The tech world is split over Telegram’s fund-raising campaign
When even the most invested in the crypto bubble are skeptical, you should stay well away. This sounds like the blockchain equivalent of pets.com, the hype inflection point:<p>&gt;“It’s a pitch that sounds good to V.C.s that haven’t participated but makes no sense to people that have been in the space,” said Nick Tomaino, the founder of a virtual currency investment fund, 1confirmation, that didn’t invest in Telegram.<p>&gt;The most obvious reason to be skeptical of the project is that there is not even a prototype — just a 132-page paper promising what the system will look like one day. The Telegram team is promising to release the software late this year or next year.<p>&gt;What’s more, Telegram is promising to do more than any other virtual currency and to fix the intractable problems that have plagued virtual currencies like Bitcoin, such as overcoming the network’s difficulty handling all the transactions that have poured onto the network as it has become more popular.<p>&gt;An analyst at one virtual currency-focused hedge fund, Pantera Capital, wrote a scathing essay noting that the Telegram team has given no evidence that they will be able to solve the problems that have dogged everyone else.<p>&gt;“I cannot, in 132 pages, gain the slightest intuition as to how to go about proving that the hard problems it needs to solve will be solved,” the analyst, Charles Noyes, wrote about the Telegram project on Medium.