Oleg Andreev's Channel

Consume content

These two words embody many things that are wrong in technology, business and our society. Both words are forbidden in my company.

Do I still need to elaborate?

Abstract concepts such as "user" / "consumes" / "content" used routinely strip the things we love doing from all humanity and sense. Once a year I listen to Apple engineers explaining how you can put your content in a glassy rounded box. I sigh and remember how Steve Jobs was talking about things that matter: people reading, artists drawing, musicians composing. Things made sense and products were made with purpose.

When we use such newspeak at work, we focus on the form and forget about the meaning. We stop communcating with clients and start living in our own world of platonic ideas. Results of such work do not make life better. At best, they produce temporary excitement and fading attention.

Be precise, seek meaning, be human.

Дети и взрослые

Дожил до того времени, когда со своими десятилетними детьми общаться интереснее, чем со многими взрослыми.

💠 Golang Engineer Position at Tonkeeper

I'm looking for a talented Go engineer to work on exciting services at Tonkeeper. You'll be part of TON API team that builds the leading infrastructure in TON network. Our mission is make crypto useful, easy to use and safe for the mass audience.

We are full-stack product company that builds sophisticated technology towards unique and useful products for millions of users. We have pioneered features that stand out not only in TON, but in the whole crypto industry: transaction emulation, high-level transaction graph aggregation, open source payment tech, developer tools, and breakthrough Gasless Relay service and Tonkeeper Battery.

We work as a single team, all our products and infrastructure reinforce and support each other. While working on TON API services, you will see your direct contribution towards user experience and commercial success.

We require: exceptional attention to detail and work ethic, experience in building and maintaining complex systems in Go. Experience in payments tech would be a plus, but not a strong requirement.

We offer: we are some of the best distributed company in the world — we pay fair salaries, have an options plan, but most importantly we work all across the globe and support our team in every way in terms of travel, meetups, immigration, legal support etc. We build our team the same way we approach our mission: make the world more economically safe and connected.

👉 Please reach me out: oleg@tonkeeper.com

🇭🇰 Гонконгский аэропорт — худший из всех, где мне приходилось торчать ночью — нет слип-подов, очень холодно и дует везде, прикольных местных жрален нету, почти все ланжи не круглосуточные, а тот, что оказался круглосуточным — без удобных кресел. Это уровень провинциального аэропорта в огромном городе, который вроде как претендует на статус угасающей мировой столицы.

Ad complexity and differentiation

Let's take a look at three ads in London sharing the same telephone booth in a 5-second rotation cycle. Notice how they differ in numeric complexity.

The first one hardly specifies any parameters. It sells good vibes that you can get in a nearby chain pub (just 134 meters away, typed in all caps to emphasize insignificance of that figure). This product competes with many other ways you can spend you time and focuses on purely subjective feel to win your attention.

The second one specifies two parameters: a lottery pool and a deadline. It sells an idea that you have a chance to win a truckload of dough. In a way it also sells feel-good product, just like the first one, and the number is deliberately odd to make it look more real.

The third one is interesting: it burdens the reader with 10+ important pieces of data. The main one is monthly cost over the first six months. It is surrounded by all sorts of caveats and disclaimers: deadline, upfront payments, trade-in savings and annual adjustments.

This ad is horrifying. Why is it so different from the other two and why people would put up with it? This is because it sells a financial product around an expensive necessity. You don't need to be reminded why you need a phone. You already decided to join the exquisite camp of iThings. The only thing this ad is trying to achieve is to lure you into a subscription contract because you don't have spare £866 to buy the gadget outright. This financial product is competing only with the similar offerings, equally loaded with fine print, earning thin margins.

Ultra-competitive business is boring. Differentiation is everything.

Поговорили с Ильей про анархию: https://t.me/ilyabirman_channel/10758

Последние N лет пишу в личной и рабочей переписке "щас" вместо "сейчас". Сегодня обратил внимание, что создан новый паттерн: ето/етот вместо это/т — потому что не нужно искать мизинцем букву "э" в три раза дольше, чем остальные буквы.

🗿Gitbox source code (2010-2013) is now available on Github under permissive license: github.com/oleganza/gitbox

If anyone wants to submit a patch or maintain the project, please open an issue on Github.

Please note that this is not a username, but a plain text description with a highlighted link. This is a scammer with a hidden phone number and no username.

Tonkeeper Pro delivers yet another cool "multi-" feature. Now you can keep one recovery phrase for a billion accounts. Outsiders do not see any connection between accounts (unless you send moneys between them).

🏴‍☠️ Who are the cypherpunks?

Almost exactly 30 years ago, the famous cypherpunk Timothy C. May wrote The Cyphernomicon, an FAQ for the cypherpunk movement, where he predicted most of what has unfolded over the following decades. There he mentioned the famous "four horsemen of infocalypse": four recurring reasons to attack private communication tools: drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists, and pedophiles. Yesterday, we witnessed yet another invocation of this meme that resonated around the world.

There is an obvious tension we face as a society since the invention of telegraph. Our lives are almost fully digitized and we want all this data to remain securely under our control. At the same time, police is in business of chasing criminals and always seek to overcome all obstacles in the most efficient manner. Traditionally, the police had an unlimited access to mainstream communication channels by default with some bureaucrats in the mix to safeguard the collected data against leaks and abuse (with mixed success). Cypherpunks movement started with an idea that personal computers would give the citizens protection by default and then the police would have to come over to the individuals and seek the data.

