The Helium network is unique because miners are able to buy hardware to connect to a home internet modem, broadcasting your internet services to others locally. Servicing your internet will lead miners to ultimately earn crypto through LoRaWan or long-range radio wireless access networks. Within a few years over one million LoRa Hotspots covered 10% of the globe! While this sounds like a great achievement there were inevitable problems to come. Some hosts claimed to only make about 15$ a month, you would only get rewarded when people actually transmitted data over your hotspot. Unfortunately, not many devices are looking for these hotspots or connecting to them.

Amir Haleem had tweeted “getting the infrastructure out there was the first step. Realistically there’s only been *usable* coverage for the last 6-9 months,” and added, “convincing users to rely on a network built by individuals is non-trivial, and the coverage was spotty.”

This isn’t stopping Nova Labs though. Nova Labs is cranking up its ability and will launch its Helium 5g brand as a new cellular service that is going to be accessible on the 3.5 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS). With help from invested partners like GigaSky, Freedomfi and a handful of others, Nova Labs plans to use its hotspot approach to have users buy 5g compatible hardware (with packages ranging from $999 all the way up to $5,000), install it at their home, and then download an app to access the system. Large institutions help with different types of services, for example, GigaSky provides the app service and Freedomfi provides the sale of the hardware. With the hardware hooked up to a modem, users would broadcast services for anyone in range of an LoRA. The plan for the future of Helium 5G is to cover all of T-Mobile’s dead spots. Currently, there are about 3000 hotspots in 900 cities, a far cry from one million non-5 G compatible hotspots.

If you have a hotspot setup using Helium’s services, anyone using the hotspot and transmitting data will earn you crypto (MOBILE), but factors like how good your hardware/hotspot device is, where it was placed(indoors or outdoors) and if anyone is paying for the service to use it in the first place will affect how much you can actually earn. That’s not the only downside at the moment.

Critics like lead analyst and writer Sascha Segan say this isn’t really even 5G yet. “The Helium 5G network is instead a 4G LTE CBRS network, which right now has significant advantages over 5G but doesn’t have the 5G moniker Helium and its partners wanted for marketing.“ He states the companies decided to pitch themselves as 5G simply for marketing and all partners are currently only offering 4G LTE services over the CBRS. Segan also performed an experiment where he walked around New York City and tried to detect when he was actually on the Helium 5G service and not T-Mobile. The results of this experiment were unsatisfactory due to not being in the range of a usable signal.

So far there’s three big problems that surround the company being lack of active 5G capable hotspots, issues with the range of your transmission and few people who even know about it and have service. Early prospects for Helium 5G might just be slightly overblown, for now. There is however a new partner, NMTD, which has plans to launch 5G active hotspots transmitting 5G. Projections of these hotspots will most likely come by 2023 with people still needing to buy the hardware to be a transmitter and miner of MOBILE.

https://www.lightreading.com/open-ran/helium-5g-launching-soon-with-about-1900-nodes-across-700-cities/d/d-id/779402

https://blog.helium.com/whats-next-for-helium-5g-data-transfer-proof-of-coverage-rewards-67b54f19f8d5

ASML went public on the New York stock exchange in 1995 and was seen by big tech companies as the future of science and technology. In 2012, ASML wasn’t able to create EUV machines that it had its eyes on because of monetary deficiencies so the company was able to give away a quarter of its shares to the big 3 chip manufacturers, Intel, Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Now, with the creation of EUV, there are supply issues because only one company is creating these machines. Chip creators like TSMC and Intel have Semiconductor fabrication (fabs), these are the factories that use ASML’s machines to create the semiconductor chips. The problem with this whole system is that there is a huge monopoly that makes it so no new businesses are able to join in on the profit by virtue of the machines themselves, costing up to 300 million dollars and the factories, that can take billions of dollars to not just build but manage. TSMC is the biggest player right now with over 40% of ASML’s supply in EUV machines, big companies like Intel and Samsung are even falling behind to ASML’s reining monopoly.

