I am a little confused as to why a blockchain was necessary here? Since Telegram is a centralized platform, couldn't they just roll their own "usernames" which they already do.
Honestly. Telegram is a superb chat client, but there’s no reason for this blockchain nonsense. Let users choose a username and password like services have been doing for decades.
Sleek, fast, intuitive, and seamless across devices. From a software standpoint it’s incredible, compared to something like Discord which takes longer to launch than it takes my PC to power on and get to the desktop.
Discord is a bloated UI nightmare. There are so many awkward choices. Most annoying is that the server list is icons only. There are many servers with similar icons. Just allow me to have actual text there.
Discord straight up doesn't work on the web for me anymore. The enter key doesn't trigger anything, so I can't search or write anything. It's the most obnoxious bug I've ever witnessed.
None of these bloated apps work on the web very well anymore on Firefox I've found, even Twitter and Instagram. Especially true if you have even minor privacy settings/adblock toggled on in your browser.
I think sites like Discord just assume you'll install the app and that browser users are just boomers or the 0.1% who are more security+privacy oriented.
On iOS it’s written using a fork of Texture, formerly AsyncDisplayKit. In my experience, Texture outperforms UIKit’s auto layout and rich text widgets significantly.
Durov has been pushing a lot of blockchain nonsense over his app. I really like Telegram as a chat app, but his stunts are making me wonder whether it's still a good idea to depend so much on it.
They need to monetize. Blockchain is one way to capture value (unfortunately, the hype train has long left the station). Given Telegram's functionality (file sharing, large groups in particular), it is likely the costs are way too high.
They could just literally charge the $16 or roughly whatever it is upfront. It means nothing for them to be in a blockchain except waste of resources (ironically increasing their costs...)
> They could just literally charge the $16 or roughly whatever it is upfront. It means nothing for them to be in a blockchain except waste of resources (ironically increasing their costs...)
I don't think so. When you own a lot of crypto, and have lots of real dollars (Pavel has lots of real dollars!), you can manipulate price a little bit.
In 2019/2020 Telegram had to give investors all their money back, and the new TON project started without venture capital with a value of 0$. It's now 1.84$.
If their market makers are sophisticated enough, they will create enough liquidity grabs to sell telegram's TON bags over time for a nice sum.
I think they are aiming for creating a market + "eco system" similar to ETH.
I've been pushing people to use Element (matrix) rather than Telegram whenever possible but Telegram has that critical mass and beats Element's usability by a mile.
To extend your wish: i wish i had a ton of cash to dump into development of matrix's 3 top most client apps (including Element)...to diversify things, and to ensure they compete with each other for improved UX...and of course to speed towards a more p2p world (at least p2p for messaging). ;-)
Most of us simply charge fees for stuff to make money. I haven't had to create a bespoke distributed ledger or fabricate a currency to charge fees yet, and don't expect to.
Very sad. I loved the fact I could change my username whenever I wanted. Ideally I would want no username as well as no phone at all, just a random numeric ID like ICQ had.
I really hate being forced to invent a nickname and be hard-glued to it forever.
No, absolutely no. Private keys as a form of identity are flawed because they can't be recovered if lost and can't be revoked if leaked. In the real world, as opposed to crypto dreams, both these capabilities are not "nice to have", they are hard requirements. People lose their passwords — something they can remember — all the damn time, yet you're suggesting to use something that has to be stored as a file, but must be kept secret but at the same time stored reliably. And it's not just for authentication, it's the identity itself.
Private keys as a form of identity can't possibly work in the real world.
And how pray tell will you authenticate with this numeric user id or username in the system? Is it like social security numbers where everyone just lets you input anything?
I have no idea how SSNs work as I'm not from the US. Usually you'd have a password. The username is for identity, the password is for authentication, possibly combined with additional factors.
You have to spell your ID to people so they can contact you anyway and a number is the easiest to spell aloud when communicating to people from different countries because everybody (every language) calls the same letters a different way and almost nobody cares to study proper letter names as this is the most useless knowledge about a language otherwise.
> Send a QR code or a link that can be used only once.
I most often have to spell my contact details in a voice phone call because my primary job is to communicate to live people all over the world, not to code. Believe it or not but people actually call my office desk phone regularly (although I always prefer email if possible). Even in the IT sector (let alone administrative tasks, healthcare, utilities, etc), whenever you need a rack in a datacenter, new servers or whatever you often are meant to submit your phone number on their website and then they call you. Some very big Internet and datacenter operators don't advertise any ways to contact them other than by phone, some would publish an email or a contact form but ignore you until you call them.
> Why have an identifier that any number of people can use to contact you?
I don't use Telegram for anything that requires "real security", and advise against doing so. I assume that 100% of what I say in Telegram would be accessible to whatever authorities there are. I only assume that low-skill script kiddies won't be able to read my encrypted chats. I use Telegram the way I would use Facebook, or post-it notes in an office coffee point: with no expectation of real privacy.
It still covers a lot of mundane communication cases.
Clicking the link to that blockchain service informs you that it is "Not Available in the U.S." Some blockchain.
To answer your question - the point of a blockchain would be a universal and uncensorable key store the Telegram client can point back towards. The fact that Telegram is centralized is less important when messages are encrypted. It would still in theory offer a way to bootstrap connections with people that is less vulnerable to censorship than relying on a central server, but I don't know and won't speculate more on the details of the specific blockchain they are using.
They do so, you can choose almost any free username out there. Telegram wants to popularize its side blockchain project called TON (which could make an ICO, due to SEC limitations). So they decided to utilize it by making an auction for l33t usernames. Today they launched virtual sim service on the same platform (https://fragment.com/numbers), so anyone can buy virtual number and create a Telegram account.