Why a Master Bug Finder and QA Specialist Won't Compete on TON

I've been called the "Sherlock Holmes of bug finding" by a US Web Security Company.

I was lead bug finder at Skype in its early days on numerous OS platforms.

I frequently find and report bugs to Apple in their "bug free" products.

And I certainly could do with a slice of $50,000 paid in TON.

So, why am I decidedly NOT going to participate in this contest?

I'll tell you why: because of the amount of bugs and bad usability issues I found in various TON products and services, especially Tonkeeper and Tonhub, and which whenever I reported them to those teams I was met with arrogance and denials.

And yet, in time, as I predicted, they themselves recognized I was correct, and fixed those issues that I'd reported. In the case of Tonhub even a bug bounty of over $10k was offered, and they did not bother replying, but made full use of my recommendations.

This contest will benefit those applications, and so that is good for TON and for those applications. But it will not benefit TonSafe which is where I decided to throw in my efforts because the team there appreciated and acted on all my recommendations.

In fact I played a role in bringing about TonSafe in the first place, convincing top developer companies to cooperate in making the safest and most professional TON wallet. TonSafe is not included in the contest, as TonSafe is not yet "open source".

Over at the BASED Team blog you can read about why TonSafe came into existence.

But there are also other reasons: the TON Foundation has a lot of money and a half billion dollars in funds, and has involved big companies (not usually a good thing for the end result for the man in the street), and they actively promote insider teams.

Those insider teams have been involved in ripping off customers (Whales) and questionable practices at best (NFT projects supported by TON such as Getgems), as well as a number of scammy projects which received support.

Until there is real decentralization of centralized assets such as ton.org and a cessation to promoting unprofessional scammy monopolies such as ton.app and its owner "BrainFucker" (his handle choice on Telegram, not mine), no way José.

Instead I rather forego all possible income and benefits to stay true to my principles, while preserving my anonymity. This will best allow me to remain independent and give the best possible advice and expert assistance to great projects such as TonSafe.

If anyone can find any real user issues with TonSafe please go ahead and try: without financial rewards, your reward would be helping to make TON's safest-wallet-by-far even safer. Already constructive feedback included the choice of API: and this is a work in progress, with limited resources given the lack of support from TON.

It is also not likely coincidental that after a year of being closed source, in discussions around the lack of motivation for TonSafe to do so in the short term while some $140k has been invested thus far, and a criticism I raised about Tonkeeper being promoted by TON Foundation which claims to be advocating Open Source, a week later, Tonkeeper choose to go open source. Competition is great for end users, but there should be a level playing field, which TON certainly is not: new and great projects such as TonSafe receive no publicity, whilst scammy ones such as Whales receive ongoing promotions.

This is my personal blog and I share my views more for historic future record and for my own record of thoughts, I don't seek followers, and my views are my own.

I do extensive research on TON and read widely a number of publications and reports, and draw several conclusions from those. It does not mean that the information I read nor my analysis thereof is infallible, it certainly is not.

But for those who have been involved in TON projects it has often not been a happy journey, with clear favoritism and lack of transparency in a network that claims to be open. We can only hope that this will improve over time, and that the involvement of big capital miracolously for the first time in history, actually favors community.

PS: It'll be interesting to see if users spot UI safety bugs which I know about still existing in Tonkeeper, now it has gone open source, and yet, the going open source has no bearing on many such bugs, it's about mistakes in the UI. I am going to bet that one of them, even though reported by a user, may NOT be spotted, nor fixed at their next update. I'll update here after that, to let you know!

If so, it'll mean I found bug(s) that the contest with all its bounties and participants did not! If that happens, then it'll certainly add chances that I could be hired for my usual rate of USD 200 an hour again from some group with plenty of funds. If that happens, I still won't abandon BASED, they are a GREAT group of great people with great principles and great potentials, which I believe may go far beyond the TonSafe project!