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Telegram plans multi-billion dollar ICO for chat cryptocurrency
- bflesch 9y agoI don't understand: Wouldn't Apple just remove their app from the app once they touch payments? Someone will be bitten by compliance, and if Telegram is able to circumvent that then the bucket stops with Apple. This is what has stopped me from doing payment in my apps until now - you never know when some apple or google employee decides to smash you in the face with the ban hammer.
- frabcus 9y agoI don't really understand the Apple policy on payments. How come, for example, they don't demand their cut from Monzo person to person transfers?
- Sholmesy 9y agoThat’s clearly different. Same question could be asked for any banking app.
- nihonde 9y agoIsn’t Apple only seeking a cut of sales of digital goods? You can sell physical merchandise like a real book, but you can’t sell an ebook without cutting them in.
- weavie 9y agoI thought surely you can buy ebooks on the Kindle app for iOS. But a quick search and you are right - nope, you cannot buy books on the Kindle app for iOS. The option just isn't there.
- jonknee 9y agoAnd you can't even present a link to purchase digital goods through a browser... You can open Mobile Safari and search Amazon for a Kindle book, but you can't use an Amazon app of any sort to do part of it.
- baby 9y agoThat part really blew my mind. I spent a good 20min trying to find out how to buy audiobooks on audible
- tzahola 9y agoWeird, considering the fact that the Bandcamp app lets you buy music digitally via PayPal. Am I missing some important difference between the two?
- nihonde 9y agoThey must be paying Apple their percentage of the proceeds, unless they have an exception.
- tzahola 9y agoI'm not sure. I've found this in the App Store Review Guidelines: >3.1.5 (a) Physical Goods and Services Outside of the App: If your app enables people to purchase goods or services that will be consumed outside of the app, you must use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments, such as Apple Pay or traditional credit card entry. But if this applies to Bandcamp, then it would equally apply to Amazon... So I don't know.
- jonknee 9y agoI just downloaded Bandcamp for iOS and under Digital Album I see "Not available for purchase on this device" along with links to purchase the physical vinyl or CD.
- tzahola 9y ago
- rmc 9y agoI suspect that once you get big enough, Apple is reluctant to touch you. Remember, Uber broken Apple's app rules, and were not banned, merely threatened[1]. If Apple removes the app, then who will people blame? The app or Apple? I suspect Telegram might be betting on that. [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/04/24/ubers-kalanick-got-caught-tricking-apple-risking-expulsion-apple-store-report-says/100829796/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/04/24/ubers-ka...
- kayfox 9y agoTelegram still concedes to Apple. You cant join Telegram chats marked as NSFW on iOS devices.
- pjc50 9y agoThat's especially bonkers - you can't use it for private NSFW chat?
- cordite 9y agoYet you can with discord on iOS.
- B4TMAN 9y agoweird
- goshakkk 9y agoYou can (for now?) do that with the official Telegram X app though (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/telegram-x/id898228810?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/telegram-x/id898228810?mt=8)
- AJ007 9y agoIt is also opening them to regulation from a lot more than Apple. It is hard enough for a large tech company to deal with conflicting demands of various governments over privacy & censorship. Create a currency and now you can add financial demands as well. Why are they doing this? Because companies are raising vastly more money and at a faster speed than going the traditional VC or even IPO route right now. The strategy: Make up any reason and do it. I think the decentralized, semi-anonymous, open source development route can benefit from this approach better in the long term than a centralized for profit company can. Games may also end up being some of the biggest success stories. When you can actually prove that something is rare, and even potentially decentralize the gameplay, it presents interesting options for anti-cheating and proof of value. What is dumber: crypto kitties or con artists making hundreds of millions of dollars off sloppy copy and pasted documents?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- prostoalex 9y agoFacebook Messenger supported peer-to-peer debit-card-backed payments for quite a bit now https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/750020781733477/?helpref=hc_fnav https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/750020781733477/...
- AznHisoka 9y agoDoes WeChat have its own cryptocurrency or do its users just transfer fiat (ie yuan) into it?
- ikeboy 9y agoI fail to see why this is valuable in any way. Why would this raise even a million, let alone half a billion?
- akerro 9y agoBlockchain, VR, Bitcoin, AI are the buzzwords that bring you $$$. Businesses will throw money at you just for using AI/ML, blockchain, even if these use cases can be solved with a few if/else or fuzzy logic or distributed NoSQL database.
