8 ms·

Inside Telegram’s ambitious $1.2B ICO to create the next Ethereum

127 points by abhi3 9y ago

thebiglebrewski 9y ago
Would it be wise to invest in this?
- ddddddrrw 9y ago
  No
  - patrickaljord 9y ago
    It's basically gambling. So do it if you want to have fun and most probably lose your investment with a ridiculously tiny chance of getting rich. That is how every ICO should be approached. I haven't invested in ICO but then I've never been into gambling.
    - toomanybeersies 9y ago
      It's telling that my colleagues who have invested in Bitcoin and other magical internet money are also the ones who bet on the horses every weekend and also enjoy going to the casino.
- dahdum 9y ago
  On Reddit someone shared a Facebook ad they were getting about this. It's being hyped like TRON and will likely share a similar fate. "Today price $0.8 after ICO $50" https://i.imgur.com/lxGE0dz.jpg https://i.imgur.com/lxGE0dz.jpg
  - binocarlos 9y ago
    The TRON hype train has been getting a lot of kickback recently on Reddit - claims they have been stealing content from other white papers and copying non attributed GPL code from other projects - current market cap 4.7 Billion - make of that what you will :-) * https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7qfjef/tron_gets_caught_again_plagiarised_white_paper/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7qfjef/tron...
    - wmf 9y ago
      Note that TRON != TON?
      - binocarlos 9y ago
        Yes good point - I was replying to the above comment: > It's being hyped like TRON
  - wmf 9y ago
    Mmmm, securities fraud. Did Telegram just officially say that their token will go up from $0.80 to $50? Or is Facebook allowing scammers to create fake official pages? (On another note, ICO pricing around $1 seems like it will inevitably trigger the "I can't even afford one coin" effect. Pricing the ICO around one cent (with 100x more coins outstanding, of course) would give more breathing room.)
    - vehementi 9y ago
      They're saying that if you pay them today, you get them for $0.80 as a "ico pre-sale". Then during the real ICO, coins will be available from them for $50. Nothing about market price
      - akhatri_aus 9y ago
        If they're available for $50 after it means the market price has gone up, if they can sell them at $50 why can't you? Securities/Tokens are a two way street not your typical discount aisle.
    - nokcha 9y ago
      >Did Telegram just officially say that their token will go up from $0.80 to $50? Or is Facebook allowing scammers to create fake official pages? The latter. See https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/breaking-telegram-ceo-officially-confirms-gramtoken-io-ico-fake/ https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/breaking...
  - ValentineC 9y ago
    Note that the website in the Facebook ad is likely a scam: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2632441.80 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2632441.80 See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/telegramico/comments/7qn09t/telegram_preico_is_now_live_gram_token/ https://www.reddit.com/r/telegramico/comments/7qn09t/telegra...
  - doctoboggan 9y ago
    Looks like a scam capitalizing on the press around TON. The article said sales wont be until march but this ad is saying you can buy them now.
- colbyh 9y ago
  Lockup period means this ICO will behave differently than some of the other coins that have come out recently, and there's no way to tell what the market (or regulatory atmosphere) will be like in 6-18 month. It's speculation, just like all the other ICOs, but at least Telegram is a viable platform with a good use case for the coin.
- yehosef 9y ago
  I think what's interesting about this ICO is that their product is a natural fit with the blockchain ideology. Because of the encryption of telegram, people are already using for communications that they don't want observed by the authorities (eg telegrass). Adding cyptocurrency to this allows them now to exchange "money" for goods/services without having to resort to traditional money, credit cards. This would close the loop and create a compelling package, IMO. I'm not an expert at all in this realm - but it seems to me that this is one ICO that has a good chance.
chaostheory 9y ago
Yes like any other ICO this is risky. However there is a big difference between this and other crytocoins: there is already a large base of pre-existing users of Telegram. With TON, Telegram has the potential to become WeChat outside of China.
- neuralzen 9y ago
  Look what happened with Kik's KIN though. That had similar positioning (though not the same vision). 1.2B seems insanely high, even with their numerous goals.
- objclxt 9y ago
