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Telegram has raised an initial $850M for its billion-dollar ICO

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Re: Telegram has raised an initial $850M for its billion-dollar ICO

#41

Post by CryptoPunk »

tonfa wrote: post #40
granaldo wrote: post #9

To be honest I have not seen any official marketing page from telegram nor any ico calendars like https://www.coingecko.com/en/ico . Is this entirely private by some group of deserving entities? When will the public can and able to participate?

They seem to want to do things properly wrt SEC. That would mean only advertising to accredited investors.

Thanks to securities laws, the rich get richer, and the poor have to wait for the scraps.

Ideally the SEC's mandate would be limited to going after P&D groups and other scams, and no longer include enforcing restrictions on selling securities to unaccredited investors as a non-public company.

If the poorest households are allowed to spend 9% of their income on lottery tickets, I don't see the justification for preventing unaccredited investors from investing in whatever they want.

All it does is eliminate the long-tail of small companies and nonprofessional investors from participating directly in a key sector of the economy.

Re: Telegram has raised an initial $850M for its billion-dollar ICO

#42

Post by therealmarv »

johnsushant wrote: post #36
therealmarv wrote: post #34

Another ICO. ICO that, ICO this... you cannot even go to another tech conference without an ICO gets mentioned. All this 1000 of crypto coins are useless in long term and I won't support Telegram too. There are 3 main players named Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum which will stay here longterm and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

You mention Litecoin but not Ripple?

Ripple will also stay I think. But I would be careful of Ripple. Just my opinion. It's interesting it's connected so well with many financial institutions and that they have big names on board but I would be a bank I would rather look in something like Stellar than Ripple which is (theoretically) in a centralized control of one entitity. All this locked up XRPs which are not in circulation would not let me sleep well.

Re: Telegram has raised an initial $850M for its billion-dollar ICO

#43

Post by thisisit »

panarky wrote: post #14
firasd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably they will use the tokens in the app for payments and a way to run decentralized applications (so paying for computation, storage, etc.) What's being sold is the potential for the token price to appreciate in value. It's definitely a worse deal for investors than an IPO as there is no equity being sold.

> It's definitely a worse deal for investors than an IPO as there is no equity being sold. If you pay $100,000 for 100 shares of Google I guess you're technically getting equity, but what exactly is the advantage of that? Sure, your broker has a digital ledger that records your ownership, but is that fundamentally different from digital entries in any other ledger just because there's equity? Whether you buy Google s…

> Whether you buy Google shares or Telegram tokens, the only reason you're buying is because you expect the price to go up in the future.

I am not arguing the equity angle. I kind of agree with you on that, especially because you used Google as an example.

But, I am getting a bit tired of people making it sound like IPO and ICOs are the same. They are not. Google or any other company have to be in operation for year(s) and show consistent revenue, if not profits and even talk about their future plans on how they will use the money before people "expect their prices to go up.

ICOs on the other hand rely simply on paper. No one knows whether they will deliver on their promises and expect price to go up. It is like VC investing for sure. But, without the expertise required to vet ICOs the whole "expectation of price going up" can be described as FOMO.

Re: Telegram has raised an initial $850M for its billion-dollar ICO

#44

Post by unicornporn »

SXX wrote: post #24
jstanley wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "it is"? The Telegram client is open source.

In this case "private" have nothing to do with the code license. Problem with Telegram is that protocol and cryptography they use is their own. They might use better reviewed protocol like one of Signal, but they didn't. No need to explain what dangers same strategy going to cause with cryptocurrencies.

Was the Signal protocol reviewed in 2013 when Telegram was launched? It seems it was developed in 2013.

I'd say the biggest problem with Telegram is the fact that E2EE isn't enabled by default and no one (that I've chatted with) uses it.

Re: Telegram has raised an initial $850M for its billion-dollar ICO

#45

Post by thisisit »

mrb wrote: post #27
firefoxd wrote: post #4

Maybe I'm the last to join the party but if i understand correctly, is this money they are going to receive as investment? I ask because as much as i can google I can't find any product they are selling or any ad they are displaying, so what is being bought here? I'm not trying to be sarcastic, is there something i am missing?

Per the SEC filing, yes, they are receiving the $850M as cash from private investors (mostly VCs). The "product" they are selling is tokens for their ecosystem, described in this leaked whitepaper: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1oaKoJDWvhtlvtQEuqxgfkUHcI5...

