Telegram ICO , is it game over for other cryptos ?

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Minimum investment is 1 million usd I thought. So for the average person not much. Something of this scale will take years to build. Their timelines are not realistic. They have not developed or had experience in the block chain space. We shall see
 
1 million is the for the pre-sale ( which all MNOs can afford :p ) , the public ico starts at the end of the year.
The real question is this, they have 200 million users and counting, they have a massive head start in user acquisition

what sort of long term competitive advantage do coins like dash / bitcoin have compared to them ?
 
Every crypto that's come along since "NxT" has supposed to have been "game over" for Bitcoin. Maybe people should start asking themselves why it wasn't. About 1500 and counting - almost all of them more advanced, yet none of them bigger in marketcap.

Nowadays we can make supreme colour copies of the Mona Lisa. For example - we can make them far more durable by printing onto metal sheets, far bigger - the size of buildings, we can make digitized Mona Lisas and print them onto carpets. But try getting $400 million dollars for any of them.

In other words, why isn't a "feature rich" Mona Lisa more valuable than a plain old Leonardo Da Vinci version that's well past its sell-by date ? Because the store-of-value market looks for places to park value that are as unambiguous as possible, not as "feature rich" as possible.

Technology assets are valueable as long as they are useful in terms of network service. They also need to always stay ahead of the pack in terms of feature set and scope of appeal which makes them all extremely vulnerable and potentially short-lived in terms of stock value. Just look at all the service-oriented blockchain networks popping up like mushrooms after a rainshower right now. (See a commentary I made about this from a while back on tech stocks vs monetary stocks: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/...bitcoin-bashing’-important-please-read.13678/).

But with monetary assets, a completely different set of criteria apply. They need to be 90% store of value and 10% means-of-exchange to be sustainable because the more "technology & service oriented" they become the more ambiguous they are as an "original" asset in which to store value. Thats why Bitcoin focuses on minimising development while Ethereum prioritises maximum development.

When both (monetary and service-oriented) assets are digital, the distinctions in terms of blockchain specification appear subtle, but are still profound. For example, it would still make far more sense for Dash to inherit bitcoin's codebase than Telegram/TON's if it existed (which it doesn't). Also, if you look at how Dash's feature set has evolved, it hasn't been about prioritising services but about enhancing the known and established properties of money on a digital platform:

• fungibility (network-native mixing)
• mobility (instant send)
• security (inherits the bitcoin codebase, the only one which markets have unambiguously identified as being prioritised around a monetary store of value function)
• durability (transparent blockchain for maximum levels of sustainable public confidence)
• sufficiently-rare (first-in-class. Just look at the difference between the Dash M.Cap and the nearest masternode-oriented blockchain asset to see how the market endorses this)

Meanwhile compare those development priorities with something like Ethereum or Telegram/TON. TON is 90% payment rail and 10% store of value. For a start it's 10 years late so it's already missed the boat in terms of originality and "unambiguity" market for which the passage of time is an essential component. Telegram is targetting a technology market that's more akin to the Wassup type social networking stock than any decentralised monetary asset.

Finally, Telegram Messenger LLP is a corporate (non-profit) entity. The one thing they have is a lot of users but they don't have $1.2 Billion to spend on developing their project which at the moment is no more than a dream smorgasbord of features than almost any techy with enough dreaming power could think up over breakfast. Dash on the other hand is not a dream but a real $8.4 Billion entity that is succeeding as a monetary asset and that has 4 years of track record under its belt already.

(P.S. For fun: See if you think the company characterised in these citations is capable of building the blockchain to make "game over" for all crypto):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10639688
https://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-stop-using-telegram-right-now-1782557415

 
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toknormal said:
Every crypto that's come along since "NxT" has supposed to have been "game over" for Bitcoin. Maybe people should start asking themselves why it wasn't. About 1500 and counting - almost all of them more advanced, yet none of them bigger in marketcap.