  > there is already a large base of pre-existing users of Telegram The base is 180 million MAUs as of December 2017, and they're not growing as fast as other messaging services have in the past (in Feb 2016 they had 100 million MAUs, so in just under two years that's ~80% growth). So yes, they have a large base of pre-existing users. But I don't think it is clear that this base of users is going to continue to grow exponentially, and they're not growing as fast as they arguably should be.
  - chaostheory 9y ago
    I feel that its actual potential utility as a crypto currency platform is more important than its current position as an IM platform. A better argument would be to point out what happened with Kik
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    That seems like good growth. Other messaging apps are growing faster? I don’t doubt it. Just surprised. Do you know which ones?
- SkyMarshal 9y ago
  It also has the potential to ruin their business by introducing a token into an app that doesn't actually need one.
wslh 9y ago
If it looks like a scam, expressed like a scam, and promoted like a scam, then it probably is a scam. Let me explain... achieving scale with public and private blockchains is a difficult computer science problem. Even if Dr. Nikolai Durov [1] is a genius, he is competing with other geniuses who are at least trying to probe their points in a more formal way [2]. It is not by chance that it is taking so long for Vitalik and other researchers to solve the scalability and security issues in Ethereum. So until other peers don't analyze Dr. Durov results via adversarial attacks we will not know how real are his claims. A serious alternative to this ICO would be raising money for a PoC including hiring other researchers to break the original scheme. For example, before RSA was finished, Adleman worked on breaking the schemes devised by Rivest and Shamir until RSA was born [3]. This does not mean that you cannot make money, speculation works in a different dimension. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Durov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Durov [2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J8hehbnZWzcIUMQcxMiGbjz86wDu3zDFF7UtkR0XjGE/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J8hehbnZWzcIUMQcxMiGbjz8... [3] http://teacher.scu.edu.cn/ftp_teacher0/chjtang/teach/adleman.htm http://teacher.scu.edu.cn/ftp_teacher0/chjtang/teach/adleman...
- Kelbit 9y ago
  No kidding. Blockchain is the new hotness right now, shouldn't be difficult to raise a seed round for a crypto startup if your product is genuinely interesting.
  - tehlike 9y ago
    It's not difficult to raise a seed round for crypto startup even if the product is stupidly boring and useless. It's called an ICO.
liamzebedee 9y ago
> The “TON Blockchain” will consist of a master chain and 2-to-the-power-of-92 accompanying blockchains > “Infinite Sharding Paradigm” to achieve scalability > “Instant Hypercube Routing” > "it will also use 2-D Distributed Ledgers." There's no doubt that if you want to make a quick buck, this buzzword-laden series of claims will attract many greater fools. But the ongoing crypto-hubris is unattractive to say the least.
- DennisP 9y ago
  I wonder whether the hypercube part is related to Vitalik's idea from 2014: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/21/scalability-part-2-hypercubes/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/21/scalability-part-2-hype...
  - wmf 9y ago
    Probably. TON looks like it is trying to combine all the good-sounding ideas from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockstack, Sia/Filecoin, I2P/Tor, etc.
    - yyzhero 9y ago
      Hypercube routing seems Similar to hypercast: http://www.comm.utoronto.ca/hypercast/overview.html http://www.comm.utoronto.ca/hypercast/overview.html
  - tudorw 9y ago
    Is it a multi-dimensional database?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cube
- donkeyd 9y ago
  > How do I know which Crypto to buy into? > Read the Whitepaper. I've seen this interaction so many times now. It's great that people read these whitepapers, but what to they judge them on? They're often a one-sided technical explanation with zero objective information in terms of feasibility in the market. There's one (apparently delayed) ICO planned, for a company that wants people to share their CPU time to train neural networks in exchange for some token. I can hardly believe that a distributed network of laptops in living rooms can be more efficient (and therefore cheaper) at doing this than centralized, purpose built hardware in data centers with efficient cooling systems (like Google's new TPU). And that's even if they figure out how to make this technology work effectively. My colleague, though, was very impressed though, because he heard somebody say that training a neural network takes a lot of time, which is true, depending on the complexity and whether you run it on a €500 Acer laptop or on specialized hardware.
