[seniorivn]

>and buyers of those bonds are affiliated with Russia structures like VTB Capital bank or Russian Government investment fund named “Russian Fund of Direct Investments”.

As far as i know, it's not true(meaning there are no signs/proof of that). It's entirely possible, durov does have connections in russian elite, after all he was the creator of vk.com russian most popular social network. Vk was owned by russian oligarchs most of it's life at least partly. At the end of durov involvement with vk, he had some harsh clashes with oligarchs/regime, but ended up making a deal(and got paid well, even if not as well as he should've been). So he certainly knows how to deal with them, but i seriously doubt he enjoyed it, so he must have been really desperate if he got in bed with them again.

The biggest promise of telegram was that it would become a point of entrance to a decentralized economy based on TON blockchain and it's masternode hosted services. If they succeed to launch and than move telegram itself onto ton masternode hosting, telegram would've become the greatest/freest/(and potentially most secure, if they would implement e2ee key synchronization) messaging service ever

End of TON project, ment an end of telegram's future as a not data harvesting company.

[vldchk]

I can share sources to Russian websites but will it tell you anything?

https://www.rbc.ru/business/23/03/2021/605a3fbc9a79470b2eb35...

They created a very elegant scheme when through a fictional Arabic investment fund they put russian government money (Government fund invests into Arabic fund which invests into bonds). It is kind of Russian classic and they did it a lot in the last.

Nowadays Telegram Bonds are traded at Saint-Petersburg stock exchange and there are a lot of rumors that Durov attends a lot of private parties in Russia for kids of oligarchs.

[seniorivn]

I'm russian as well, and rbc.ru is not the most independent source at the time of publishing, but even according to them, RDIF(РФПИ) invested about $2mil, that's a drop in the bucket, and since it was secondary market, it proves nothing but active propaganda from both sides(russian government has an agenda to promote as well as telegram)

bonds being traded wherever they are traded isn't really a proof of anything as well, wouldn't be even if it was shares of a company, but as bonds it's not that much of an influence, especially if accumulating big share of them would cost a fortune.

As to rumors, i would love to see any of it, again it's entirely possible, after Telegram official's attendance of government pr public forum(will use the same source, but it was all over the internet https://www.rbc.ru/technology_and_media/09/07/2020/5f0730bf9... ) it would be surprising if telegram isn't dealing with them in any way.

[cnst]

It's funny how standard business dealings of having subsidiaries and offshore investment vehicles are being viewed by the Russians as a "Russian classic" just because critical thinking overload. :-)

The article does not really describe anything controversial or out of the ordinary.

I'm sure many countries do similar investments and arrangements. For example, IDA Ireland has offices in the US, and runs ads on Bloomberg TV. How's RDIF that much different?

[skinkestek]

> End of TON project, ment an end of telegram's future as a not data harvesting company.

Durov can ask any day of the month for a donation and I'll give it as soon as I have money in hand. $10 - $100, no problem, more in 6 months.

In fact even if he bust released a dumb sticker collection I'd buy it just to support Telegram even if I don't use stickers.

I guess this holds true for many other ex-Whatsapp enthusiasts as well.

Investments are a bit harder for me right now since I don't have capacity to do that right now.

But I think saying he has nowhere to go except data harvesting that shows you don't know how important Telegram is to how many people.

[irl_chad]

I completely agree with you.

In my country, we use telegram to communicate, rather than WhatsApp or SMS. Older people might use Viber, but Viber is a total nightmare. Just having it installed, I get dozens of spam messages per week from shops where I’ve bought things.

SMS is very expensive here.

Comparing telegram to WhatsApp or other competing apps isn’t even worth doing - there is no other app as user friendly or as functional and well thought out as telegram. It’s niche features like scheduled messages are a Godsend.

During the events of Jan 6, I was very worried that Apple would pull TG from the App Store. Thankfully they didn’t, but it’s not white supremicist groups that they would be hurting - it’s ordinary young people in foreign countries.

[seniorivn]

do you think a lot of people would be willing to donate to telegram? what would be an average annual donation per user? I bet it would be a lot less than what big tech makes, and there is no reason to believe durov would settle for that

[skinkestek]

> do you think a lot of people would be willing to donate to telegram?

Yes.

> what would be an average annual donation per user?

I don't know but if it was entirely voluntarily, somewhere between 0 and $10 yearly.

> I bet it would be a lot less than what big tech makes, and there is no reason to believe durov would settle for that

That doesn't seem to be Durovs goal.

[seniorivn]

> That doesn't seem to be Durovs goal.

completely disagree, he is definitely focused on making telegram some huge IT project that would put him on the same level as great IT entrepreneurs of our time. The whole TON project was all about making tons of money from becoming the main beneficiary from first decentralized consumer economy. It's a mystery how he is going to achieve anything similar now, but that goal was so ambitious, it's unlikely he will settle for something as small as this

let's use 2017 as a reference https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of... https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

so it had an annual revenue of $20 per user, and your assumption is a mere $10 max(likely lower), that's extremely low for someone like Durov