Alternative: telegram launches anyway, and the SEC does... what exactly? Bans them from being traded on US exchanges? It would be impossible to stop the software, just as they can’t stop bitcoin.
Refers Telegram to the DoJ for criminal prosecution, which results in bank accounts being frozen, any SAFT holders (or anyone else) who sold their Grams being on the hook to the buyers, and the seizure of Telegram’s assets in America and anywhere else with a mutual prosecution treaty, which covers much of the EU.
At the point of wilfully defying a court order to sell securities, it becomes fraud and potentially money laundering.
Also, a big part of their target audience of Gram early holders is in USA, so they also obviously care about the legality of these transactions. For them it's not sufficient to have some technical workaround that enables them to sell the tokens they have, they need a solution that allows them to do so legally.
Why are you spreading this lie? It’s very well known by now that Telegram was primarily developed in St. Petersburg, in a building shared with VKontakte.
https://twitter.com/bershidsky/status/910169626989953024
https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/910186197598838784
https://theoutline.com/post/2348/what-isn-t-telegram-saying-...
>While Durov comes from Russia, he is in exile
Durovs exile is very fleeting, normally you wouldn't visit the country you're in exile from... https://tjournal.ru/tech/52954-durov-back-in-ussr https://lenta.ru/news/2017/03/20/durov/
I should also add the obligatory note that Telegram has shipped obvious backdoors in the past allowing them to selectively decrypt secret chats https://habr.com/en/post/206900/
lol @ the downvoting TON bagholders
They can sanction individual directors (ban them from holding office in any US corporation)
They can freeze any US assets
They can ban any US companies transacting with them
I feel sure that the US would finds ways of shutting it down, but the idea of just going ahead with their plans and maybe block the US from their network would be legally and politically interesting to watch.
Isn't it true that the whole crypto world dreams of mass adoption? Well guess what - institutional money would greatly appreciate a valid S-1/F-1 filing in EDGAR.
That’s very naive approach. Just because technology is solid, doesn’t mean that government is going to give up. Remember, governments are only entities in the world that are allowed to seize all your assets, throw you in jail and sometime kill you.
People in tech tend to overestimate value of technology and underestimate power of regulations and governments (I only realized it myself few years ago). I feel that we need to update this xkcd, to talk about regulations - https://xkcd.com/538/
It seems impossible when you think about it for a little while, but when someone thinks long and hard about it because it's their full-time government job, maybe someone finds a way.