sdddd 9y ago
I don't think it is good?Okay , I choose the Signal.
supermdguy 9y ago
> It could turn Telegram from a messaging app into a platform that hosts internet-based content which could, in theory, operate micro-paywalls that let users unlock news or subscriptions for small amounts of crypto payment, while there’s also the potential to become a major payment hub. So... it does pretty much everything? So much for decentralization. Sure, it's theoretically decentralized, but it's disturbing that Telegram is trying to both take over so many blockchain applications and retain partial control over each one.
sho 9y ago
The next Ethereum? I'm still waiting for the current ethereum to show any kind of reason for its existence beyond an admittedly cool tech demo. I'm not seeing anything in this offering which couldn't be done more easily and cheaply by a ton (sorry) of other payment options. Notably they say they want to be WeChat - and they've done it all without any need for blockchains.
- pavlov 9y ago
  I would have to agree about Ethereum being not much more than a tech demo at present. A few months back I tried to learn building an Ethereum distributed app, or "dapp" as they call it. I installed my own Ethereum node to see how that works. The Ethereum toolchain is a strange combination of actual JavaScript (command line tools + REPL to a live node) and a pseudo-JavaScript called Solidity: a custom language inspired by JavaScript but with abundant new syntax for developing smart contracts. That doesn't seem like a good idea from a robustness point of view -- did anyone ever say "I know, I'd like my money to be handled by immutable JavaScript functions"?! Still, I can see the mindshare appeal of reaching the widest possible developer demographic by making everything look "web-like". I would be OK with that choice if the platform worked as advertised, but it doesn't, and it just keeps getting worse. I spent about $100 on deploying my toy dapp's smart contracts, and then I gave up. Debugging on Ethereum is a nightmare. It seems very easy for a non-obvious bug that's not caught on the testnet to make a deployed program go into a loop and burn through all the money you allocated for it. With today's USD/ETH rate, my failed $100 experiment would have cost $300. Even if I had got the app deployed, who's going to use it when fees are this high? Nobody wants to pay $10 to store a piece of data in my dinky little dapp. The whole concept of dapps is ridiculous with the current Ethereum implementation. Ethereum is a victim of its success: the network is congested, fees are running sky-high, and my Ethereum node has stopped working because of the exploding demands of storing the blockchain. Realistically there doesn't seem to be anything the Ethereum founders can do to fix this on the short term, which means that there will be a painful implosion as the network goes useless until it's replaced by a new sharded Ethereum (which will naturally come with its own growing pains). My conclusion is that Ethereum today is like MongoDB in its first year: breathless promises of "web scale" are in no way matched by the reality of what the platform can do... But like Mongo, it's in JavaScript and has a formidable hype machine, so people will flock in. Eventually things will get better, I'm sure.
jaequery 9y ago
If Telegram did $1.2B, Slack must be on pace for a $50B ICO. What a great world we live in!
- danmaz74 9y ago
  Yes, and Facebook a $bazillion. But at that point, "fiat" will already be a forgotten relic of the past, so, who cares?
lucd 9y ago
Another next Ethereum ? $NEO is already operational.. $ADA is more promising..
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  NEO is centralized. But at least it has code. Cardano has no published code for its smart contract platform, yes somehow it is the 5th most valuable cryptocurrency. Its hype is based on something that Ethereum already has under development: a formally verifiable programming language (and unlike Cardano, the work on formalizing the two programming languages is being done out in the open). Its website also praises regulations and implies pretty strongly that only regulated entities will be able to run consensus nodes for its smart contract platform. I don't think either has any hope of being the next Ethereum.
jakebasile 9y ago
According to the whitepaper (on page 18) it cost $70m to run Telegram just for 2017 and a total of $171m since 2014. Pavel Durov had a net worth of about $300m when he left VK in 2014 and as far as I know he's the only source of funding for Telegram. This seems like one way to change that and hopefully ensure financial stability, if it works out. I'm not sure it will though, which is unfortunate as I quite like Telegram. There's always Wire, I suppose. As long as they stay afloat.
