I'm surprised that nobody is talking about how Telegram raised pre-ICO of billions of dollars even when it was obvious that this type of censorship will be possible.
Mobile apps should not do ICO, period. It's irresponsible for someone to try stealing uneducated people's money while promising something that's impossible to achieve.
Realistically speaking there are only two players in the market: Google and Apple, both of which will happily comply with governments and regulators since they have no business in allowing gray area businesses, and that's a good thing.
However when you raise ICO, you're basically promising the censorship resistant future while fully knowing that it's impossible to achieve what you promised because your app is built on top of these centralized platforms.
This is on a completely different level in terms of scam factor when compared to naive idiots promising things like "putting grass-fed cows on the blockchain", because literally it's impossible to build a censorship-resistant, decentralized mobile app and they are the ones who know this the best.
I point this out because it looks as though all the press coverage seem to be focused on how Russia and Apple is censoring Telegram and Telegram is the victim, when Russia and Apple did nothing different from what they used to do. Russia has always been this way, and Apple has always tried its best to fight for user privacy but did make compromises when they really had to. It's great that Apple is doing its best to fight for user privacy but to be frank, Apple shouldn't be the one to blame here.
It's Telegram who decided to promote itself as a "censorship resistant decentralized blockchain application" to raise billions of dollars, and they got to this position because of this stance they had to take in order to raise the money. The only losers in this case are the idiots who invested in Telegram's ICO.
Mobile apps should not do ICO, period. It's irresponsible for someone to try stealing uneducated people's money while promising something that's impossible to achieve.
Realistically speaking there are only two players in the market: Google and Apple, both of which will happily comply with governments and regulators since they have no business in allowing gray area businesses, and that's a good thing.
However when you raise ICO, you're basically promising the censorship resistant future while fully knowing that it's impossible to achieve what you promised because your app is built on top of these centralized platforms.
This is on a completely different level in terms of scam factor when compared to naive idiots promising things like "putting grass-fed cows on the blockchain", because literally it's impossible to build a censorship-resistant, decentralized mobile app and they are the ones who know this the best.
I point this out because it looks as though all the press coverage seem to be focused on how Russia and Apple is censoring Telegram and Telegram is the victim, when Russia and Apple did nothing different from what they used to do. Russia has always been this way, and Apple has always tried its best to fight for user privacy but did make compromises when they really had to. It's great that Apple is doing its best to fight for user privacy but to be frank, Apple shouldn't be the one to blame here.
It's Telegram who decided to promote itself as a "censorship resistant decentralized blockchain application" to raise billions of dollars, and they got to this position because of this stance they had to take in order to raise the money. The only losers in this case are the idiots who invested in Telegram's ICO.