Wallet P2P: All Bugs Are TON
In this post, I reveal that Telegram = TON = Wallet and why it matters
I've written before on my reasons not to participate in Bug Finding Contest and to miss out on some good financial rewards as well as a likely job at TON Foundation/Telegram.
And TON Foundation not having good Testers and QA Managers is now going to result in a negative impact upon Telegram. So this is interesting, let me share my findings.
Wallet has been integrating TON into Telegram. Everyone knows that any bot on Telegram that does have a username ending with "bot" is directly owned by Telegram.
This applies to @mobile, @wallet, @donate, as three examples. Donate, is infamous among Russian TON developer communities, who allege it belongs to @brainfucker.
In any case, it is well known and provable that the much reviled ton.app is owned by the @brainfucker and also it is known about the history between ton.org and ton.app.
TON.APP Fiasco
For those who do not know, a very short summary: there was a fiasco over another project ton.place (probably @brainfucker is involved there too). This involved ton.place being a carbon copy of an anime only fans site in Russia, and a very bad privacy policy.
There was great concern among Russian developer groups about why this awful project was getting verification marks and promotion at ton.app, and the response of TON Foundation, which owns the ton.org domain was "it's a third party, we'll cut links."
Another part of the complaint was that ton.app was not listing a great many other good projects on TON. TON Foundation then say that they instructed the @brainfucker to include anything an everything related to TON.
TON.app thus went from a closed shop that benefited @brainfucker and his friends, to an open chaos that accepted anything and everything without proper testing, no clear certification criteria, and a host of other things making ton.app an unprofessional site.
TON.org within a month had now put back links to ton.app and was now promoting it even more, in fact the ton.org/wallets directory would not directly go to ton.app.
Telegram, Durov
So let's forward now to Wallet. And how Wallet proves beyond all doubt, as if the VK staff close to Pavel Durov moving to Dubai with Telegram and joining the TON Foundation, was not enough evidence already, about how exactly TON = Telegram.
And let me put this into context: Telegram is a 5 star app. I cannot give Telegram a high enough rating for everything it does, and how it does it. And this is due to Durov brothers and their own standards and methods which are commendable.
I reiterate: I see no problems with the Durovs, on the contrary. I see many problems with TON and I worry that these will inevitably impact negatively upon the Durovs and Telegram, as will become increasingly clear in the coming months.
Also let is be clear: I have always said that TON is NOT EQUAL to Telegram. Naturally Telegram has an interest, rightly so, and is supporting integration of TON into Telegram, and it is Telegram that will ultimately help propel TON to fame and value.
Let it also be clear that some USA organization extending its tentacles across the world and shutting down projects on spurious basis is not acceptable, even if it is the real world we live in, we can only sympathize with Telegram as the victim in that saga.
As we also know in a genius strategic move Telegram cut off TON and gave away ton.org to the winners of some Telegram contest, a couple of nerd gamers who were working and still are, on the core TON blockchain.
How random that was, is a big question. But let us assume it was random, and that TON now became TON Foundation, new owners of the all-powerful TON.org domain which gives complete centralized power to the characters sitting on TON Foundation.
Let us agree, Telegram and TON, closely related now, seek to dominate a future decentralized world, to use the buzz word very vaguely, or, let's say a better world, in the same way Telegram brought freedom to communications, TON should to the web.
In this case, the great reputation of Telegram is going to be tarnished by TON and its associates. Gambling is rampantly promoted by the @brainfucker's ton.app site, and thus, by TON. In fact, visit the TON Foundations own block chain account and see.
TON Foundation and Gambling
For months on end, the TON Foundation account is being used to play fruit poker, gambling. This can be seen from the address you can find at ton.sh, which was the first (I believe) TON explorer, and created by someone at TON Foundation.
Although, it appears that TON Foundation deny any connection with TON.sh, it doesn't matter. The example address in the search box is the TON Foundation wallet address, or, at least, one of its known addresses. Look at the transaction history. Gambling.
Of course, gambling, pornography, drugs, and anything else legal and illegal can find its way onto TON blockchain, just as it can on the web 2 "World Wide Web" but it is a very different matter when the "owners" of TON are using TON to promote such things.
And I'm sure this is not something the Durov's would want to be associated with.
So, let us get to the subject of my post, Wallet = TON, at least, in it's new P2P market.
@Wallet, Telegram, TON
At first, I was really happy that Wallet, owned by Telegram, even if possibly also by TON Foundation, but certainly by Telegram, introduced yet another new feature. This will further integrate TON into Telegram and bring TON millions more users over time.
For anyone wanting success of TON and projects that count on TON to function well and the growth of TON, this is what we all want. And so I was very pleased, and I learned of it directly from a lesser-known news channel run by Wallet, which I follow.
I immediately started to test it and saw that I was certainly among the very first, if not the first open tester. I thought: well done. And a good idea that you do not release this to the masses just yet, but in stages.
This is exactly what TonSafe has done, which no one will have heard about, there has been no marketing at all. All the focus of BASED where I am tester, has been about making a great and reliable product first, before doing any marketing.
Well, to my great disappointment, within half an hour Wallet put out the message on its main bot channel as a broadcast, and quickly followed by the (also, as with ton.app, much reviled) "TON Community" social media and Telegram channel.
So, within a few hours, there were thousands of trades going on, and we know this from the order numbers, as well as taking a look around at the P2P advertisements.
Bugs: Using Users as Unpaid Testers
And, I soon found several UX bugs in this P2P feature of Wallet.
Now, thinking this Wallet is a Telegram operation, I was really confused! First, Telegram doesn't even offer any real customer service (which is bad, but, as the product is really good, they can get away with it). But Wallet has a Telegram-based support bot.