- dharma1 9y ago
  That's what I thought too when I saw this. Telegram is nice but with no monetisation they will run out of cash. This could make Telegram profitable, or at least give it a longer runway.
- sAbakumoff 9y ago
  How did you obtain the white paper? AFAIK it's not available publicly yet.
  - kirillseva 9y ago
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ucUeKg_NiR8RxNAonb8Q55jZha03WC0O/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ucUeKg_NiR8RxNAonb8Q55jZha0... Hopefully I'm not violating any rules by sharing this thing that looks like it might be TON's leaked whitepaper
    - sAbakumoff 9y ago
      Thanks! It seems that this paper is already in hands of TechCrunch(the currently discussed article) and CoinDesk[1] and now it's available for HN users :-) [1] https://www.coindesk.com/big-money-murky-governance-kicking-tires-telegrams-token-sale/ https://www.coindesk.com/big-money-murky-governance-kicking-...
dreit1 9y ago
I think a serious conversation that needs to be had is that there a lot of tech companies that can produce a useful service. Twitter, Telegram, Snapchat etc come time to mind, but they will never generate a profit like a traditional business. Does that mean that these services should not exist? Or does it mean there needs to be a non traditional way of financing to where creators can build the product and then have a reasonable way of "being done". Something like Twitter reached a point where it didn't really need more features. How could it sustain itself without constantly growing and paying profits to shareholders? I don't know the answer to this, but it's certainly something that needs to be discussed, because the unfortunate truth is that there are many good services that don't make money
- kenning 9y ago
  My hope is that big businesses put a ton of money into creating new products, and when the space is understood, someone makes an open source version. Then the consumers of those products start to resent the people making money off of them and the private thing dies off. There are not really any models of this though, sadly.
  - golergka 9y ago
    First of all, open source versions often are just not as good. I was a fan of gitlab for personal projects, but after trying it for a couple of months on a company's project, we moved back to github because of all the bugs and low perfomance. Second, who's going to pay for all the servers?
    - connorshea 9y ago
      When did you try GitLab, and was it self-hosted or GitLab.com? We've been working on improving performance, especially on GitLab.com, for the last two years now. Having started around then I can definitely say it was pretty miserable back then, but it's infinitely better now. You can see our infrastructure issue tracker for more info on what we've worked on over the last few months and what we're doing now: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues
antirez 9y ago
Why on the earth they don't just do a telegram based digital money without any block chain but just an N nodes database Geo distributed? So that you can pay real money to have telecoins (or whatever) and that's all. Oh wait... This prevents earning 1 billion of dollars to give back monopoly money.
- cornholio 9y ago
  That might work for the intended use-case, but it does not use the blockchain, therefore it can't benefit from hype and deflationary expectations, so the "invitation only early investors" can't have exponential profits - the real motivation for the whole scheme.
simik 9y ago
Have I missed the link to the actual leaked 132-pages white paper?
tromp 9y ago
The article is rather out of date, stating > $1.2 billion. That blows any other token sale out of the water, and it would easily surpass the current record of $257 million raised by Filecoin and showing EOS as having raised $200M. In fact, EOS claims to have already raised over $1.1B and its ICO is still continuing for another 5 months: https://steemit.com/eos/@simoncase/eos-announcement-what-just-happened https://steemit.com/eos/@simoncase/eos-announcement-what-jus...
batat 9y ago
[citation needed] Looks like rumors and disinformation spreaded by Anton Rozenberg - former Telegram developer. Russian journalists refer to his Facebook post[1]. IIRC, Rosenberg and Durov had some serious conflict. I've seen article on Medium[2] (earlier with unblurred screenshots) and Rosenberg seemed to me not quite adequate person. [1] https://www.facebook.com/id77777/posts/10154846872521076 https://www.facebook.com/id77777/posts/10154846872521076 (Russian) [2] https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/pavel-durov-sued-senior-tech-lead-for-1-7-b24961dec503 https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/pavel-durov-sued-senior-...

