When I was asked a year ago whether TON had any prospects, I, as “smart Masha,” reasoned about the network effect and other technical and economic challenges the project needed to overcome to stand a chance—and generally demonstrated my skepticism. The reality turned out to be much simpler and more hopeless: the project was simply banned.

For this very reason, in a recent post about Bitcoin’s rise, I pointed out that Bitcoin’s dominance among cryptocurrencies seems to me to be the only viable scenario. Not because “helicopter money” flowed into Bitcoin, as Grigory Bazhenov tried to present my position, but specifically because Bitcoin is invulnerable to regulators. They can curb its penetration, they can pressure the exchange of Bitcoin for fiat—but they are unable to destroy it. Even if the NSA manages to find and imprison the real Nakamoto—what would that affect? At most, a heap of Bitcoins would be dumped onto the market, but the market would swallow them without choking. However, sanctions against Durov, Zuckerberg, or Buterin are indeed capable of seriously affecting the projects they lead. This link turned out to be the weakest. This is the Achilles’ heel of any potential “Bitcoin killer.”

Of course, all the software developed as part of Durov’s project is open source, and it has already been launched under the name free TON, but it lacks the very network effect that was the main bet and the killer feature of TON—Durov officially stated that he would not support such projects, which means the new free crypto has no hope of being integrated into Telegram.

But every cloud has a silver lining. It was precisely thanks to my review of TON’s capabilities that I became acquainted with Lightning—and I continue to recommend everyone use it. Over the past year, it has become much easier to use, and while the Lightning manual used to take up a separate page on my site, now it is a short paragraph on the donations page.

Durov created a great achievement—VK. It was taken away. He created an even greater one—Telegram. It took off, but it didn’t seem like enough to Pavel. He reached for the greatest of all, and it is not his fault that it didn’t work out. But what is truly bad is that now Durov will have to cover the losses at the expense of Telegram. I hope he has learned lessons from the VK case and will try not to ruin the project.