Nowadays we can make supreme colour copies of the Mona Lisa. For example - we can make them far more durable by printing onto metal sheets, far bigger - the size of buildings, we can make digitized Mona Lisas and print them onto carpets. But try getting $400 million dollars for any of them.

In other words, why isn't a "feature rich" Mona Lisa more valuable than a plain old Leonardo Da Vinci version that's well past its sell-by date ? Because the store-of-value market looks for places to park value that are as unambiguous as possible, not as "feature rich" as possible.

Technology assets are valueable as long as they are useful in terms of network service. They also need to always stay ahead of the pack in terms of feature set and scope of appeal which makes them all extremely vulnerable and potentially short-lived in terms of stock value. Just look at all the service-oriented blockchain networks popping up like mushrooms after a rainshower right now. (See a commentary I made about this from a while back on tech stocks vs monetary stocks: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/...bitcoin-bashing’-important-please-read.13678/).

But with monetary assets, a completely different set of criteria apply. They need to be 90% store of value and 10% means-of-exchange to be sustainable because the more "technology & service oriented" they become the more ambiguous they are as an "original" asset in which to store value. Thats why Bitcoin focuses on minimising development while Ethereum prioritises maximum development.

When both (monetary and service-oriented) assets are digital, the distinctions in terms of blockchain specification appear subtle, but are still profound. For example, it would still make far more sense for Dash to inherit bitcoin's codebase than Telegram/TON's if it existed (which it doesn't). Also, if you look at how Dash's feature set has evolved, it hasn't been about prioritising services but about enhancing the known and established properties of money on a digital platform:

• fungibility (network-native mixing)
• mobility (instant send)
• security (inherits the bitcoin codebase, the only one which markets have unambiguously identified as being prioritised around a monetary store of value function)
• durability (transparent blockchain for maximum levels of sustainable public confidence)
• sufficiently-rare (first-in-class. Just look at the difference between the Dash M.Cap and the nearest masternode-oriented blockchain asset to see how the market endorses this)

Meanwhile compare those development priorities with something like Ethereum or Telegram/TON. TON is 90% payment rail and 10% store of value. For a start it's 10 years late so it's already missed the boat in terms of originality and "unambiguity" market for which the passage of time is an essential component. Telegram is targetting a technology market that's more akin to the Wassup type social networking stock than any decentralised monetary asset.

Finally, Telegram Messenger LLP is a corporate (non-profit) entity. The one thing they have is a lot of users but they don't have $1.2 Billion to spend on developing their project which at the moment is no more than a dream smorgasbord of features than almost any techy with enough dreaming power could think up over breakfast. Dash on the other hand is not a dream but a real $8.4 Billion entity that is succeeding as a monetary asset and that has 4 years of track record under its belt already.

(P.S. For fun: See if you think the company characterised in this post is capable of building the blockchain to make "game over" for all crypto):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10639688
https://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-stop-using-telegram-right-now-1782557415

telegram.png
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Thanks for taking time to do this analysis , although i disagree with the storage aspect ( because we are in very very early stages of blockchain tech, think of facebook vs orkut/ myspace , the later are completely extinct ) , blockchain experience does count a lot.

having said that, telegram is currently acquiring half a million users per day and is so confident about their game they are ready to give you full API access to their backend and have open sourced their front-end completely, telegram is a slowly becoming a behemoth in the messaging space.

Average folks dont care about Pavel's emotional issues, all people worry about is "Paying for coffee" and as long XYZ delivers that, people will flock to that.


we definitely need to take this threat very very seriously, we can no longer afford to close our eyes to not having strong marketing chaps, like you said there are 1000s of coins , having kick ass tech is not longer enough , we need kick ass marketing team and long term marketing strategies.
 
Dashmaximalist said:
Thanks for taking time to do this analysis , although i disagree with the storage aspect ( because we are in very very early stages of blockchain tech, think of facebook vs orkut/ myspace , the later are completely extinct ) , blockchain experience does count a lot.
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I've never bought the "Myspace/Facebook" argument for crypto. I see this quoted left right and centre and have seen it since back in 2013 where people said "I don't think bitcoin will be the one but something like it/more advanced will be".

