If you have ever wondered what happened to the Telegram blockchain and token. Well, it seems they have moved into the shady world of name-flipping.
Telegram has been on a roll over the weekend with updates, and normally I just mark it as read. I really don't care what updates things do, so long as they don't break my shit.
However, instead of marking read I opened one and was about to exit which would have the same effect but "Collectible Usernames" caught my eye.
All of a sudden I recalled they use to have a blockchain, and obviously being on Hive I figured let's for once open the update article.
The update section about Collectible Usernames
Telegram seems to have made a separate platform called Fragment, which then uses their blockchain TON under the hood.
I assume this is done in a almost agnostic fashion, Telegram would not change too much of how it works instead it will interface with TON and by doing that Telegram itself can easily disable or enable features deemed wrong by any government.
I guess that all just goes without saying, so sorry I brought it up. Sheesh.
Trying to find out more about the creation of these usernames though, Fragment merely has this on their about page, where they at least indicate that it is not just a free for anyone to park situation.
Telegram chose to implement its first round of available collectibles as catchy and secure usernames usable within its fast-growing ecosystem. Other services are free to integrate collectibles to unlock cross-platform, permanent perks for their users.
Seemingly they have generated general but yet "brand" names to be bought on the platform.
Unless they have a deal with some big holders of Doge or I don't know went on a forum or however that thing assumes governance.
It does make a person think that any and all Crypto names can be sold by telegram wether they have community governance or not.
Obviously arguing that they can't list the word Hive becomes tricky just because you can't say that Hive as a name itself can really belong to anything in particular. You do need to be specific.
Doge however is pretty unique or even BTC, Ethereum literally any other coin but Hive.Anyway hardly matters.
In their "What is a collectible" page though is where it gets interesting:
Auctioning Basic Usernames It will soon become possible for owners to auction their existing basic Telegram usernames to the public – doing so will permanently convert them into collectibles. https://fragment.com/about#what-is-a-collectible
I guess Telegram is old enough to not have much username camping anymore, but announcing that normal usernames will be able to be sold will probably make quite a few farms* happy.
Farms as in bots, scammers, milkers etc. You know those places with 1000's of fake numbers out to getcha
From their they just mention that essentially these names can then be used as aliases, I assume status symbols to some. Mainly though they are just URLs which you can direct to anywhere within the telegram ecosystem.
Possibly that is also only for now. Having these "collectibles" is merely a step towards say having a top level domain ending in .t.me for Telegram.
That means that probably the plan here is for this to be an alternative to something like Unstoppable Domains.
Now I don't know much about DNS etc but I am thinking that Hive actually can already do that.
Just speaking out my arse here but it seems to me that all you really need is to be able to tell the DNS (computer thingy that finds out where a URL leads to) , well where to go.
With that Hive already stores all our shit, so if it had that ability built in for any username to be used as say a penderis.hive URL and then either allows me to point it to a datastore or to simply post the instructions for how to render content say via json and posts then Hive itself would be not just an unstoppable domain but also a pretty unstoppable datastore.
Yeah yeah I know IPFS... suck a dick. IPFS to me seems more like a oh we won't bother you yet scenario. Pretty sure they can take your shit and chuck it in the street anytime they like.
When it comes to text, and specifically STRING content then Hive is truly unstopable and our usernames are truly collectible.