- mstade 9y agoNo kidding, this also works in large organizations when teams/departments want to increase their budget. Create a project using some buzzword tech, or say you will integrate it in an existing project, and the people with their fingers on the money trigger are much easier to convince. Even if it makes no sense or adds no real value, it can gain you significant budget room to make other changes you want or need to do, and the higher ups get to brag about how they are implementing blockchains everywhere..
- herbst 9y agoTelegram has added in client payments a while ago. Their app/bot platform is crazily amazing. Plus a lot of the most popular bots also send out cash to users, which right now works with a rather complicated third party Bitcoin bot, but then could be done internally.
- wellboy 9y agoBecause people are crazy about icos right now. Just in the last week, Crypterium has raised $45M, EOS has raised several bilions etc. There are around 1 million people who are big into altcoins that are constantly ogling icos to get in early for the cryptocurrency to go 100x or 1000x.
- yalogin 9y agoWhat is preventing every app/service to launch their own crypto currency? It looks like in these times it is in their own interest to launch their own crypto currency than adopting an existing one as they stand to make billions. In that scenario do we say bitcoin and their ilk is failing or succeeding?
- kayfox 9y agoNothing is preventing them. So expect everyone to do it.
- romanovcode 9y ago> What is preventing every app/service to launch their own crypto currency? Yeah, they will. Cryptocurrency in 2018 is the machine learning of 2017. Startups will get asked "what is your blockchain strategy" instead of "what is your machine learning strategy".
- corey_moncure 9y agoMy strategy is making money
- BonesJustice 9y agoThis is what I'm afraid of. Just as nearly every mobile game has switched to in-game currencies, other apps will develop their own (crypto)currencies. The benefits to the app owners are numerous, and users always get screwed. 1. The app owners control the denominations in which the currency can be purchased, and they can structure prices to maximize the average user's unused balance. 2. Once the proprietary currency has been purchased, transactions using that currency need not go through the confirmation dialogs required for cash purchases. That removes a chance for users to reconsider and back out. 3. Because of (2), apps can inject dialogs with 'offers' to buy things at points in the workflow where the user expects some other dialog. Users who aren't paying close attention will end up wasting their currency on accidental purchases. 4. The only "real money" transaction is the purchase of the currency, so any protections that consumers might have had with cash purchases in their jurisdiction may not apply when the proprietary currency is used. 5. On top of the usual bank/credit/debit fees, you can expect app currencies with a cash out capability to include additional fees from the app developer.
- vazamb 9y agoI am a happy user of Telegram but I don't think re-inventing ethereum with a small team of developers is a great idea. But then again, using existing tech gives you fewer opportunities for cash grabs...
- donquichotte 9y agoStrange decision indeed, they could use one of the existing technologies like Ripple or Stellar.
- Snackchez 9y agoI might be wrong, but no one other than banks (if that) can use ripple. I'm not clear on stellar.
- __john 9y agonah, anyone can buy Ripple and have a Ripple wallet. Only thing you can't do is mine Ripple.
- romanovcode 9y agoThe problem is that Ripple is bought via Bitcoin. Tinfoil in me says that bank created Ripple just to get easy Bitcoin.
- eitland 9y agoAFAIK Ripple is pre-mined ("minted") and the creator(s) controls >50% of it.
- samat 9y agoWe are talking about people who rolled their own crypto and their own binary protocol for messenger app in 201*, after all.
- eitland 9y ago
- snissn 9y agoKik has their own crypto called Kin A lot lot lot of crypto projects use Telegram for their official chat lines.
- fsiefken 9y agoIntegrating cryptocurrency within an easy to use chat environment has added value. Gitlab and Github have chatops, irc had chatops for ages, there were bots for twitter... chatops for payment solutions/providers/oracles is just automation. 'Ok Google, please pay HN 1 Gbyte for the inspiration.' See for a good example how Byteball is doing this in their Android client, encrypted chat inside their wallet, chat with bots and oracles and chat with other people to send 'MBytes' to their wallet or using e-mail with a 'claim' link. I paid my lunch that way to colleagues (who are now stuck with MBytes to play with). To get around the Apple walled garden you could even make gateway GBYTE/NEO/XBT bots for Discord, Matrix/Riot or IRC. https://medium.com/byteball/sending-cryptocurrency-to-email-5c9bce22b8a9 https://medium.com/byteball/sending-cryptocurrency-to-email-...