Apple gets all their chips from TSMC, making up 25% of TSMC’s revenue which is a staggering number. If this didn’t make things worse, TSMC is branching out into the US to build fabs in Arizona where the production will start in 2024. This is possible because of the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 that President Biden announced, providing 52 billion dollars in subsidies to the semiconductor industry. While all the pressure of competing with demand from fabs is stuck with ASML, a conglomerate company named SEMI predicts there will be about 72 new fab machines built around the world by 2024; this creates further pressure for ASML and chip manufactures. So what are the implications for everyday people? Having fabs can be a good thing for a country because it increases revenue and trade, but the catch is that every fab needs about 4.7 million gallons of water a day to support its operation. Water is a necessity because it cools down equipment and cleans silicon wafers that makes production of chips possible. The amount of water for one fab is equivalent to nearly what 25,000 residents in Arizona will use in a day.

Taiwan itself is already seeing the worst droughts its had in 50 years, they now rely on getting water to keep their fabs running by going to the south-side of the island with trucks. If droughts like these were to hit other countries because of the current chip war, it can have negative effects on agriculture. Prices of food will most likely skyrocket because there isn’t enough water to grow specific amount of crops due to allocating most of the water supply to chip production. Furthermore, the growing demand of fabs can lead ASML to capitulate from the inside and slow down their research on building new machines because they’re stuck supplying so many other machines to countries around the world. There are both positives and negatives to the semiconductor industry and while it’s seen mostly in a positive light, there are growing concerns on what this CHIPS act has entailed for the future of not just the US, but the world.

Sources

https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems#:~:text=EUV%20stands%20for%20’extreme%20ultraviolet,a%20wavelength%20of%2013.5%20nm.

https://www.theverge.com/22628925/water-semiconductor-shortage-arizona-drought

https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/sa_presentations/919/84919/original.pdf

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/06/28/tsmc-arizona-construction-subsidies/

So why did ETH switch to proof of stake in the first place? Ethereum’s white paper in 2013 proposed that it wanted to start with a proof of stake model but it was almost impossible to create such a mechanism at the time so Vitalik Buterin was forced to launch his project using proof of work. Proof of work is a consensus model focused on having miners validate transactions by solving difficult math problems. The miner who solves the problem first and adds a new block to the chain is given a reward, the problem is this method eats an enormous amount of electricity because of the difficult math problems (so much so that Ethereum consumes as much power as the Netherlands). Proof of stake on the other hand replaces miners with so called validators where anyone can become a validator if they pay over a hefty fee of about 32 ETH. The people that become validators will have higher staking rewards because they take care of other peoples money that’s locked by a smart contract. Proof of stake is debatably more secure than proof of work, in proof of work you need half the computing power in the network to take over as opposed to proof of stake where you need to control half the coins in the system; making proof of stake a better option for some projects. Once proof of stake is rolled out, ETH will finally introduce the anticipated sharding algorithm. Sharding breaks up a single ETH blockchain into 64 chains, burgeoning the transaction speed and the amount of transaction that can occur.

While proof of stake sounds like a great option for ETH and something that they’ve planned since the beginning, this merge can come with a lot of bad initial implications that can hurt the project. For example, switching over to this new system can come with bugs and exploits that allow hackers to potentially find; this will allow Vitalik’s team a harder time to mitigate these attacks if they do occur. Another big reason this switch can be a risk is because proof of stake is still a fairly new consensus model which doesn’t have nearly as much history as proof of work. With less data to work with, this creates risks because new vulnerabilities that have never been seen before can happen more likely on a newer models. Proof of work has already been out for a long time and has proved its way as a valid model, which is why new projects are flocking to this system. At the end of the day, people are approaching this ETH merge cautiously because of the risks that can materialize, this is why investors are hedging their bet by buying so called ‘Ethereum killers’ like Cardano or Solana in the meantime, or proof of work coins in general.