Thanks, that was a good read. And raises a lot of questions in my mind.

They are going to use PoS mechanism. So, I had to look at the token distribution scheme. 4% by the team and 52% by "Ton Reserve", which I think is not explained. With only 44% held in hands of non-Ton people, is this even decentralized?

Re: Telegram has raised an initial $850M for its billion-dollar ICO

#46

Post by justinjlynn »

thisisit wrote: post #45
mrb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per the SEC filing, yes, they are receiving the $850M as cash from private investors (mostly VCs). The "product" they are selling is tokens for their ecosystem, described in this leaked whitepaper: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1oaKoJDWvhtlvtQEuqxgfkUHcI5...

Thanks, that was a good read. And raises a lot of questions in my mind. They are going to use PoS mechanism. So, I had to look at the token distribution scheme. 4% by the team and 52% by "Ton Reserve", which I think is not explained. With only 44% held in hands of non-Ton people, is this even decentralized?

If it's proof of stake and the majority is held in a single hand and the proof of stake required isn't a supermajority... then it's basically a database under the control of one entity.

Re: Telegram has raised an initial $850M for its billion-dollar ICO

#47

Post by saurik »

runeks wrote: post #37

The inherent issue with ICOs is pricing. Buying tokens, which can be exchanged for a service at an unknown ratio (price), amounts to financing a new fast food chain by buying a million tokens for $1,000, where the tokens can be used to purchase hamburgers once the chain opens. The problem is that you have no idea if those million tokens — once the chain is up and running — will buy a thousand hamburgers or three. So…

> the end product of the business will be cheap (as it’s priced in these tokens)

Essentially every one of these services creates a distributed market and almost none of them make the mistake of somehow deciding the price of the service in tokens in a way that wouldn't cause the market to adjust to reflect the value of the token (and ironically the only one I can come up with that makes this mistake was the WhopperCoin ;P). If the value of the token doubles then the cost in tokens of using the service should quickly drop by half. This is an annoying volatility but the service absolutely doesn't become more expensive or cheaper based on the value of the token. This isn't "one token buys one hamburger", this is simply "you can buy and sell hamburgers with tokens".

Re: Telegram has raised an initial $850M for its billion-dollar ICO

#48

Post by biztos »

panarky wrote: post #20
firefoxd wrote: post #4

Maybe I'm the last to join the party but if i understand correctly, is this money they are going to receive as investment? I ask because as much as i can google I can't find any product they are selling or any ad they are displaying, so what is being bought here? I'm not trying to be sarcastic, is there something i am missing?

There's no product yet, they're selling the tokens that will be used in future products. When we finally find use cases that make cryptoassets relevant to regular people for routine activities, then the skeptics will understand that there's more going on here than just tulips and Ponzis. Telegram has real potential to do that, it just takes some imagination to see what it could be.

Given that nobody has found those use cases yet, why do so many people assume they exist?

Re: Telegram has raised an initial $850M for its billion-dollar ICO

#50

Post by narrator »

jmickey wrote: post #16
panarky wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's definitely a worse deal for investors than an IPO as there is no equity being sold. If you pay $100,000 for 100 shares of Google I guess you're technically getting equity, but what exactly is the advantage of that? Sure, your broker has a digital ledger that records your ownership, but is that fundamentally different from digital entries in any other ledger just because there's equity? Whether you buy Google s…

Well, with shares you are more or less guaranteed that they will increase in value, if the company does well. With tokens this is not clear, as it would be possible for Telegram to do insanely well, but the tokens not being very popular/being used for some unimportant feature.

Thw tokens not being used is what gets me. Is telegram incentiveized at all to use the tokens? Sure they own a lot of them, but so what? They already got the cash and they can just use it to do business like normal and make money that way. Why try and get people to use tokens to do business when they can just have them use fiat to buy things? The transaction of the tokens is taxable just like any sort of barter exchange, so it's a lot more complicated to work with than fiat. I just don't get it. It might work for a business that is locked out of the banking system, but otherwise, why bother?

Are there any ICOs that have tokens that are valuable based on anything other than their speculative value? Do any even have a dividend or are useful for anything besides trading on exchanges? Most tokens seem to have a big spike and then slowly grind down in value over time. It just seems to me like a "make your own speculative bubble" industry.

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