The thing about social networks is that they are a mono-tier service. In that sense they're no different from a business - like Starbucks say. On the other hand the financial system is a whole lot different and isn't about providing service or features other than possibly at the point of sale where those "features" may come from lots of sources, none of which are necessarily associated with the monetary asset backing the payment.

In that regard I don't think people care about "how they pay for their coffee" as you say. I think they care about what part of their saved wealth they use to back that purchase and how well that sustains their wealth.

For example, until the recent WaveCrest clusterf*k I was using a Bitcoin/Dash backed debit card. I could use this at any merchant that took Visa payments and the transactions were fast, convenient and indepentent of the Dash/Bitcoin blockchain properties. Despite that I was actually "spending" Dash and watching the value of my savings grow because they were held in Dash. If I booked a ferry ticket, the payment system was the operator's eCommerce database, all the supporting services came from Wirex and Dash was only in the background serving as the "store of value" that made the whole transaction possible.

I agree with you that it's important to keep everything on our radar and monitr the competition - if you step into the #alt_coins forum on Dash Nation you'll see me in there almost everyday commenting on stuff. But what we shouldn't do is run off and do something differently just because someone with a big user base says they're bringin out a crypto.

What should Dash do differently that it isn't already doing ?
 
Should we pay attention to other projects in the cryptosphere? Sure.

Am I quaking in my boots that Telegram is going to be the killer app that puts Dash out of business? No. No I'm not.

It can be difficult or impossible to make the essential distinction between what is fun marketing fluff, and what is technically possible and probable, and does the team actually have the digital chops to pull it off...

Hey, I'm coming out with an ICO next week that makes a blockchain so private that several three initial government agencies wanted to hire me on the spot and causes bald men to grow their hair back. And that's just for starters.

Sounds amazing doesn't it?
 
toknormal said:
I've never bought the "Myspace/Facebook" argument for crypto. I see this quoted left right and centre and have seen it since back in 2013 where people said "I don't think bitcoin will be the one but something like it/more advanced will be".

The thing about social networks is that they are a mono-tier service. In that sense they're no different from a business - like Starbucks say. On the other hand the financial system is a whole lot different and isn't about providing service or features other than possibly at the point of sale where those "features" may come from lots of sources, none of which are necessarily associated with the monetary asset backing the payment.

In that regard I don't think people care about "how they pay for their coffee" as you say. I think they care about what part of their saved wealth they use to back that purchase and how well that sustains their wealth.

For example, until the recent WaveCrest clusterf*k I was using a Bitcoin/Dash backed debit card. I could use this at any merchant that took Visa payments and the transactions were fast, convenient and indepentent of the Dash/Bitcoin blockchain properties. Despite that I was actually "spending" Dash and watching the value of my savings grow because they were held in Dash. If I booked a ferry ticket, the payment system was the operator's eCommerce database, all the supporting services came from Wirex and Dash was only in the background serving as the "store of value" that made the whole transaction possible.

I agree with you that it's important to keep everything on our radar and monitr the competition - if you step into the #alt_coins forum on Dash Nation you'll see me in there almost everyday commenting on stuff. But what we shouldn't do is run off and do something differently just because someone with a big user base says they're bringin out a crypto.

What should Dash do differently that it isn't already doing ?
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The store of wealth argument does not apply to crypto in the current phase because it's a very very tiny market ( global assets are in $450 trillion range) , right now all that is required for success is excellent payment rails accompanied with strong user base, having said that telegram might not be excessively inflationary so it might even be good of store of value.

The way i see it is there will be a big prize given to one crypto ( like 90% of market share ) while the rest would be shared amongst other coins, to reach that sort of leadership position marketing is extremely important.

what should we do differently ? we should have world class marketing and PR team which we lack currently. we should rollout partnership announcements with big brands etc which salviate investors minds , we should play a bit dirty if need be.
 