- Maro 9y agoWhat's the value of the in-app currency being a cryptocurrency (putting aside hype/pr), vs calling it a virtual currency, a Mysql database with a API on top? Dropping to a technical level, if the miners are all run by Telegram, then I think it's just a pointless overhead over Mysql. On the other hand, if anybody can run miners, I don't comprehend what value that adds, what it means.
- s_dev 9y ago>What's the value of the in-app currency being a cryptocurrency In a word -- decentralization -- is the key difference between a virtual currency described by some SQL tables and an API and one described by a blockchain. A gov if it wants can take down a server if it is physically hosted in that country. A blockchain unless you've gargantuan CPU power is nigh on impossible to take down.
- CPLX 9y agoIt's not decentralized if one organization owns 52% of it.
- vernon99 9y agoNot necessarily. This is actually orthogonal to decentralization question. Very much depends on their proof of stake implementation.
- edraferi 9y agoI agree. It's more like they're retaining control of the money supply like a central bank does. It give you the power to indirectly influence the price / exchange rate of the currency, but you're not involved with every transaction.
- hndamien 9y agoExcept that you are with Proof of Stake.
- pjc50 9y ago"Instant Hypercube Routing" This all sounds a bit .. timecube?
- goda90 9y agoI enjoyed learning about Hypercube routing in my parallel processing class. A hypercube is just a 2^n cube. A square = 2^2, a cube 2^3, a 4 dimensional hybercube = 2^4, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube_internetwork_topology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube_internetwork_topolog...
- erikb 9y agoAlready excited about the upcoming lawsuit, US government vs Telegram.
- Maro 9y agoWhat if everybody starts making their coins, Amazon, Facebook, Chinese companies, etc. Suddenly it sounds like I'll end up paying tx fees to convert coins. Doesn't sound very good... And what currency should I get my salary in?
- luxpir 9y agoThis is one quite likely outcome for our future. There is never a clean solution and everyone wants 'power'. I just dread what will happen when some crypto-rich colonialist leaves the planet to create 'Slave World'. Sigh... humans.
- DenisM 9y ago>And what currency should I get my salary in? The same currency that you must use to keep away the taxman, and that can always be used to settle debts.
- criddell 9y agoIs this solving a real problem? Video game consoles have had online stores with their own virtual currency for a long time now. Why not just go that route? Other than marketing reasons, why bother with a full on cryptocurrency for Telegram? Are the benefits worth the environmental costs of mining (assuming a similar to Bitcoin technology)?
- OJFord 9y agoIts founder: > Messaging apps shouldn't make money http://www.wired.co.uk/article/messaging-apps http://www.wired.co.uk/article/messaging-apps An interview which of course does not bind him nor the company to that philosophy, but it is slightly encouraging.
- mtgx 9y agoI suggested about six months ago that Signal should have its own ICO/cryptocurrency. Good way to get an open source project funded. Look at Brave, IPFS, and others.
- achiang 9y agoIsn't that what MobileCoin is?
- sah2ed 9y agoMobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15935583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15935583 [1] https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf
- leigha 9y agoI would be willing to contribute a lot if signal could even reach half the usability level of telegram. Signal is losing many users to telegram because of UI/UX.
- cantrip 9y agoThis is a disaster, as it will likely succeed and in doing so make the entire world less secure. Telegram is not a secure messaging platform, despite marketing themselves as such. Signal has built a simple, seamless, and beautiful messaging platform whose security is based on solid cryptography, not marketing, bug contests, or chasing the latest tech fad.
- jherdman 9y ago> Telegram is not a secure messaging platform, despite marketing themselves as such. Supporting sources?
- thsowers 9y agoI haven't used Telegram in a while (so maybe things have changed since then), but I would guess that that grandparent is talking about how they rolled their own crypto, and how secure conversations isn't the default setting
- Vinnl 9y agoThere's this, by a respected cryptographer who, however, also is the author of Signal: https://moxie.org/blog/telegram-crypto-challenge/ https://moxie.org/blog/telegram-crypto-challenge/
- miaklesp 9y agoAny less biased source?
