Today, we will talk about Pavel Durov once again, as well as about the TON blockchain, a Telegram-based ledger. In this video, we will try to unveil the reasons behind the Telegram Open Network emergence and analyze this platform bit by bit.
The Idea of Telegram Open Network
Pavel Durov was “voluntarily” forced to leave the largest Russian social network - Vkontakte - made by himself. The main reason for this resignation was the unwillingness to cooperate with the Russian authorities. Any government wants to control information flows of its citizens in order to study and influence their moods so that their power remains secured. But Durov refused to turn over VK to the government, and as such, he was forced to leave.
Pavel Durov realized that it was impossible to create a centralized service that wouldn’t be controlled by the government. And so he came up with an idea for a project that would not be able to give out information about its users — because it simply wouldn’t have it. That’s how the cryptographic Protocol called MTProto was developed by his brother, Nikolai Durov.
The protocol encrypts the correspondence with special keys which are known only to the chat users and no one else. This is what the messenger lawyers tried to explain to the Russian intelligence agency during the court trials, explaining the technical impossibility of transferring encryption keys to the 3rd parties. But the Russian government is not inclined to listen to common sense when it comes to their interests. As a result, the Russian firewall agency called Roscomnadzor massacred their Internet by blocking millions of IP addresses no matter how futile it was in stopping Telegram.
Alright, back to TON. It is obvious that the Telegram messenger cannot be considered a full replacement for VK regardless if it’s 3x the best among similar apps. Even during the messenger presentation, Durov himself said that Telegram is just a way to show the capabilities of MTProto and test its further potential. That’s why we can assume that Durov has been carrying the idea of a global decentralized network for some time now, and Telegram may as well turn out to be stage one, where the technology is tested and the userbase is accumulated.
Early on, we’ve discussed how many Bitcoins does Pavel Durov have and what are the prospects for his Gram cryptocurrency. These videos can be found on our channel, you may as well subscribe as to not miss news about TON. For today, let's take a closer look at the structure of Telegram Open Network.
TON Features
Let’s view the development of the TON core projects:
Telegram Passport is the first implemented project that allows for quick ID verification on various platforms. The user stores and encrypts their personal data with a private key and can optionally transfer and de-anonymize themselves to third-party companies. For reasons such as money transferring. Here’s an important point — Telegram Passport stores all information in encrypted format. It can only be decoded by the user.
TON Payments is a payment (duh) service with its own cryptocurrency called Gram. The cryptocurrency should support instant and almost free payments between the Telegram users. Once TON Payments is launched, all messenger users will become the owners of the light crypto wallets for storing the Gram cryptocurrency.
TON Virtual Machine. This one is going to be on par with the Ethereum and EOS blockchain. It will support creating and signing smart contracts, all while the virtual machine will be responsible for processing them.
Looking for torrent alternatives? Well, TON Storage it is! It will be able to store any information on millions of PCs belonging to the TON users — all this is decentralized, of course. There’s even gonna be a Gram reward for allocating your hard drive space to Storage needs.
TON Services. It’s an infrastructure for developing and running decentralized programs that resemble websites or apps by their structure. They will be protected from any external censorship, such as blocking access by IP address or removing from the Google app store.
Just two more features left!
TON Proxy is a tool for bypassing the Internet restrictions so that the TON users would always be able to access the platform. The current situation with the Russian government banning Telegram clearly shows the need for such services and it may as well provide an excellent platform for testing the feature and trolling the authorities.
And as for TON DNS, it’s gonna be a directory of domains, which will allow users to register and find the necessary services on Telegram Open Network.
What We Have so Far
The final result of the TON development is gonna be a popular cryptocurrency with cheap and instant transactions. It’s gonna be used by millions of people for exchanging various services. On top of that, we will be able to widely use smart contracts and a decentralized version of the Internet, all with a guaranteed privacy. Looks so good we are gonna keep our fingers crossed for the Telegram team.
Check out our Telegram channel – there's a lot more info about the TON blockchain!