Dashmaximalist said:
what should we do differently ? we should have world class marketing and PR team which we lack currently. we should rollout partnership announcements with big brands etc which salviate investors minds , we should play a bit dirty if need be.
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Couldn't disagree more. We have hired a world class marketing and PR team. Not one, not two, but three actually, and counting. We have had substantial partnership announcements, with more in the pipeline. And one of the central, foundational, non negotiable (for me) reasons Dash is winning is that we take the high road. Over and over, we take the high road. Perfection? No. Striving to do the right thing? Yes.

What sort of little bit dirty things would you recommend that we do?
 
solarguy said:
Couldn't disagree more. We have hired a world class marketing and PR team. Not one, not two, but three actually, and counting. We have had substantial partnership announcements, with more in the pipeline. And one of the central, foundational, non negotiable (for me) reasons Dash is winning is that we take the high road. Over and over, we take the high road. Perfection? No. Striving to do the right thing? Yes.

What sort of little bit dirty things would you recommend that we do?
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the market seems to be ignoring our partnership announcements for whatever reason. we have been kicked kicked out of top 10 which is a massive turn off for most investors, we should influence the price with constant and exciting announcements so we stay in investors mind ( bit dirty thing ).

so you say we have world class marketing teams , who are these people , what are their credentials, what's our long terms marketing strategy , do we have road map for that ?
 
I'm wondering how you come to the conclusion that one crypto will take "90%" of market share.

First of all, of what market ? Blockchain assets span a huge number of commercial sectors, it's like saying back in the day that one website or one eCommerce system or one browser or one social networking company will gain "90% share".

Of the monetary assets, at least it's unlikely to be true because while in technology standardisation is desirable, in investment the opposite is true - so investors looking at cryptocurrencies as a store of value will want to diversify their portfolios, not consolidate them if past performance is anything to go by.

Re. your earlier "Myspace/Facebook" remark, it's true that Facebook is large but you only need to take the caps of 6 smaller companies - say priceline, uber, netflix, salesforce, paypal, ant financial - to be in the same ballpark. Then there are thousands more in the 20 to 50 Billion dollar range. Facebook doesn't even dominate the social media sector - it's the biggest single messaging-app company but the actual market size and diversity of the social media sector as a whole is diverse.

In my opinion, Dash has carved out a market, was the first into it and now has to consolidate it. That market is for highly liquid store of value - basically the coins to bitcoin's gold nuggets. Derivative networks can do the acrobatics wherever needed to carry that store of value into higher order layers of the system but Dash has been growing year on year despite all sorts of technologically advanced blockchains sprouting up around it.

Look back 12 months (which I accept is a long time in crypto): we were at number 7 ranking, $10 per coin and $72 million marketcap. Now we're at number 10 ranking, $1078 per coin and $8.4 Billion in marketcap. There are some very exciting proposals on the boil that are actual organic ones, not some bank coming swaning in and driving the marketcap ballistic with a single announcement and finally there are technological developments in the pipeline that are very relevant to Dash's core sector and which will still be a first for any crypto.
 
solarguy said:
Wachsman, Ogilvy and Mather and Amanda B. Johnson. Plus all the indy stuff.
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they are all external people if i am not wrong, and i don't understand why we don't have an in house marketing team accompanied with them which is related to my most important point of having a strategy/ road map for marketing.

I feel we are not taking marketing as seriously/professionally as we take development
 
toknormal said:
I'm wondering how you come to the conclusion that one crypto will take "90%" of market share.

First of all, of what market ? Blockchain assets span a huge number of commercial sectors, it's like saying back in the day that one website or one eCommerce system or one browser or one social networking company will gain "90% share".

Of the monetary assets, at least it's unlikely to be true because while in technology standardisation is desirable, in investment the opposite is true - so investors looking at cryptocurrencies as a store of value will want to diversify their portfolios, not consolidate them if past performance is anything to go by.

