Telegram in Russia may be blocked due to Durov’s plans to launch his own cryptocurrency

Source: gazeta.ru

Fight Roskomnadzor with Telegram does not stop for a minute . Millions of IP addresses are blocked, and although the messenger itself continues to work, the department does not pay attention to this by blacklisting the new address blocks. Now, due to the blocking in the Russian Federation, many resources are not available, whose work depended on the cloud services of Amazon, Google and a number of other providers.

A number of media outlets claimed that they were trying to block Telegram because Pavel Durov did not give law enforcement officers access to the encrypted chat rooms of the messenger users. But it is quite possible that the reason lies elsewhere. The other day, an FSB officer sent a clarification letter to his colleagues stating that the real reason for blocking the messenger was the desire of the head of Telegram to launch a “completely uncontrollable financial system”.

“Colleagues, the story is not about it at all, as you do not understand! The story is not about keys and terrorism <...>. Pasha Durov decided to become a new Mavrodi. By launching our crypt, we will get a completely uncontrollable financial system in Russia. And this is not Bitcoin for marginals, it will be simple, reliable and uncontrollable. This is a threat to the security of the country <...>. All the drugs, obsl, organ trade will go through the Pashina crypt, and he will say: “I have nothing to do with it, prohibit words, they are used by terrorists,” the message reads.

The authenticity of the message has already been confirmed by a top manager of one of the telecom operators and a fairly large federal official. Evidence was provided by RBC. It is clear that the author of the letter denies everything - RBC representatives tried to contact him in order to request confirmation of the authorship of the message. But the FSB officer in question said that he did not give any comments and did not even understand what was being said at all.

Telegram actually runs its own blockchain platform called the Telegram Open Network (TON). The basis of the ecosystem of this platform is the cryptocurrency Gram. The principles of the system were described in a fairly lengthy document signed by Nikolai Durov, brother Pavel Durov. A payment system based on TON’s own blockchain will be built into the instant messenger, and then into other services and social networks. The blockchain, as stated in the technical documentation, will be able to process millions of transactions per second. Bitcoin infrastructure is able to process just 9-12 transactions per second. At the moment, the maximum amount of transactions can be processed by Visa and Master Card, we are talking about about 50-70 thousand operations per second.

To implement its project, Telegram held two closed rounds of primary tokens placement, as a result of which they managed to raise more than $ 1.7 billion. Of the Russian major entrepreneurs, the founder of Qiwi Sergei Solonin and Wimm-Bill-Dann founder David Yakobashvili took part in the ICO.

Mikhail Klimarev, Executive Director of the Internet Protection Society, agrees with the opinion of the representative of the Federal Security Service, which was discussed above: “The fears of the Federal Security Service are well founded. Bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrency derivatives have now become a tool of speculation from the category “today we will buy for 100 rubles, and tomorrow we will sell for 200 rubles. As a means of payment, they are used a little. And TON is conceived primarily as a means of payment. It is assumed that transaction processing will be quick, and the use of cryptocurrency will not require special knowledge. Therefore, such a system can have many more users. ” Klimarev believes that in addition to good citizens, TON tokens will also be used by criminals who will buy and sell drugs and weapons.

Now Telegram uses to continue its work a change of IP addresses, which costs Durov, according to various estimates, up to $ 1 million per month. If the confrontation with Roskomnadzor continues for a long time, then such large expenditures can lead to the fact that the launch of TON will be postponed. On the other hand, the blocking of Telegram and TON in Russia will not cause particular harm to the Durov project, since the number of users from the Russian Federation is not too large.