tomorrow.
Cool. If I could chime in on the whole teenager
pocket change says a teenager should be taught
this stuff. Like my age group, I've noticed a
lot of the kids do not care about any of their
information. And I've seen so many of them get
scammed. I know a girl that just lost like a
thousand dollars because she felt the classic
like Wells Fargo email scam. And their accounts
get hacked on Instagram all the time. You explain
that. Oh, yeah, this is this is a well -known
issue. And there are. there's two youtubers in
particular that i've been watching where they
actually call the scam call centers and they
go through it but basically you'll get a phone
call or an email and it is somebody usually um
in india is where they found where a lot of these
scam call centers are from they're calling and
they're saying that there has been some sort
of issue on your account and that you need to
work through it there's there's a whole bunch
of different uh ways that they can go about basically
saying that they need your information to assist
with your account because there's some sort of
compromise. And the compromise is you giving
them. Yeah, exactly. So you hang up immediately
and then you call. Well, I personally will hang
up immediately and call the bank and make sure
that they called me. Any phone number can be
spoofed. Let me tell you a little story about
what I used to do when I was 12 years old and
my parents. Got divorced. Well, it was probably
more when I was 15 years old. But they argued
for years afterwards, and they both had some
drug and alcohol issues. So, you know, when I
was tired of hearing my mom's crap, I would just
spoof a text message and make it look like it
was from my dad. All I would say is, hey. And
it came exactly from his number. What the fuck
does your dad want now? They start arguing. Then
my dad's calling me, what, is she drunk again?
But I did it because I thought it was funny.
But you do, I mean, at the bank I worked at,
we got robocalls all the time from different
numbers. They spoof numbers, making it look like
it's a legit, it's coming from ComEd. You need
to pay your bill. That goes to regular people,
right? Well, beyond that, man. It looks like
it's coming from another bank to us. Go ahead,
Travis. No, they'll see what area codes you accept
calls from, and you will get to start spoof calls
from those area codes because there's a larger
percent chance that you pick those up. It's ridiculous,
man. But yes, it's everyone. See, that's the
thing, Joe. I believe in people knowing how to
do this. in in the educational aspect of stem
of saying hey do you want to know how to spoof
this i will teach you but then like just like
you say people think that you're the guy you're
the bad guy when something happens and you're
like no i'm not yeah i've thought about making
these courses private and i'm not going to tell
anyone how to do anything illegal not going to
tell anyone how to do Like, even get close to
nefarious things other than if you want to start,
download Linux. Here's the resources. Have fun
learning. That's it. But the thing is, Joe, what
gets me is I've had some friends, you know, from
high school and stuff, and their kids got popped
for computer crimes. And they come to me and
they're like, what do I do? You know? I'm like,
well, the problem is lack of education. The problem
is these kids are just doing what we used to
do when we were young, you know, and kind of
running out and just figuring things out and
not having anyone to talk to, man. You know?
Yeah. And I think that we have a responsibility,
honestly, to the community, you know, of these
kids to say, hey, you can talk to me. I don't
care what the fuck you're doing, man. You can
talk to me. I'm not going to the cops. I'm not
going, you know, just. you know let's chat man
you know yeah and i think that's important for
for these kids to have um that that back that
you know backstop or what whatever you know yeah
with great power comes great responsibility and
it's too easy to abuse um and unfortunately there
are just so many people who are not aware to
how rampant this is how easy it is to be tricked
when you don't have The suspicion and paranoia
as well as the understanding of the technology
and how people really are. Look, one of the things,
and I always say this, I like to believe that
people are good, that we live in a mostly good
society, and I still do. But what I learned,
what we described earlier with the gaming of
the system, it really opened my eyes to how people
are when they can get away with things. That
is unfortunate. But it's reality. yeah there's
some cheap bags out there no there's no uh comfort
in the truth let's just stop up the kids man
i agree that's the only way you can have a better
future and i'll tell you what i'd really do believe
in the future of crypto um i believe it will
change things not the way everyone says that
it is right now like they say future is oh sorry
technology is overestimated short -term underestimated
long -term i forget who the quotes by yeah overestimated
short -term underestimated long -term the impacts
um i do believe that the influence that we have
in the space collectively needs to we need to
use responsible and we need to push for education
and better usage or the better path of these
different projects to take. And that's why I'm
on this kick about web three and security and
privacy and other, other things. But I mean,
this is what I think I do best in life because
it's my career path, but it's like, I have kids,
I have to be engaged with society and want what's
better for the future. I can't just go put my,
my head in the, in the sand and act like an ostrich.