Re. your earlier "Myspace/Facebook" remark, it's true that Facebook is large but you only need to take the caps of 6 smaller companies - say priceline, uber, netflix, salesforce, paypal, ant financial - to be in the same ballpark. Then there are thousands more in the 20 to 50 Billion dollar range. Facebook doesn't even dominate the social media sector - it's the biggest single messaging-app company but the actual market size and diversity of the social media sector as a whole is diverse.

In my opinion, Dash has carved out a market, was the first into it and now has to consolidate it. That market is for highly liquid store of value - basically the coins to bitcoin's gold nuggets. Derivative networks can do the acrobatics wherever needed to carry that store of value into higher order layers of the system but Dash has been growing year on year despite all sorts of technologically advanced blockchains sprouting up around it.

Look back 12 months (which I accept is a long time in crypto): we were at number 7 ranking, $10 per coin and $72 million marketcap. Now we're at number 10 ranking, $1078 per coin and $8.4 Billion in marketcap. There are some very exciting proposals on the boil that are actual organic ones, not some bank coming swaning in and driving the marketcap ballistic with a single announcement and finally there are technological developments in the pipeline that are very relevant to Dash's core sector and which will still be a first for any crypto.
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you can't look at all technology stocks and compared them to facebook , you should just look at social media companies. Having said that it's not fair to compare money with social media entirely.

The fundamental quality of Money is 'store of value' and goods being priced in it, by this very definition only one coin is ideal ( which can be that king). The way it unfolds in the crypto space however is network effect, whichever coin pulls most people to adopt ( like 15-20% of population ) will get the real first mover advantage and once that happens it will next to impossible to dethrone that coin unless there is a new coin with far more powerful use cases.
 
Dashmaximalist said:
The fundamental quality of Money is 'store of value' and goods being priced in it, by this very definition only one coin is ideal.
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Absolutely not.

Cryptocurrencies are assets - digital commodities. They can function fine as stores of value without being used as a unit of account. (Doesn't mean they can't function as a unit of account also - an essential property of money. For example I always measure coinmarketcap.com marketcaps in BTC, not Dollars).

National currencies on the other hand are simply units of account. They don't co-incide with any particular asset except in the cases when a debt security gets denominated in their units. You could quite happily have all these cryptocurrencies co-existing while prices are denominated in none of them, in fact I just illustrated such a case in a previous post with the debit card example.

As an example of how starkly different all these concepts are, imagine if Amazon changed all their pricing denominations to Zlotis. This wouldn't affect their customers purchasing power at all since people all have their savings held in a wide diversity of assets anyway - from local currency denominated bank deposits to shares and bonds.

What makes blockchain assets "money" is that they are liquid bearer tokens. These did not exist before 2009.
 
toknormal said:
Absolutely not.

Cryptocurrencies are assets - digital commodities. They can function fine as stores of value without being used as a unit of account. (Doesn't mean they can't function as a unit of account also - an essential property of money. For example I always measure coinmarketcap.com marketcaps in BTC, not Dollars).

National currencies on the other hand are simply units of account. They don't co-incide with any particular asset except in the cases when a debt security gets denominated in their units. You could quite happily have all these cryptocurrencies co-existing while prices are denominated in none of them, in fact I just illustrated such a case in a previous post with the debit card example.

As an example of how starkly different all these concepts are, imagine if Amazon changed all their pricing denominations to Zlotis. This wouldn't affect their customers purchasing power at all since people all have their savings held in a wide diversity of assets anyway - from local currency denominated bank deposits to shares and bonds.

What makes blockchain assets "money" is that they are liquid bearer tokens. These did not exist before 2009.
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you are talking about current state of affairs , i am talking about a future where fiat currencies cease to exist, in such a scenario goods and services will be priced in a crypto. when this happens it's far more comfortable to have one coin for this purpose than have a ton of them .
 
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