- 45h34jh53k4j 9y agoMoxie might have his own horse in the race, but his analysis of cryptosystems should not be questioned. His philosophy is around humans being able to access strong encryption. I believe he ultimately doesn't care what you use, as long as your communications are secure.
- 9y ago
- jnsaff2 9y agoSo ICO is the new Kickstarter?
- ajcodez 9y agoTelegram is hugely popular in the cryptocurrency community to the point that multiple traders I know monitor Telegram community engagement as a primary indicator to bet on small cap coins. Telegram founder is also big into cryptocurrency and owns a bunch of bitcoin [1]. I think after kik [2] and Status [3] this was inevitable. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-12/cryptic-russian-crusader-says-his-5-billion-app-can-t-be-bought https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-12/cryptic-r... [2]: http://www.kinecosystem.org/ http://www.kinecosystem.org/ [3]: https://status.im/ https://status.im/
- meri_dian 9y agoThe ability of a cryptocurrency to overcome attack is based on the amount of computational power expended on hashing. As more and more standalone cryptocurrencies are launched, the total amount of computational power expended on each will decrease and therefore make each more vulnerable to a 51% attack. This problem is especially pertinent to niche currencies like Telegram's which are tied to a specific company service rather than those trying to act as a general unit of storage or exchange like Bitcoin or even an industry or economy wide tool like Ripple's XRP which. The more specific a currency's use case, the less processing power that will be dedicated to processing that currency's blockchain. And the more vulnerable it will be. This seems like a real problem for the ecosystem as a whole.
- oh_sigh 9y agoThat only holds true for PoW systems
- meri_dian 9y agoHow is PoS safe from this?
- seanwilson 9y agoWith PoW, you'd need to pay for enough hardware and electricity to rival half of the hash rate of the entire network. With PoS, you'd need to pay enough to own half of the coins. Both are prohibitively expensive. PoS also discourages you from such an attack as you'd be destroying the value of the coins you own.
- googlryas 9y agoWith PoW, assuming you can use the same hardware to mine different coins, then you just point your BTC mining rig onto MinorCoin, you get 51% of the hashing power and then you can double spend and let's say crash the value of the coin. Once that is done, you can move your mining rigs onto the next MinorCoin, or you can put them back to mining BTC without you having lost any value except for the opportunity cost when you weren't mining BTC. With PoS, you need to buy up 51% of the coins in order to make the attack. As you buy more and more coins, the price will rise, so you will spend more money than you expect to get to 51%. Then, once you're there, you do some double spend attacks and destroy the value of the network. Now, all that money you pumped into it is gone. That is the key difference between PoS and PoW in this scenario.
- KasianFranks 9y agoI'm all for it.
- sAbakumoff 9y agoI heard of an interesting conspiracy theory that Telegram & Mr. Durov are the grandiose project of the Russian secret service. Mr. Durov's company VKontakte that is the clone of Facebook in Russia is now fully controlled by structures affiliated to Kremlin after Mr. Durov was allowed to sell the company and leave Russia. The theory says that he was allowed to do so in exchange of building fully controlled global IM which is secure on paper but transparent to certain observers. BS? Probably! But if telegram is successful in creating global in-app purchase system that is centralized(the article mentions that) and controlled by Kremlin, that would be an awesome undercover operation, the one of a bigger caliber than Trump's election.
- pwaai 9y agoWell if you think about it it's actually quite genius ... How do you subvert an increasingly connected population where information travels and spreads like wildfire that can force you out of power? You bring those people on a platform where they are told they are safe because of technical jargon here. It's in their best interest to not reveal these relationships or make it obvious that the people on such platform are being monitored. Nor are they trying to catch people who are smart enough to not use the platform. ex. "terrorists" What's important is that they've essentially captured a large bracket of the population using such privacy tools thinking they are free from surveillance when in fact it's the complete opposite. Now you have full ability to disrupt and destroy any type of anti-government organization.
- PhilipDaineko 9y agoThis can be true, since KGB has a track record of creating underground organizations to be able to lead and control anti-soviet movements. For example, in 1921 they created "Monarchical Organization of Russia" to gather all anti-soviet agents around it and hence were able to control all European communist opposition at that time. This is described in a book "KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev" by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Gordievsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Gordievsky, a former KGB officer.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mrsea 9y agoTheres plenty of good cryptocurrencies now, it doesn't seem like theirs is going to be that useful. Tons of them have thousands of people looking to spend it on too.