Yeah. And 10 years down the road, it's not going
to be me talking to you. It's going to be our
generation talking to next generation. And so
we need to think that out as well. I mean, it's
not all these micro conversations going on, but
it's about what we're doing as a collective right
now in the space and how that plays out cross
-generationally. So, yeah. So, Travis, what's
your view on regulation for crypto? Everyone
in my family, is uh cpa um except for my except
for me um kind of a black sheep as far as that
goes but um i kind of went the computer out um
but um as far as regulation it it when we're
talking about federal regulation like um on a
national level um which we're seeing you know
creeping heavy heavy heavy um or if we're talking
about um you know international exchange of i
mean i mean or if we're talking about um complete
anonymity on crypto um i i think there's a lot
of aspects that can be can be discussed here
i think that i mean there are countries where
um anonymity is the number one issue you know
is i i i need to be able to to to deal with some
type of monetary system without my name being
tied to it. And in a lot of countries, this is
life or death. I mean, this is critical, critical
stuff that isn't evading taxes. That's not the
critical aspect we're talking about. We're talking
about getting your ass hung or shot. And so I
don't know. I mean, it's a terribly hard... issue
to even define much less you know talk about
solutions to like how um i mean i think the two
critical are anonymity and proof of identity
and they both have to exist side by side um and
they have to exist in a situation where i have
no access to a bank for example you know i live
in the middle of nowhere i don't have banking
access i don't have how do i have access to um
Not necessarily wealth, but funds. How do I store
funds? And I do that via crypto. That's the only
known way really out there for someone in the
middle of nowhere. Let's say someone in Africa,
no banking, no access really to much computer
systems or telecom systems. How do I maintain
and build wealth? That's a hard fucking question,
man. Yeah. No, I think for crypto to ever be
mainstream, there has to be some level of regulation
for the centralized exchanges, that kind of thing.
But I also agree with what you're saying, too,
is we need a decentralized indexes to still operate
in a decentralized way of transmitting money.
If I've got family over in Ukraine or some parts
of China right now where they're being punished
or whatever, you know, being able to transfer
money without any controls, that kind of thing
is certainly important. And every government
hates that. Every government is going to hate
that, you know? Yeah. So, yeah, anonymity is
good, but I think for the average Joe who wants
to invest and goes to FTX or something like that,
there needs to be some sort of regulation so
that there's a trust in it. a trusted avenue
for those who don't want to delve into DEXs and
that kind of thing. Sure. But we're talking about
an entire across -the -board financial system
here. I mean, and so we can't just talk about,
you know, these folks or these folks or these
folks. We have to say, I mean, this is a rebuilding
of our financial ecosystem. And how is that going
to be handled? it's not an easy question um i
don't know i agree you know they're all all important
and you know too many people i think have vested
interest whether it be for themselves for their
company and not necessarily for the betterment
of the future that this tech is going to bring
not for the good of good of all and i i really
hate to see that because i think no matter what
in this space if you have a good product or even
a average product at this point you stand to
make a lot of money if you play your cards right
and you can still be honest by doing it you're
not going to make as much as you were ripping
off everyone and and um you know screwing others
over but look you have to you know try being
a decent human being chris was there something
you want to add here oh no chad said that the
stock market had very little trust and was like
the wild west before the 1920s and i think that
you know we can put crypto on the same spectrum
we are at the forefront of a brand new technology
as you say with your uh the video that we usually
play in the beginning of these things but it's
i mean we really are at the dawn of of something
revolutionary so there's no doubt that i think
what's up yeah who isn't here rest easy writes
who the f isn't here for money be real look i'm
here for money i will sit here and tell you yes
i'm here for money but how do i present my content
to you i don't really sell affiliate links i
don't try to get you to buy into the idea of
making hundreds a day doing nothing i try to
be honest with you i'm here to do the research
and the hard work and find the next project that
is going to be a useful solution and that is
going to have that utility that comes with that
massive value in the crypto Yeah, and Joe, you're
not paying any of us to be on here to talk about
this, man. He's buying you? Oh, shit. Well, secret's
out. I guess they have to know. I just checked
it from Chris. Joe pays me. Okay, awesome. Cool.