127 points by abhi3 9y ago

thebiglebrewski 9y ago

Would it be wise to invest in this?

ddddddrrw 9y ago
No
- patrickaljord 9y ago
  It's basically gambling. So do it if you want to have fun and most probably lose your investment with a ridiculously tiny chance of getting rich. That is how every ICO should be approached. I haven't invested in ICO but then I've never been into gambling.
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    It's telling that my colleagues who have invested in Bitcoin and other magical internet money are also the ones who bet on the horses every weekend and also enjoy going to the casino.
dahdum 9y ago
On Reddit someone shared a Facebook ad they were getting about this. It's being hyped like TRON and will likely share a similar fate. "Today price $0.8 after ICO $50" https://i.imgur.com/lxGE0dz.jpg https://i.imgur.com/lxGE0dz.jpg
- binocarlos 9y ago
  The TRON hype train has been getting a lot of kickback recently on Reddit - claims they have been stealing content from other white papers and copying non attributed GPL code from other projects - current market cap 4.7 Billion - make of that what you will :-) * https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7qfjef/tron_gets_caught_again_plagiarised_white_paper/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7qfjef/tron...
  - wmf 9y ago
    Note that TRON != TON?
    - binocarlos 9y ago
      Yes good point - I was replying to the above comment: > It's being hyped like TRON
- wmf 9y ago
  Mmmm, securities fraud. Did Telegram just officially say that their token will go up from $0.80 to $50? Or is Facebook allowing scammers to create fake official pages? (On another note, ICO pricing around $1 seems like it will inevitably trigger the "I can't even afford one coin" effect. Pricing the ICO around one cent (with 100x more coins outstanding, of course) would give more breathing room.)
  - vehementi 9y ago
    They're saying that if you pay them today, you get them for $0.80 as a "ico pre-sale". Then during the real ICO, coins will be available from them for $50. Nothing about market price
    - akhatri_aus 9y ago
      If they're available for $50 after it means the market price has gone up, if they can sell them at $50 why can't you? Securities/Tokens are a two way street not your typical discount aisle.
  - nokcha 9y ago
    >Did Telegram just officially say that their token will go up from $0.80 to $50? Or is Facebook allowing scammers to create fake official pages? The latter. See https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/breaking-telegram-ceo-officially-confirms-gramtoken-io-ico-fake/ https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/breaking...
- ValentineC 9y ago
  Note that the website in the Facebook ad is likely a scam: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2632441.80 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2632441.80 See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/telegramico/comments/7qn09t/telegram_preico_is_now_live_gram_token/ https://www.reddit.com/r/telegramico/comments/7qn09t/telegra...
- doctoboggan 9y ago
  Looks like a scam capitalizing on the press around TON. The article said sales wont be until march but this ad is saying you can buy them now.
colbyh 9y ago
Lockup period means this ICO will behave differently than some of the other coins that have come out recently, and there's no way to tell what the market (or regulatory atmosphere) will be like in 6-18 month. It's speculation, just like all the other ICOs, but at least Telegram is a viable platform with a good use case for the coin.
yehosef 9y ago
I think what's interesting about this ICO is that their product is a natural fit with the blockchain ideology. Because of the encryption of telegram, people are already using for communications that they don't want observed by the authorities (eg telegrass). Adding cyptocurrency to this allows them now to exchange "money" for goods/services without having to resort to traditional money, credit cards. This would close the loop and create a compelling package, IMO. I'm not an expert at all in this realm - but it seems to me that this is one ICO that has a good chance.

chaostheory 9y ago

Yes like any other ICO this is risky. However there is a big difference between this and other crytocoins: there is already a large base of pre-existing users of Telegram. With TON, Telegram has the potential to become WeChat outside of China.

