Andrey

I received a detailed review of my answer about TON in the chat , and with the author’s permission, I am publishing it here.

if nothing but Telegram is required to use the coins

Yes, having Telegram will be a sufficient, but not necessary condition for using the coins.

But there will be a need for the ability to buy gram quickly and conveniently for fiat

I don’t think that buying Gram will be harder than buying popular altcoins like Ethereum, especially since the development team has enough resources to organize such exchanges. And considering that identity verification tools are already built into Telegram, this will be even easier from a regulatory compliance perspective.

why is it needed as money, since there are bitcoins themselves

• Due to high transaction speed: 5 seconds are enough to “confirm” a small amount transaction, compared to several dozen minutes for bitcoin.
• Even lower fees: a PoS rather than a PoW consensus mechanism is used, so block creators do not have to perform generally useless work calculating hashes (block mining), and end users do not have to pay for it.
• Built-in support for smart contracts and the ability to create your own applications (services) based on the network itself (the project includes more than just a blockchain) and these smart contracts, accepting grams as payment for their services.

I would still prefer to keep my (long-term) savings in bitcoins, but for everyday use, grams are definitely more convenient. The question “why grams when there are bitcoins” sounds roughly like “why fiat when there is gold”.

Low emission rates

According to the white paper, inflation is expected to be (no more than) 2% per year (the number of existing grams will double in 35 years), through the emission of new grams as rewards for validators.

Indeed, the number of bitcoins is fundamentally limited, and inflation decreases with each new halving, but ultimately the work of miners will be paid for not by the emission of new bitcoins, but by transaction fees, which could lead either to their increase or to a decrease in mining difficulty, and thus, to the overall security of the blockchain.

Firstly, for the sake of high transaction speed, it is intended to keep a very modest number of nodes

It is intended to keep about 1000 validators creating blocks, and as many “full nodes” as desired, which, in particular, will be able to point out validator errors, which, if confirmed, will result in the loss of the deposit and the transfer of part of it to the full node as a reward (the remaining part is irrevocably “burned”). As Nikolai Durov himself writes, despite the large number of full nodes in the bitcoin or ethereum networks, they are privately combined into large pools, which ultimately leads to the fact that, for example, 75% of all new blocks are created by fewer than ten miners/pools. Since it becomes even easier to create pools under a PoS consensus mechanism (those interested simply chip in for a deposit on one server, which then returns part of the reward to them), validators correspond almost exactly to mining pools/large miners. So a system of 1000 validators looks even more decentralized than the current state of affairs in existing cryptocurrencies.

Moreover, at the protocol level, the validator with the largest deposit is prohibited from having more than the deposit of the validator with the minimum deposit multiplied by a certain constant L. Thus, the system itself encourages “pool” participants to choose not the largest validator, but validators with smaller deposits, maintaining decentralization.

If these funds can be managed without Telegram, then it is unclear what Telegram has to do with it.

Funds will be manageable using a set of tools as diverse as those for bitcoin—a “wallet” can be created using existing programs or even by writing your own. Telegram is only involved in that, firstly, TON is being developed by the Telegram team, and secondly, a light client for this entire ecosystem will be built into the Telegram app, which will automatically create a user base of several hundred million people. The network itself is planned to be renamed simply to Open Network a few years after launch.

And, of course, it is currently difficult to consider a currency that depends entirely on a single creator as decentralized

In principle, Ethereum also depends quite heavily on Vitalik Buterin. In fact, in the early stages (while the project is being “refined”), it is indeed planned that the deciding vote in the case of changes to some configurable parameters (of which there are many, by the way, to avoid hard forks) will belong to the TON Foundation, as well as owning the majority of validators. But this is ensured only by the amount of currency in the TON Reserve, which sells and buys grams (in exchange for dollars) according to a pre-set algorithm to reduce possible exchange rate fluctuations. As soon as the majority of grams are sold (which is actually equivalent to the project “taking off,” as the number of sales depends on the rate), the TON Foundation will lose its privileges.

Overall, the essence of the TON project is to create a platform for decentralized and (partially) centralized services that would be impossible to control from the outside—so, besides cryptocurrency, TON will have a built-in proxy system, for example, allowing the creation of tunnels like VPN and TOR and, if desired, collecting payment for traffic passing through them using the built-in cryptocurrency or a micropayment system. Services can provide their offerings using all the conveniences of centralization (more efficient request processing), while users will be protected from contract violations on their part thanks to decentralized smart contracts in the blockchain—and without any (government) courts. That is, the idea is to create a new market uncontrollable by states, and from there it will work itself out.