Now we're good. No, but it isn't necessarily
all about the money. And there's some projects
I work with that are involved in crypto that...
I have been around for a very long time and go
to one planet education dot com and check it
out. See what we're doing over there. Trust me,
the money isn't rolling in, but it's it's one
of the most amazing projects I've been involved
with in the space. So, you know, I also want
to say something. You see what Gristle King does
with his YouTube. He is working his ass off to
both do. what's good for the helium ecosystem,
but still make his fair share of money through
consulting. You can't fault them for that. It's
not a crime to make money, man. It's not a crime
to make money. And he doesn't have a massive
YouTube channel either. It can be done. Is it
going to be instantaneous overnight? No, but...
As you progress and your name gets known and
you have more experience, there is a lot of money
to be made in here. Especially if you want to
go down the coding route and program freaking
smart contracts or do something like what Travis
does. There are endless possibilities and you
don't have to be a scumbag while you do it. That's
just what I'm saying. And I pay my monthlies
over to Nick over at Gristle King to be part
of the crew over there. I don't think I think
he gives so much to the community that it's not
asking much to say, hey, break me up a little.
You know, yeah, that's that's not a crime and
that's not a bad thing to say that I'd like to
get paid for what I do. You know. Yeah, no, I
agree. And hey, look, I give all the information
away for free. I know not the best, but, you
know, that's not the best model to go by. But
I do believe down the road with the following
that I've gained and with the connections that
I've made, it's going to pay off dividends to
have the trust and support of the community.
Look, like I said, I don't really have affiliate
codes to sell you. The ones I do is because I
believe in the product, believe in the company.
But when that project comes along, then I say,
this might be the moonshot. This is the idea.
I'm going to be telling everyone on YouTube about
it. And we're going to run with it. And I can't
peddle bullshit up until that point. Otherwise,
it's not going to matter when the time is right.
That's my thoughts. No, I think that lands solid,
man. And Joe, I mean, just a case in point. I
mean, you've got so many eyeballs right now that
have now been on with you for about three hours.
Just talking about this. Because they want to
see your face. They want your input into what's
going on. Whatever. Into what's going on. And
that's important. It's critical to have that
community building. And to have trust in that
community. And to say, hey, I don't know what
the fuck I'm doing. I like it when this guy,
because he says some good things, you know, he
kind of knows what the hell is going on and,
you know, helps me make good calls for very big
decisions in life, you know? Yeah, I appreciate
that. And, you know, it's a little bit weird
for me that I have so many people who know who
I am. And I'm sure it's the same for you. This
is an intimate hobby that we're helping people
through. They know who we are. They know some
of our personality. our quirks and about our
life, but we don't know them. And our face is
ingrained in their mind for the, for the rest
of life. Just about. You're doing the devil's
work, man. You're doing the devil's work. We're
good. Yeah. We will keep going as long as you
guys want. If you're having fun, if you want
to call it a night, whatever you'd like to do.
However, I'm good for anything. I think this
is awesome. We have so much good content in this
video. And I appreciate your guys' comments in
the comment section. I haven't been displaying
them today because we get a lot of comments now.
And I don't like posting them over people's faces
because I don't feel good doing it. It's not
proven. Huh? It's not proven in my case, so feel
free. no one of the things i was going to say
here is okay i i hate i hate the millennial gen
zennial obsession with social media and influencers
i i absolutely despise it and occasionally i
sign a non -disclosure agreement that says the
influencer referring to me because i have a youtube
channel and like i i kind of laugh at it and
say you know i'm here in spite of that i I do
believe, and I try not to have a big ego, and
I try to be down to earth and acknowledge everyone.
Look, I get a little testy, but that's just my
personality. However, I try to be a genuine person
on here, but do what's best, because I know there
is influence. I mean, it was like 430 ,000 viewing
hours or something. No, maybe it was 40 ,000
viewing hours. I have to go look, 430 ,000 views.
