Helium paid him ~$500k for a $300 box — why Akash is pre-incentives
Decentralizing AI: Compute Protocols and Proof of Work - Panel Discussion | Proof of Data 2024 (Recall Network)
“I was the early Helium miner in 2019 — I bought a device for about $300 and I minted enough tokens to be worth about half a million dollars in about a year’s time. I’m the wrong type of person to be incentivized… that’s why it’s very challenging to design incentives. Akash is pre-incentives — the reason we have not launched incentives even though we have a huge budget is because incentive design is extremely, extremely hard.” — 00:21:28
Context: Agreeing with Ben’s warning that proxy incentives get gamed; crypto is “phenomenal for incentives, at the same time very, very wasteful.”