Digital Resistance: Pavel Durov Will Use Bitcoins to Bypass Russian Blockade of Telegram

The Russian government is blocking its citizens from accessing the Telegram instant messenger. Its creator, Pavel Durov, is responding to the blockade by declaring that he intends to use bitcoins to finance network administrators who offer VPN services, among other things, that will effectively help bypass the government blockade.

The Russian government has blocked its citizens from accessing the Telegram instant messenger. Its creator, Pavel Durov, is responding to the blockade by declaring that he intends to use bitcoins to finance network administrators who offer VPN services, among other things, that will effectively help bypass the government blockade.

Telegram was founded in 2013 by brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov from St. Petersburg. What sets it apart from many other messengers of this type available on the global market is, above all, its emphasis on the privacy of its users.

While Mark Zuckerberg, responsible for Facebook and the Messenger messenger, is on the carpet in the US Senate in connection with the disclosed, massive leak of user data of his platform, Pavel Durov is running afoul of the Russian authorities in a completely different way – he refuses to give them the keys to encrypt access to the private content of Telegram users.

As a result of Durov’s refusal, last Friday the Russian Roskomnadzor (Federal Telecommunications Supervision Service), on the court’s order, issued a decision to block access to the Telegram messenger from the territory of the Russian Federation.

Pavel Durov naturally disagrees with this decision, declaring in one of his statements:

“I’ve started giving bitcoin grants to companies that run socks5 proxies and VPNs. I’m excited to give millions of dollars this year and hope others will follow suit. I call it the Digital Resistance – a decentralized movement standing up for global freedom and progress.”

However, this is not the end of Durov’s activities in this area. Telegram is behind the largest public financing to date, ICO (Initial Coin Offering), the funds from which are to turn the messenger into an autonomous payment platform based on cryptocurrencies and the blockchain.

This platform can be used, among other things, to finance popular news channels characteristic of Telegram – often anti-government or anti-establishment in their content.

So far, the aforementioned ICO has managed to raise an impressive sum of $1.7 billion.

Unlike Facebook or Messenger, Telegram does not store its users’ data and does not derive its profits from providing external companies with tools for so-called targeted advertising – officially still functioning as a non-profit organization.

“We promised our users 100 percent privacy and we would rather cease our activities than break that promise,” Durov added in another post.

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