But there's college professors that would kill
to have that. They would kill to have the platform
that Travis and Chris have because it's more
than the reach they have now. So I do think there's
responsibility in what I say here. And I have
to hold myself accountable and do what's best
for the greater opinions. There is influence
and clout that goes along with this. And I know
I'm, like I said, a little crass, a little bit.
I criticize. I try to only criticize at the right
moments and do what I think is right. And criticizing
honestly is different. You know, I mean, I believe.
I don't know. Yeah. That's not just throwing
someone under the bus. If you criticize someone
with honest truths, I think that's fair game.
I don't know. So, a little change in gears. What
are your guys' New Year's resolutions and plans?
Who wants to go first? With life? Crypto? Whatever
you want to talk most about. Oof. So much to
talk about. I have a lot of New Year's resolutions,
but like, I mean, I know a big one for a lot
of people is to get into the gym, but I've been
doing that very consistently. So I don't really
consider that as one of my resolutions. It's
just kind of something I'm just going to continue
because it's already part of my routine. I'm
on a track team at the school that I'm at. My
goal is to go really far like NCAAs this year,
which would be awesome for me. And as far as
YouTube, I mean, Joe, we've talked about this
before. Our goal is to provide like good content,
good, reliable content. One hundred percent.
I can't speak for you, but I can speak for myself.
I I'm already making mistakes. I know I'm going
to be making mistakes in the content that I make,
but the viewers are always there and they're
correcting me. And I love that. And it's always
making me improve. And our content, if you look
at like our first crypto videos compared to now,
we've improved so much with how we're talking
and how we're getting the point across. And it's
just it's awesome. So I just want to keep going
forward with that kind of stuff. I want to keep
making. more videos especially since we're in
the bear market it kind of gives us a better
view of the projects that are serious and that
want things to succeed versus the projects that
are just in it for the money because there's
not a lot of money going around right now so
if we can uh you know we're gonna find some some
solid projects as well as just like expanding
our horizons and collaborating with more youtubers
we've already been on a whole bunch of different
streams now we got people in here that um you
know like chump change and and repent of mine
like all these guys that i never really thought
i would i would have like the same platform where
i would actually be speaking to them now they're
watching our streams so i think we're doing some
pretty cool stuff joe and i uh i think that this
this next year and up until the next bull runs
happen i think it's going to be really good for
our self -growth and channel growth what what
you mentioned about that like improvement is
probably one of my favorite things Like when
I see raw talent on YouTube or people like play
guitar, you know, I like playing guitar. But
like seeing them when you see them come out of
the box hot, but they're making little mistakes,
but they're still killing it. And you get to
watch them just progress over time and just really
bring it that. I love it. I love watching other
people have that kind of success. Anyways, Jules
2022, 2023. Sorry. Resolutions, plans? Yeah,
nothing specific. Just keep plugging away and
doing what I can. Travis. Yeah, shoot. I am kind
of changing gears a little bit, as most of you,
I guess, kind of know right now. But I want to
do more hands -on. like builds on sensors and,
um, you know, how to actually, you know, how
do you build a $10 sensor that goes on the helium
network? You know, how do, how do we do this
cheaply? How do we do this in, um, you know,
uh, you know, ST micros, how do we, how do we
do this in cube? How do we, how do we do this
a different way and get a little more hands on
with more of the, um, you know, the bench stuff
and just do some live streams on that. And, um,
do a channel. I've been doing a couple of shows
with Nick or Gristle King the past couple of
weeks called Hackshare, which is kind of like
a, I don't know, kind of a spin off of Helium
Hacks half the hour. But yeah, we do that on
Wednesdays. It should be good. I think Fish is
going to be talking this Wednesday on OpenAI.
So you should definitely tune in. That's a paid
Gristle King subscription, right? No. Oh, yes,
yes. Sorry. I think that – no, no, no. This one
isn't. No, no. This is just open for all, free
for all on Wednesdays at 6 p .m. Central, 4 p
.m. Pacific. And it's not the crew thing and
it's not the network thing. It's just something
we made up. And it's not on Zoom. It's on Jitsi.