neuralzen 9y ago
Look what happened with Kik's KIN though. That had similar positioning (though not the same vision). 1.2B seems insanely high, even with their numerous goals.
objclxt 9y ago
> there is already a large base of pre-existing users of Telegram The base is 180 million MAUs as of December 2017, and they're not growing as fast as other messaging services have in the past (in Feb 2016 they had 100 million MAUs, so in just under two years that's ~80% growth). So yes, they have a large base of pre-existing users. But I don't think it is clear that this base of users is going to continue to grow exponentially, and they're not growing as fast as they arguably should be.
- chaostheory 9y ago
  I feel that its actual potential utility as a crypto currency platform is more important than its current position as an IM platform. A better argument would be to point out what happened with Kik
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  That seems like good growth. Other messaging apps are growing faster? I don’t doubt it. Just surprised. Do you know which ones?
SkyMarshal 9y ago
It also has the potential to ruin their business by introducing a token into an app that doesn't actually need one.

wslh 9y ago

If it looks like a scam, expressed like a scam, and promoted like a scam, then it probably is a scam. Let me explain... achieving scale with public and private blockchains is a difficult computer science problem. Even if Dr. Nikolai Durov [1] is a genius, he is competing with other geniuses who are at least trying to probe their points in a more formal way [2]. It is not by chance that it is taking so long for Vitalik and other researchers to solve the scalability and security issues in Ethereum. So until other peers don't analyze Dr. Durov results via adversarial attacks we will not know how real are his claims. A serious alternative to this ICO would be raising money for a PoC including hiring other researchers to break the original scheme. For example, before RSA was finished, Adleman worked on breaking the schemes devised by Rivest and Shamir until RSA was born [3]. This does not mean that you cannot make money, speculation works in a different dimension. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Durov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Durov [2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J8hehbnZWzcIUMQcxMiGbjz86wDu3zDFF7UtkR0XjGE/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J8hehbnZWzcIUMQcxMiGbjz8... [3] http://teacher.scu.edu.cn/ftp_teacher0/chjtang/teach/adleman.htm http://teacher.scu.edu.cn/ftp_teacher0/chjtang/teach/adleman...

Kelbit 9y ago
No kidding. Blockchain is the new hotness right now, shouldn't be difficult to raise a seed round for a crypto startup if your product is genuinely interesting.
- tehlike 9y ago
  It's not difficult to raise a seed round for crypto startup even if the product is stupidly boring and useless. It's called an ICO.

liamzebedee 9y ago

> The “TON Blockchain” will consist of a master chain and 2-to-the-power-of-92 accompanying blockchains > “Infinite Sharding Paradigm” to achieve scalability > “Instant Hypercube Routing” > "it will also use 2-D Distributed Ledgers." There's no doubt that if you want to make a quick buck, this buzzword-laden series of claims will attract many greater fools. But the ongoing crypto-hubris is unattractive to say the least.

DennisP 9y ago
I wonder whether the hypercube part is related to Vitalik's idea from 2014: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/21/scalability-part-2-hypercubes/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/21/scalability-part-2-hype...
- wmf 9y ago
  Probably. TON looks like it is trying to combine all the good-sounding ideas from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockstack, Sia/Filecoin, I2P/Tor, etc.
  - yyzhero 9y ago
    Hypercube routing seems Similar to hypercast: http://www.comm.utoronto.ca/hypercast/overview.html http://www.comm.utoronto.ca/hypercast/overview.html
- tudorw 9y ago
  Is it a multi-dimensional database?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cube
donkeyd 9y ago
> How do I know which Crypto to buy into? > Read the Whitepaper. I've seen this interaction so many times now. It's great that people read these whitepapers, but what to they judge them on? They're often a one-sided technical explanation with zero objective information in terms of feasibility in the market. There's one (apparently delayed) ICO planned, for a company that wants people to share their CPU time to train neural networks in exchange for some token. I can hardly believe that a distributed network of laptops in living rooms can be more efficient (and therefore cheaper) at doing this than centralized, purpose built hardware in data centers with efficient cooling systems (like Google's new TPU). And that's even if they figure out how to make this technology work effectively. My colleague, though, was very impressed though, because he heard somebody say that training a neural network takes a lot of time, which is true, depending on the complexity and whether you run it on a €500 Acer laptop or on specialized hardware.

