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I was confused by your last paragraph. I now understand by crypto community, you meant cryptocurrency community. (And 'built on crypto' is also talking about the currency features, not encryption features.)

I've only ever heard negative opinions of Telegram from the cryptography community.

True: Crypto as in cryptocurrency community.

Telegram just raised 1.7B without diluting and it seems that both Telegram and the speculative investors are very happy about that. How that can be construed as a mess is beyond me.

You yourself seem to think this is, without putting too fine a point on it, a scam. If your capital is $1.7B in money you've scammed from others (or others who themselves hope to scam others), you've definitely waded into a big mess.

Was Color raising 400M to buy color.com domain a scam?

How much did the AR guys that are showing 3D renders raise again? The ones that everybody is calling scam?

I can also present to you an alternative viewpoint (non-scammy) on Telegram:

Telegram has the leading mindshare in crypto space communications which could mean that they will be able to drive day-to-day adoption. Imagine paying back your friends through Telegram. And most of your Telegram friends are anyways crypto savvy and would love to use this. I can fully reason TON being very relevant if they get the tech right.

About getting the tech right - they've built Telegram, right? It's an app that's being used daily. And it works great. And the founder is a very successful serial investor. I wouldn't bet against Telegram that they actually pull this off. With so much money they could easily buy a crypto team to give them the missing skills.

Let's crunch some numbers:

- They've sold for 1.7B USD of tokens. And let's say that they sold 50% of their tokens. This gives them 3.4B market cap.

- Let us look at the coinmarketcap.com - you can see that EOS, which has not launched the mainnet and has an ICO ongoing for the past year (raised ~2B so far). They don't have any real-world usage (remember - they do not have a public blockchain running) and they are currently valued at 14B.

- It's not unreasonable to expect that you will profit from buying TON tokens.

In the end - these are big boys that are investing. They understand due diligence. It's going to be hard for them to scream "its a scam".

And just to be clear, my definition of scam is: "I am lying about what I will do with the purpose of taking the money from you." Here its more of "I have a wish list of things I want to build, but I'm not experienced enough to know that this might be harder than expected." But this is what startups do daily. The only difference is that Telegram (and other crypto projects) is able to get cash at a much larger scale.

PS: I still don't like TON ICO.

I'm really just going by what you said in your original post and your apparent shock someone would call the situation a mess. They've done a gigantic, scammy-seeming ICO and their investors (whose goal was likely short-term speculation) realize there might not be a public market, the sums involved are big enough to attract significant regulatory attention and as a free bonus, a nasty state actor is taking off its shirt and yelling 'FITE ME!' at them.

That's seems like a mess to me. It, as far as I can tell, seems like a mess to you. It seems like a mess to the author of the TC article. Why is it so weird they'd call it a mess?

Doesn't seem a mess to me.

> ... but you can't deny their position as the go-to communication tool of the Crypto community (Wechat being the second in line).

"Crypto" in this context is cryptocurrency right? (not cryptography)

>integrate Ethereum directly in Telegram

How would that work? What I gather from their whitepaper is that their plan for the network is much more ambitious. Even if they were to use Ethereum as the settlement layer, they would still need to build a lot of infrastructure on top of it.

[0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/18F51eFyyHZ1Pu0JxaTcT99xDLIc...

Ethereum is/was just as ambitious with its dapps and services and everything. TON is aiming to be a better Ethereum. If they have solid PoS from the beginning it could be interesting.

Ethereum is/was just as ambitious with its digitalapps and services and everything. TelegramOnNetwork is aiming to be a better Ethereum. If they have solid PieceofShit from the beginning it could be interesting.

Maybe stop abbreviating without explaining.

the abbreviations aren't mine: ethereum dapps are distributed apps, pos = proof-of-stake (the theoretical efficient alternative to proof-of-work), TON = telegram open network mentioned in the article.

> without diluting

If the tokens don't grant a stake in Telegram's business, does this mean the ICO is essentially an independent system (where tokens have value regardless of how Telegram performs as a business), and only loosely related to Telegram in the sense that their name was used to initially promote the opportunity?

Yes.

ICOs give investors (better said: "token purchasers") no security rights. This is a point of contention between people running ICOs (tokens have utility value and are used to pay for services) and regulators (ICOs do not pass the Howey test [1] and are securities).

Right now token purchasers are either buying the tokens for the purpose of use or buying them speculatively with the purpose of the price going up over time as usage increases. Token issuance vehicles (companies) are oftentimes separated from the entity that is running the business to reduce legal exposure.

[1]: https://consumer.findlaw.com/securities-law/what-is-the-howe...

Thanks. Saved me 2 angry key pounding minutes.

> I would prefer that they simply integrate Ethereum

looks like TON is has its own proof-of-stake system, so it's competition for Ethereum. is that why Russia is blasting it off the internet?

It's more likely due to the fact that the Telegram founder is waging a war with Russia and publicly denying them access to Telegram.

PS: I'm still not convinced all of this is not some charade, but then again I don't trust anybody that build communication tools, so do take the charade comment with a grain of salt.

They are publicly denying them access? Source? Beside a PR statement?

> is that why Russia is blasting it off the internet?

What are the chances a government (and a Russian government of them all!) would not only actually understand cryptocurrencies, but also have some solid strategy regarding those? Some governments are maybe close to this, but in overall - I'd say, chances are quite low.

Nah, it's just that FSB want to be able to either read messages or kill the non-cooperating service. Or, if we take another theory, they want to make to make an impression the service is extremely uncooperative and they absolutely can't read any messages. Either of those is much simpler and plausible than a conspiracy to ban some token that doesn't even exist yet.

My guess is that Russia is blocking some servers that affected them and they’re spinning that as Russia targeting them for PR.

TON doesn't exist as a product yet, so there's nothing for Russia to block.

Russia's attempts to block Telegram are almost certainly related to the services that Telegram offers now, not things which it might hypothetically offer in the future.