Bitcoin is currently the most popular cryptocurrency in the world. And it’s Bitcoin exactly that is most associated with blockchain. Throughout its existence Bitcoin saw a lot of interesting things: from selling pizza to rapid slump of exchange. Since the very beginning work with Bitcoin was portrayed as following: fast, convenient, reliable, cheap. But now you can confidently claim that it’s not convenient, not reliable and not cheap. These are the fundamental problems of Bitcoin, and there are only few companies out there that can solve them. Telegram is already on the way.
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We learnt about Telegram plans concerning the launch of its own blockchain platform TON with Gram cryptocurrency at the beginning of 2018. The company conducted two ICO stages and collected 1,7 mlrd dollars. And as we got to know in May, the company declined third and public ICO stage.
By the middle of March Telegram had over 200 million users all over the world.
In the middle of April Russian court demanded to block Telegram after the messenger refused to pass the encryption keys of user dialogues to Federal Security Service. In the end of April Iran court banned Telegram in its country. In Russia Telegram has about 14 million users and about 40 million in Iran.
Problems
Below are the following methods of safe Bitcoin storage:
- Protection of failures: paper and / or digital backups with opportunity to encrypt them and / or store few parts in different places.
- Protection from theft: «cold storage» or hardware ways of protection. Wallet encryption itself is not the safe protection method from Trojan programs because the password can be read with the keylogger.
The presence of various methods of safe storage, on one hand, aids the users but, on the other, increases the risk of data theft and affects convenience and speed of work with Bitcoin. The disunity of services that are not united into single system creates great number of fraudsters. During the attempts to find the necessary exchange / storage methods you will come upon a huge list of websites that are offering their services and you can never be sure they will not deceive you. Considering the fact that it’s impossible to cancel the transaction, chances are high you will forever lose big amount of money. So is it reliable? Not too much.
In its turn, Telegram accumulates the necessary services in one app. Right now closed testing of Telegram Passport takes place already. The service will allow to identify the messenger user. It is supposed that the user will upload all the necessary data at once and then Telegram will be able to immediately transfer them to the partner services and use them both inside Telegram and outside of it. End-to-end encrypting ensures the data usage safety. The data is stored in your smartphone only and Telegram does not have any access to it. Sounds quite nice.
Convenience, speed and price are tightly connected. Do you want to send Bitcoin faster? Pay more for it. But even high price cannot always guarantee you fast transactions. Not very convenient if we speak about the world where every second matters and, considering the Bitcoin rate, there is always quite a sum of money in the hold-off state. Add to that the time to use various safety methods mentioned above.
How can Telegram solve these problems? Everything is simple. 200 000 000 active users. This is more than enough for perfect system performance. Right now the messenger is the fastest among its competitors. If they dealt with the messenger, they will deal with the speed of work with cryptocurrency. Even though the company team is relatively small, but it’s composed of the best minds of this planet. All projects by Durov featured great talents. And Telegram has the best of them.
Telegram will be able to guarantee convenience and speed. Will it be cheap? We can suppose that yes, as much as it can be possible.
Conclusion
There are a lot of rumors about TON cryptocurrency. If we consider the proven facts only, we can be sure that Telegram will be able to solve the fundamental problems of Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies. Pavel Durov, being the PR genius as he is, has already started his expansion. Time will show how his system will work after the official release. And we will hope that this would be the next step in cryptocurrency development.