It is true, that there are criminals out there and we need the police to do their best to catch them. It is also true that unrestricted submission of private lives to the police gives room to all sorts of abuse. The mission of cypherpunks is to push for removal of single points of failure from all the technology that empowers private communication and markets. Today we live in the superposition of both regimes: the total surveillance over centralized infrastructure and the anarchy of decentralization. As Snowden demonstrated in 2013, every communication hub is wiretapped and all traffic is collected for later decryption and analysis. At the same time, 2013 was when Bitcoin mainstream adoption began.

Thanks to cryptocurrencies people have a strong incentive to take care of their own cryptographic keys — a truly tedious task in the age of PGP mail. Fast forward to 2022-2024 and we have TON, a mass-market blockchain network with millions of people joining every month. TON users authorize with decentralized apps with a decentralized authentication protocol TON Connect. Wallet apps such as @wallet and Tonkeeper offer the most friendly and thought-out experience among all crypto wallets. Telegram itself, which is a fully centralized service, began decentralizing ownership of social assets and authentication via Fragment and designs its ad revenue sharing model on top of TON.

The Cypherpunks from 90s may all be retired, but the new generation of hackers stands on their shoulders and continues building the future for the entire world. 🌏

🔥W5 is live

W5 standard is now final and available in all TON wallets. The awesome new features made possible with it are going to transform the user experience of decentralized products forever. The first features made possible with W5 — Gasless transactions and Battery — are already making TON the absolute leader in terms of friendliness to newcomers. More will follow this year.

In August 2023 I kicked off the project by collecting input from the fellow TON developers and spending a single weekend in isolation to write the first draft of the contract. Then Tonkeeper team picked it up, improved the code, added tests, collected more feedback and the ball started rolling. It was a truly open collaboration of developers from different projects: we've been tirelessly testing the standard off everyone's ideas, wishes and bikesheds, tuning it at every step. By November 2023 we had a working and optimized prototype and proudly presented it to everyone at the Gateway conference in Dubai (see the video above).

Beginning 2024 we've released a beta version to try out Battery and Gasless at scale and worked with TON Core team on polishing the standard to make it suitable for massive public release. Together with TOP and TON Foundation we've coordinated adoption of the standard by all major wallets and infrastructure providers in TON.

Finally, on July 25, 2024 the standard went live. We all have sown the seed for the beautiful garden of innovations that will bloom in the following months.

Massive decentralization

TON is great because we can do two things that we couldn't do before:

1. Make decentralized apps scale to billions of users.
2. Make decentralized apps Just Work™.

A month ago my team at Tonkeeper launched 😴Tonkeeper Battery. Today we launched ⚡️Gasless and wallet standard 🔥W5 (in beta for now).

These features revolutionize onboarding to crypto. People can receive their stablecoin or an NFT and use it right away, without going through ridiculous exchange interfaces and investing in coins they don't care about just yet.

Got an airdrop? Charge the Battery with it, boom, you can trade it.

Got an NFT? Charge the Battery with a bank card, boom, you can put it up for an auction.

Got paid in USDT? There is no step two: you can use it right away. Fees are paid from your USDT balance.

Later, when you discover TON universe and decide to buy some TONs — go ahead. But no one is forcing you to do that before you want to. Because TON stands for freedom, dignity and excellence.

How to use group chats in Telegram

Sometimes you need to summon 3+ people in a group chat for a discussion. I've been using Telegram since it's launch in 2013 and since then I have accumulated over 600 group chats. Most of those were added while working on Tonkeeper in the past 2.5 years. When people use group chats incorrectly, we all suffer from the consequences.

Here's how to use group chats:

1. Make everyone an admin. This will allow others invite more people, change picture and settings later without bothering you.

2. While making everyone an admin, do not check "remain anonymous". The person won't be able to untick it themselves ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

3. Immediately turn off "history hidden from new members". This will bite you when more people are coming in and miss out on important bits of information. In my practice keeping history secret was useful in grand total of three group chats in the past 2 years.

This advice works for 99% of family- and work-related chats. Of course, if you are starting a large community, or discuss something extra-sensistive, you'd pay extra attention to the settings and tune them to your situation.

PS. I wish Telegram added a quick toggle for that behavior somewhere on the chat setup screen.

Blockchain business is like Formula One

Building apps on a blockchain is very much like the top-tier racing sport, F1. And it's not about speed, performance or running in circles.

You see, F1 is a technical sport between some of the best engineers on the planet, and the smartest one wins the trophies. In F1, like in real life, there is a stack of technical regulations saying what you can and cannot do. If you break the regulations — you are disqualified. If you meet the regulations — try hard to reach the fourth, third, or maybe even a second place.

But in order to win your job is to find the gap — the one where the regulations mean one thing, but actually say a different one. That's where the true geniuses figure out extra power and downforce to be added to otherwise excellent engineering expected from everyone in the paddock.

Blockchains and Fintech are somewhat like this. You don't want to break the regulations, but you also don't want to make a complicit product — blockchain part adds more overhead and instability to whatever traditional piece of software you are doing. Blockchain products are used in the middle area: where people need to break away from corrupt status quo imposed by old order, achieve personal freedom and take personal responsibility. All while using it wisely and not get disqualified.

In F1 only the top of the top need to find the gap. In blockchain everyone has to play this game to stay afloat. Airdrops instead of ICOs. NFTs instead of securities. Self-custody apps instead of banks. Zero-knowledge protocols over cloud computing.

You don't disrupt the world head-on. You work around the obstacles by building a better way.

Channel name was changed to «Oleg Andreev's Channel»

— Цель вашего визита в Кампучию?

Ушная сера

Проходя мимо музея восковых фигур в Мадриде, неожиданно узнал, что «сера» пришла к нам из латыни.

Неделя закончилась и слава богу.

– день рождения второй дочери в начале недели,
– день рождения первой дочери в конце недели,
– сдал на права в городе, где все водят и ходят как идиоты.