sdddd 9y ago

I don't think it is good?Okay , I choose the Signal.

supermdguy 9y ago

> It could turn Telegram from a messaging app into a platform that hosts internet-based content which could, in theory, operate micro-paywalls that let users unlock news or subscriptions for small amounts of crypto payment, while there’s also the potential to become a major payment hub. So... it does pretty much everything? So much for decentralization. Sure, it's theoretically decentralized, but it's disturbing that Telegram is trying to both take over so many blockchain applications and retain partial control over each one.

sho 9y ago

The next Ethereum? I'm still waiting for the current ethereum to show any kind of reason for its existence beyond an admittedly cool tech demo. I'm not seeing anything in this offering which couldn't be done more easily and cheaply by a ton (sorry) of other payment options. Notably they say they want to be WeChat - and they've done it all without any need for blockchains.

pavlov 9y ago
I would have to agree about Ethereum being not much more than a tech demo at present. A few months back I tried to learn building an Ethereum distributed app, or "dapp" as they call it. I installed my own Ethereum node to see how that works. The Ethereum toolchain is a strange combination of actual JavaScript (command line tools + REPL to a live node) and a pseudo-JavaScript called Solidity: a custom language inspired by JavaScript but with abundant new syntax for developing smart contracts. That doesn't seem like a good idea from a robustness point of view -- did anyone ever say "I know, I'd like my money to be handled by immutable JavaScript functions"?! Still, I can see the mindshare appeal of reaching the widest possible developer demographic by making everything look "web-like". I would be OK with that choice if the platform worked as advertised, but it doesn't, and it just keeps getting worse. I spent about $100 on deploying my toy dapp's smart contracts, and then I gave up. Debugging on Ethereum is a nightmare. It seems very easy for a non-obvious bug that's not caught on the testnet to make a deployed program go into a loop and burn through all the money you allocated for it. With today's USD/ETH rate, my failed $100 experiment would have cost $300. Even if I had got the app deployed, who's going to use it when fees are this high? Nobody wants to pay $10 to store a piece of data in my dinky little dapp. The whole concept of dapps is ridiculous with the current Ethereum implementation. Ethereum is a victim of its success: the network is congested, fees are running sky-high, and my Ethereum node has stopped working because of the exploding demands of storing the blockchain. Realistically there doesn't seem to be anything the Ethereum founders can do to fix this on the short term, which means that there will be a painful implosion as the network goes useless until it's replaced by a new sharded Ethereum (which will naturally come with its own growing pains). My conclusion is that Ethereum today is like MongoDB in its first year: breathless promises of "web scale" are in no way matched by the reality of what the platform can do... But like Mongo, it's in JavaScript and has a formidable hype machine, so people will flock in. Eventually things will get better, I'm sure.

jaequery 9y ago

If Telegram did $1.2B, Slack must be on pace for a $50B ICO. What a great world we live in!

danmaz74 9y ago
Yes, and Facebook a $bazillion. But at that point, "fiat" will already be a forgotten relic of the past, so, who cares?

lucd 9y ago

Another next Ethereum ? $NEO is already operational.. $ADA is more promising..

CryptoPunk 9y ago
NEO is centralized. But at least it has code. Cardano has no published code for its smart contract platform, yes somehow it is the 5th most valuable cryptocurrency. Its hype is based on something that Ethereum already has under development: a formally verifiable programming language (and unlike Cardano, the work on formalizing the two programming languages is being done out in the open). Its website also praises regulations and implies pretty strongly that only regulated entities will be able to run consensus nodes for its smart contract platform. I don't think either has any hope of being the next Ethereum.

jakebasile 9y ago

According to the whitepaper (on page 18) it cost $70m to run Telegram just for 2017 and a total of $171m since 2014. Pavel Durov had a net worth of about $300m when he left VK in 2014 and as far as I know he's the only source of funding for Telegram. This seems like one way to change that and hopefully ensure financial stability, if it works out. I'm not sure it will though, which is unfortunate as I quite like Telegram. There's always Wire, I suppose. As long as they stay afloat.

