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.
It also helps you trust that movement of the asset will not be hindered by the issuer's inability to keep servers running in the face of potential DDoS attacks.
All of the substantial ICOs require some level of KYC/AML registration for direct public sales and pre-sales. Tokens later become available to everyone else through independent exchanges, which happens quickly these days.
With a database there's always ways around editing the data if you own the entire system.
With a blockchain it's not possible to edit the data without replacing the entire chain.
If you are in control of write access to the blockchain, you can roll back to whatever block suits you better, and just fork it. Others might protest, but those fools have no write access, so they're stuck with your fork for the time being.
Blockchain is just a protocol for consensus-based DB replication, you don't somehow magically end up with a superior DB because of that.
So let's say you do set up a meeting with Experian, TransUnion and EquiFax and now need to prepare a slide deck to convince them to migrate their existing tech (let's say a master MySQL with a bunch of slaves, shared write access for trusted entities) to blockchain.
What's your selling point? Lower costs when deployed at the datacenter? Decreased hardware costs? Greatly increased TPS? Faster lookups? Easier to build applications on top compared to the existing stack?
In corporate IT the mighty dollar rules the day. MySQL and Postgres had hostile incumbents, Linux and open source in general had hostile incumbents, commodity hardware for the data center had hostile incumbents, AWS (or Google Cloud) had hostile incumbents, Splunk, Cloudera, SalesForce and any other SAAS company had plenty of hostile incumbents.
Yet end of the day they were able to show cost savings, and either sell it at the CTO/CIO level to existing companies or enable startups with much more rigid cost base, which in big companies quickly got the CIO's attention.
There's nothing particular about blockchain tech that I can see that introduces a major game changer on the cost savings front. Launch two identical startups today, one on top of blockchain, another on top of MySQL. Will the first one have lower operating costs 1, 5, 10, 20 years down the road?
[1] Not sure that's the appropriate term.
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.
Exactly, if someone with >50% power can essentially double spend it makes the currency as a whole almost worthless. As a result it's very much in the creator's interest to either not have >50% or to come up with a distributed consensus algorithm where a majority party can't double spend (very hard).
That is the difference, but what is the value in that? You're making things much more complicated and for what - especially for an in-app currency.
It depends on the value of the backups I guess and the total cost involved. If you're looking at store of value there needs to be backups of backups. I see room for both depending on the needs of the business. It's just a trade off -- the blockchain is inherently more stable and secure than a server for certain purposes and server is far faster and cheaper depending on how you use it.
Is there anyone using bitcoin for transactions anymore? Fees are absurdly prohibitive.
My point was that if the central bank behind a currency goes away so does all of its utility, even if the currency is still physically or digitally there.
No one said anything about default. You can't default on a currency that isn't backed by anything.
That's not true. Unless the bank is critical for conducting transactions, their presence is not required for a currency they produced/backed to have value.
Value in currencies is whatever people assign to it. Utility is whether people will accept it as payment. If the US government goes tango uniform next week, and I and those around me have enough cash available (let's also assume the banks and CC companies we rely on for card/digital transactions also disappear) we can use the remaining physical currency as our method of denominating our local economy, and likely would.
"Telegram will The white paper also makes clear that four percent of the supply of Grams (200 million Grams) will be reserved for Telegram’s development team with a four-year vesting period. Telegram also plans to retain “at least 52 percent” of the entire supply of the Grams cryptocurrency to protect it from speculative trading and maintain flexibility. The remaining 44 percent will be sold in both the public and private sale.
The currency will be listed on external exchanges and used inside the Telegram app."
For example in Solidity a language that targets the Ethereum Virtual Machine. You can have constructor parameters in your contracts like addressOfTokenUsedAsReward, then you provide the smart contract address ex "0x12dgsdg..." of the token you built. These contracts unlike your mysql database are immutable and the code can't be changed, even if there is a vulnerability in it.
If mining is somehow built on shuffling messages around this might be the good parts about old Skype (close to decentralized) without the problems (steals your bandwidth without asking).
That said: as with anything cryptocurrency-related I'm hugely sceptical.