For those that don't know, support bots on Telegram protect the support staff from revealing their Telegram identities, as messages from those seeking support, are relayed into a private group, which can contain any number of staff or volunteers.
But it is normally very difficult, with standard support bot set up, to separate out many different support requests: there is no ticketing, every message all ends up in the same private chat group, and if there are many support requests, could be missed.
I do not know if Wallet has a better set up for their support bot, but I can say from reports of other users that they are responding, even if, not yet able to refund lost TON or follow up on disputes, so time will tell, they must surely be overwhelmed.
But, now we have proof that this awful manner of releasing such an important new feature of Wallet, is not Telegram, but TON Foundation. And this fits in with many, but not all, TON projects (including popular wallets Tonkeeper and Tonhub) of using the masses as guinea pigs and unpaid testers, subjected to large amounts of bugs, losses.
Again, this reflects badly upon Telegram, which until now, was thought to be the only owner of Wallet. Now we see Telegram = TON Foundation = Wallet
Telegram = TON Foundation = Wallet
And this is clear from this post by TON Community (Foundation) here which claims that P2P in Wallet is the TON (Foundation's) project, not Telegram, "even though it uses Telegram". But, we cannot believe anything these guys say, based on past history.
They say ton.app has nothing to do with us, that TON Community channels are not our responsibility, and so on, and provide a really strange bot called TON_HELP_BOT which I have written about before.
All this can be put down to a lack of professionalism, early days, in a big project, where things are not clear, and where there is a long way to go before convincing us all that The Open Network is really that and not The Oligarch Network or Opaque Network.
What should Wallet have done in releasing P2P Market?
Aside from the obvious, they could have hired @abc9e, my hourly rate starts at only TON 300. It's so easy to answer, I feel bad writing it:
- They should have done more testing with good testers first
- They should not have announced it widely and immediately on public release
- They should have placed a better ticket-issue-dispute tracking system first
But it's all OK as far as they're concerned, because the 10% that notice these things and have bad experiences, doesn't matter, 90% won't, and by the time it become popular these bugs will be ironed out.
It's the new way of doing things in the "Wild West" and "New Frontier" of Crypto.
Only, in my view, that's not what TON needs to achieve "Mass Adoption".
And this is why it will be important to build good "ecosystems" within the "TON ecosystem".
Appendix
Source: Investmnent Kingyru
The news of @wallet update has been flying all over the channels, media, and even TV. Now you can buy TON directly from any other Telegram user, without having to send your cryptocurrency to an exchange. Since it's all centralized, Wallet acts as an intermediary and protects you from scammers.
Seems like great news. But why is it so advertised everywhere? There is nothing new. You can buy p2p in @cryptobot, you can transfer TON to any user via @tonrocketbot. Even paid subscriptions and tokens are already in bots.
Wallet has been around for a long time, since 2021, but in April 2022 it was integrated into Telegram, right into the menu. Even then, it was PRed from all sorts of places as an easy way to buy cryptocurrency and send it to any other Telegram user.
Wallet always had a verification tick from Telegram, which already shows some connection. There is almost no information about the developers, so I decided to do some digging.
So, what I found. Artur Stambultzian is a former Team Lead of Vkontakte, who made VKUI - a set of React components that can be used to create interfaces that look indistinguishable from our iOS and Android apps.
A very cool frontrunner, as far as I found information, he's been doing it for 9 years. He is very public, he participated in many festivals, hackathons and has given many speeches. Coincidentally yesterday he created his own Telegram channel, where he told me, that he's been working on Wallet for already 6 months and that he moved to London and so on. (This is not advertising, pure coincidence). In Vkontakte he wrote posts very often and quite interesting, and together with his girlfriend he left for Tbilisi almost immediately after the operation started.
Through his Vkontakte profile, I found Ilya Grishin, who together with Arthur makes Wallet. Ilya Grishin was from Tula region and had been working in VK for 5 years. I do not know where he works now, but in the comments he is asked "do you work in Telegram?
I also found a connection with Ivan Gusev (also from VK) through his profile. In December 2021 they were even drinking vodka (I'll attach a photo in the comments), apparently there and decided to move to TON.
The point of the post is that @wallet is created by Vkontakte guys, who have a close and friendly relationship with FS Labs, and they already have outputs to the media and news publishers, at their old place of work. They're all over the place.
Thanks to the above research by Woody of Kingyru:
And from Artur's Telegram channel, sorry for the automatic translation, but a great observation, and at BASED we're blessed that developers are full of fire and love of the product they create, and at the same time very capable full stack developers!
Today I clearly realize how seemingly far from professional activities a person's qualities can influence what he does. A simple example. I have several developers on my team. The first is just beginning to understand what the Internet is. The second one has been brewing in all this for a long time, he is an expert and that's it. The first, with its unprofessionalism, is emotionally attached to the product. He likes what we do, he enjoys every release. The second is in the e-bat from the word at all. Well, that is, finally do not care what we do. Here is the problem - here is the solution, and the rest is none of my business. As a result, the first section of the application has already been delegated. And he develops it little by little. And I have zero worries about what's going on there. I know the person there is just as motivated to make something cool as I am. The second will make it so that then it will have to be redone three more times.Because ideal requirements do not exist in the real world. A person should always be critical of what he is asked to do. Something to add, something to change, something finally to throw out. If a person does not care, if he is not emotionally involved, there will be no criticism. And you should always stand next to this one and make sure that some garbage doesn’t get on the market. And it's kapets as exhausting.I used to think that only hard skills are important in a coder, and software is some kind of shamanism from HR. As usual, life has proven that finally everything is important. And knowledge of PL, and motivation, and even the manner of communication.
I love that he writes freely, same as I do, it helps to clear the thoughts!