dharma1 9y ago
That's what I thought too when I saw this. Telegram is nice but with no monetisation they will run out of cash. This could make Telegram profitable, or at least give it a longer runway.
sAbakumoff 9y ago
How did you obtain the white paper? AFAIK it's not available publicly yet.
- kirillseva 9y ago
  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ucUeKg_NiR8RxNAonb8Q55jZha03WC0O/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ucUeKg_NiR8RxNAonb8Q55jZha0... Hopefully I'm not violating any rules by sharing this thing that looks like it might be TON's leaked whitepaper
  - sAbakumoff 9y ago
    Thanks! It seems that this paper is already in hands of TechCrunch(the currently discussed article) and CoinDesk[1] and now it's available for HN users :-) [1] https://www.coindesk.com/big-money-murky-governance-kicking-tires-telegrams-token-sale/ https://www.coindesk.com/big-money-murky-governance-kicking-...

dreit1 9y ago

I think a serious conversation that needs to be had is that there a lot of tech companies that can produce a useful service. Twitter, Telegram, Snapchat etc come time to mind, but they will never generate a profit like a traditional business. Does that mean that these services should not exist? Or does it mean there needs to be a non traditional way of financing to where creators can build the product and then have a reasonable way of "being done". Something like Twitter reached a point where it didn't really need more features. How could it sustain itself without constantly growing and paying profits to shareholders? I don't know the answer to this, but it's certainly something that needs to be discussed, because the unfortunate truth is that there are many good services that don't make money

kenning 9y ago
My hope is that big businesses put a ton of money into creating new products, and when the space is understood, someone makes an open source version. Then the consumers of those products start to resent the people making money off of them and the private thing dies off. There are not really any models of this though, sadly.
- golergka 9y ago
  First of all, open source versions often are just not as good. I was a fan of gitlab for personal projects, but after trying it for a couple of months on a company's project, we moved back to github because of all the bugs and low perfomance. Second, who's going to pay for all the servers?
  - connorshea 9y ago
    When did you try GitLab, and was it self-hosted or GitLab.com? We've been working on improving performance, especially on GitLab.com, for the last two years now. Having started around then I can definitely say it was pretty miserable back then, but it's infinitely better now. You can see our infrastructure issue tracker for more info on what we've worked on over the last few months and what we're doing now: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues

antirez 9y ago

Why on the earth they don't just do a telegram based digital money without any block chain but just an N nodes database Geo distributed? So that you can pay real money to have telecoins (or whatever) and that's all. Oh wait... This prevents earning 1 billion of dollars to give back monopoly money.

cornholio 9y ago
That might work for the intended use-case, but it does not use the blockchain, therefore it can't benefit from hype and deflationary expectations, so the "invitation only early investors" can't have exponential profits - the real motivation for the whole scheme.

simik 9y ago

Have I missed the link to the actual leaked 132-pages white paper?

tromp 9y ago

The article is rather out of date, stating > $1.2 billion. That blows any other token sale out of the water, and it would easily surpass the current record of $257 million raised by Filecoin and showing EOS as having raised $200M. In fact, EOS claims to have already raised over $1.1B and its ICO is still continuing for another 5 months: https://steemit.com/eos/@simoncase/eos-announcement-what-just-happened https://steemit.com/eos/@simoncase/eos-announcement-what-jus...

batat 9y ago

[citation needed] Looks like rumors and disinformation spreaded by Anton Rozenberg - former Telegram developer. Russian journalists refer to his Facebook post[1]. IIRC, Rosenberg and Durov had some serious conflict. I've seen article on Medium[2] (earlier with unblurred screenshots) and Rosenberg seemed to me not quite adequate person. [1] https://www.facebook.com/id77777/posts/10154846872521076 https://www.facebook.com/id77777/posts/10154846872521076 (Russian) [2] https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/pavel-durov-sued-senior-tech-lead-for-1-7-b24961dec503 https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/pavel-durov-sued-senior-...