
Telegram tries to appease the SEC – no Gram tokens in Messenger - davidgerard
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/01/11/telegram-tries-to-appease-the-sec-no-grams-in-messenger/
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nikivi
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.

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giancarlostoro
Except does it even have reasonable end to end encryption?

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webboynews
No if you believe vague handwaving.

Yes if you see they have an open bounty

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tinus_hn
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.

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giancarlostoro
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.

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

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lalaland1125
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.

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pavlov
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](https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-50435014)

~~~
davidgerard
[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.

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

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lawtalkinghuman
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.

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redwood
What does this mean for holders of the illiquid grams?

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davidgerard
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.)

