Telegram tries to appease the SEC – no Gram tokens in Messenger | Hacker News Reader

Telegram tries to appease the SEC – no Gram tokens in Messenger

davidgerard.co.uk

29 pointsdavidgerard21 comments

I honestly feel dirty sending media or any kind of files with Telegram. There is no clear business plan setup.

WhatsApp mines metadata/contacts and uses it for ad profiling. Telegram runs on saving. But that can’t scale to the future.

I do hope that whatever this coin is, it success because Telegram is decades ahead in terms of UX/speed than any other messenger.

Except does it even have reasonable end to end encryption?

What I hear from others if that it isn't up to par with encryption standards that Signal and WhatsApp use since Telegram rolls their own. Also, you have to explicitly start a e2e chat with a given person, otherwise it's through, and stored in, Telegram servers.

No if you believe vague handwaving.

Yes if you see they have an open bounty

Well I can't remember specifics but I seem to recall somebody pointing to the flaws of their open bounty that it had very specific rules like not MITM'ing someone or something along those lines. Good end to end encryption shouldn't be able to be MITM'd is the thing.

Regardless of how their encryption is done, if you reregister your phone number you get an sms and you’re in and the complete message history is decrypted. So clearly they have all the keys, otherwise they couldn’t send it to you. Practically it’s not end to end encrypted.

Note that this is the same with many services that claim encryption, for instance Apple.

Does apple have the keys or does iMessage just resend as a regular text if you deregister? End to end means only the two parties involved have the keys period.

For Apple this is with their iCloud backups, storage etc. If you lose the password and your devices it can still be reset.

> because Telegram is decades ahead in terms of UX/speed than any other messenger

I'm curious in what ways you feel Telegram so far ('decades') ahead of others? Honestly in my experience Telegram / WhatsApp / Messenger / Line / Kakao / WeChat (outside China) are all at feature parity

Use Telegram on your phone, tablet, and 2 computers

Now do that same thing with Signal

It's night and day how much better Telegram works when you have multiple devices

Well it's pretty easy as Telegram doesn't encrypt anything at all and stores all contacts and message history server side.

(yes, there is a secret chat feature which is encrypted, but unlike Signal it can only connect with a single client and you can't even choose which one so it's very frustrating in practice when chatting with people who have more than 1 client setup)

> It's night and day how much better Telegram works when you have multiple devices

Bears repeating. Telegram is just so much better than any alternative service if you have multiple devices connected simultaneously. Wire also does poorly.

Now try that with a secret chat.

Telegram makes it easy by cheating with privacy and security.

The main thing I find amazing about the whole Telegram Gram debacle is the magnitude of money they were able to raise. $1.7 billion is just a ridiculous amount of money. Think about how much good that money could have produced if it were invested into useful companies and startups.

I recall reading that most of the money came from Russian sources close to oligarchs. So at least it’s not out of the pocket of retail investors unlike some other blockchain scams. OneCoin seems particularly egregious in this regard: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-50435014

[OP here] no, quite a lot came from American VC firms who wanted "crypto exposure" in late 2017.

Funnily enough, actual crypto VCs thought Grams were nonsense and stayed the hell away.

So in the US at least, Telegram skinned only and precisely the most deserving suckers!

The Russian investors were who I was thinking of with "a robust response to perceived shenanigans." Messing them around is likely unwise, no matter what the sales agreement says.

Still not sure why Telegram cares about the SEC? Russian owners and offshore company, what leverage do US regulators have?

Presumably because if they're not strictly kosher under US law, USD exchanges like Coinbase that try to stay in the good books of the US authorities won't want to touch Telegram's tokens for risk of legal action.

It'd be pretty bad PR for Telegram as a company if the only way to buy their tokens was off shady unregulated exchanges.

They want to be able to spend money in the first-world financial system. They touch the US. A US monetary judgement is widely enforceable. The idea that Telegram can just go "US lol" is not the case.

What does this mean for holders of the illiquid grams?

The SEC's case says "refund the investors." The money may have been spent, however. (That's what the last para, about bank records, is about.)

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