619OTA posted a video of the Flipper Zero. If
you guys are interested, that's what that link
is. Yeah, they're sold out. I send Discord invitations
to your server and my server if anyone wants
to join. I know a lot of people have been joining,
but I mean, as Travis was pointing out earlier,
we have 20 people pretty much this entire stream,
which is amazing. Yeah, that's rabid. And we've
been live streaming. For the past week, week
and a half, more days than we haven't. And we
haven't really had as many people. Hey, Travis
is a rock star, so I know a lot of people like
to hear what he says. I know you're trying to
be subtle and what's the word for it, but I'm
going to say it. I'm going to toot your horn
for you. And I like having you on the video.
Well, I love being on here, man. I really enjoy
you having me on the show. I know we didn't have
anything real structured, but I love what we've
been discussing tonight. I think it's valid.
As far as your project, if you want to come on,
showcase anything, if you want to post an instructional
video, I certainly work with you on that. You
can post it on the channel. commercials for my
buddies at the beginning of the live streams
to, like, we have Veteran Miner. He does cables
for ASICs and GPUs. Hey, if you have something
like that, I'll run one for you. I appreciate
it. Thank you, man. Very cool. And if any of
your viewers, you know, have any questions about,
like, I don't know, like, firmware or kind of,
you know, the stuff that I work in, please shoot
it my way or do a connect, man. Cool. Yeah. very
cool thank you yeah of course you're always welcome
as well anyone else you know if we're close enough
i try to support everyone um hey just when you're
at the top remember to throw me a few scraps
hey shoot if you're ever in houston man hit me
up so i certainly will yeah play some drones
dude yeah oh that would be excellent that would
be awesome to do um you do a lot of drones yeah
yeah quite a bit i do a lot of autonomous uh
drone stuff um yeah um like flying very very
far don't tell anyone about that but yeah yeah
a lot of flying very far away drone stuff yeah
i just saw uh someone was flying their drone
in sweden there's a like a youtube documentary
looking at all of the bunkers that are in the
the mountain system and it's really cool you
can see Like hundreds of bunkers. It was all
accessible by drones. They all look like rock.
All the rocks open. It's massive cannons. It's
so sick. Wow. I'm going to use the washroom real
quick. Hold down the fort. What I do want to
know is what kind of crazy stuff you do, Travis,
where you're doing probably RF and drones combined.
Do you have any sort of like you get, I'm sure,
exceptionally high and great. I don't really
get that high anymore. That was more youthful
things. Likewise. You know what I mean. I know
I'm joking. No, no, no. I fly within restrictions
and that's where we can discuss that. I've got
a video. If you want to talk about it, I'm going
to use the washroom real quick and I'll be back.
If you have something you want me to play, I
can try to play it on here. Well, no, actually,
I can't talk about something. I do have a 3DR
Solo, and I've wired in a breakout board to it,
which allows you to, I'll post a pic in a bit,
but allows you to have your I2C, like all of
your main interfaces to the controller on the
board, breaking out the bottom of it. So, yeah,
it's neat stuff. I've got a video of... I've
got some rodeo videos of drone stuff and all
that. Here we go. Oh, man. 19 people going three
hours. You know, I got like maybe three hours
of sleep. It's rough. I'm barely functioning
right now. All right. I'm going to post a link.
Where do I post this? Can you see the comments?
Yeah. No, but I can post it in here. You guys
see that? Okay. Yeah. That's what that is. That's
using. And this is very early code. This is a
long time ago, but it's using some autonomous
Python code for control here. Can I share this?
Yeah, that's fine. To do road tracking and at
the very end, vehicle tracking. That's awesome.
And if you start it, it should be time queued
at 1 .51. Yep. And this is unlisted, and that's
totally... Oh, it probably can't go on a video
because that's a copyrighted thing, but... Oh,
I got it on YouTube. Just don't turn the volume
up. All right, cool. We're good. We're good.
So can you explain what it's doing again? Right.
Yes, it should be doing road tracking. Now it's
just lost. So it's looking for a road or a vehicle.
So now it's just kind of in look around and find
something mode. Wow. So this is all automated.
It's trying to, yeah. It's all autonomous, yeah.
