So, the Free TON blockchain has been launched.
Let me congratulate everyone who contributed to the launch, starting of course with Nikolay Durov, the author of the TON White Paper.
The following are my comments on the current state.
The Mindset
The blockchain was born with 5B tokens pre-mined. I would agree that the term “pre-mined” might not be 100% correct here, but all of those tokens do exist today. Now the community is actively discussing what is the best way to distribute them. The intention, as I see it, is to spend part of it on developers, promotions, partnerships, and so on, but the vast majority should be somehow given away to the users.
This gives you the wrong mindset: “We have all this treasure in our hands, and now we will give it to others”. I think the proper mindset should be: “we think we deserve 10% (or 20%, or 30%) of the token supply (because we do this and that…), but the rest of the supply is not for us to decide.
What does it mean? It means that the vast majority of the tokens, people should be getting not by convincing us in something, not by winning some contests we organize, not by communicating with us anyhow, but in a pure decentralized, anonymous way.
Is it even possible? I think it is. As the simplest example we might give the tokens to anyone who runs a node. Maybe with some special conditions applied. Yes, there are some technical issues here but, please, bear with me. My point is, to get the tokens this way, someone should not reveal himself, should not communicate with anyone, just contribute some computer resources to the network stability. (If it looks like a concept of masternodes for you, I am not surprised.)
Again, it is only an example. I am sure we can find a better solution. I am only trying to push you to the proper mindset.
(And actually, I would be happy if indeed we share the tokens between the nodes for 1 or 2 or 3 years. Of course, with some conditions applied)
Airdrops
The idea of airdrops comes up many times in the discussions. Once you start thinking about it, you immediately see that the implementation will require identity management. Otherwise, the same user can participate in the distribution many times.
Yes, the airdrops are popular, but they work only inside already existing blockchains. You can airdrop your new ERC20 token to the Ethereum. It will work wonderfully, because every account can participate only once. But you cannot airdrop to accounts that are not yet in the network, unless you control the identity.
But maybe it is OK forcing people to confirm their phone numbers, or Telegram accounts, or anything like it? I do not think so. You will actually completely deanonymize the whole network.
In fact, if the TON network was launched by the Telegram, this would be the only way to go. But with Free TON we have an opportunity not to deanonymize the network. At least, we should try to find a way.