Hacker News Reader

Comment by eps | Hacker News Reader

> monetize it

The owner is a billionaire high-tech enterpreneur partial to the cypherpunk ideas. He is basically doing it out of spite, to piss off the establishment.

View on HN

Paul was never billinaire. He got ~300M from selling vk.com. Spent ~100M in first year. Spending on telegram's servers only is ~1M/month and telegram is 48+ months old. So he already spent almost half of his money.

I doubt that their operations costs are $1M per month. They should be 1/10th that amount. If you're spending that much, you are being robbed by employees or providers. This number is simply not believable by anyone who has experience running a large datacenter operations organization.

> Spending on telegram's servers only is ~1M/month

Isn't that too much? I mean, setting aside if that's the precise number for Telegram, isn't 1 million a month just for 100M users not impossible?

Yes, we are always wondering how it is possible. But you need to understand that telegram rolled not only their own crypto, but their own DB, PHP compiler and so on. Everything is written in C++.

To solve one of the earliest DDOS attacks telegram's team take their servers put it on the track and install them to other DC. This is insane.

> But you need to understand that telegram rolled not only their own crypto, but their own DB, PHP compiler and so on. Everything is written in C++

All of these sound like once-off items, and don't support/explain why it would cost $1M+ a month

Even if he put that $150 million left in a bank and only earned 1% interest it would still be $1.5 million a year, so I doubt it's much of a problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com