And then it tries to go play baseball. Yeah,
I don't know. Like I say, this is very early
stuff. I bet you can write this in OpenGPT and
you'll be like, oh, yeah. Here it is. It would
ride it for me, yeah. But it does get a little
better at the end. I will say that. And actually,
it follows one of my friend's cars here at the
end. Nice. That's awesome. But like I say, this
is really, really rough, rough code, and it doesn't
know what it's doing. And it gets lost a lot,
but it will track here in a moment. You're writing
this code? I wrote it, yeah. Wow, nice. I promise
it does something here at some point. Come on
thing. You probably spent the same amount of
time writing this as it took me to figure out
like my first code snippet, which was basically
trying to log on to CoinMarketCap. Sign me in
and then claim the diamonds that they give out
every day. It took me forever. I never got it
to work because they added the captcha and I,
whatever. See, it turned around here. It tried
to track it and then it turned around and got
lost. I'm sorry to interrupt. You're good. You
can see it's trying to though. It's pretty cool.
So would this be easier to track in the daytime
or is it going off of like late? This is all
vision that it's going off of. We'll catch a
car here in a moment, I believe. But see, now
it found a road and it's trying to follow a road
to find a car. It's kind of... The way it's looking
at things. Okay, now I feel obliged to... upload
some of the new stuff that actually works well.
This is kind of embarrassing. I'm sorry, folks.
If you're able to send it directly on Discord,
upload it too. Hey, look, don't be embarrassed.
You can do something more. There's more skill
and talent that go into this than the majority
of people. It takes a while to do this stuff.
It is awesome. Jason, thanks for being here.
Take care. But I get it. I mean, we're all perfectionists
to a point. Well, this is my friend's car, actually.
And this is doing live tracking. And then it
almost hits a tree here in a minute. And so at
that point, I do take over manual control. Oh,
it's going lower. I see. Well, because it was
flying to my house doing the car tracking. And
then it saw his car and his car was also going
to my house. And so it's trying to land on when
it was trying to track. And it goes crazy here
and tries to track another car. I think it tries
to track that one and almost runs into a tree.
Yeah. So I missed the whole discussion about
the setup and how it's communicating. Python.
Yeah. Nice. And then probably here from on out
is probably manually controlled. So that's the
video. All right. Don't want to expose your house
or anything. Austin says, any comment on my 31
MXC miners? Yes, Chad. I did ask you in a – oh,
this is Bobby. I did ask you in a comment what
possessed you to buy that many. Now, I hope that
you're able to get your return on investment.
I really do. because I don't know. I hope they
get their crap together and come up with something
coherent, but I don't see it happening. I'm sorry.
I just don't see it being. Look, maybe that token
will take off again in the next bull market and
you'll make your money back. I sure hope so.
But you've seen my video. You know what I think.
And there's just too many shady stuff, too many
shady things going on there. and not enough development
for me to actually believe that there's substance,
there's value, there's anything worthwhile for
people, especially to spend that kind of money
on a device that is not worth that kind of money.
The good news is you can sell them on eBay for
around $1 ,000 is what they're going for. So
you don't have a complete loss. The thing is,
Bobby, you might... There's going to be a fee
that you have to pay for transferring it to someone
else, but yes, you can sell them if you're worried
about it. And since you've already been mining
and they have that whole gas tank penalty kind
of crap, if they're still full with MXC, there
is a chance that someone might buy it for a little
bit more than the retail value that you paid
for it. So maybe consider going down that route,
but be careful. Really work with the people in
the Discord and make sure you don't get scammed.
I mean, Chris, Jules, I'm going to have to run.
Thank you very much, Joe, for having me on the
show. I appreciate it, man. Had a great time
tonight. Chris, man, it's good to see you. Jules,
man, keep on keeping on down there, man. Always
good to see your face. Thanks for coming on.
You completed the first video of the year. I
mean, you really made our night. Hey, good deal.
Hey, I mean, it was awesome. Everyone enjoyed
this. We're getting a lot of positive comments.
Excited to have you back sometime. And like I
said, if you ever want to show off your projects,
let me know. We'll do it. I appreciate it. Take
care, folks. Take it easy. Adios.