🗿 Telegram Opens Its Black Box

GM. Happy Tuesday. It's officially Fall, and crypto has been quietly creeping back up. 

In other news, Sam Altman posted a blog claiming “superintelligence” is coming within just a few thousand days. So we got that going for us, which is nice. 

We hope we don’t have any organized criminal readers using Telegram, cause your time is up. 

Without Further Ado. ☕ *knuckle cracks* ☕ Let’s get into it.

Telegram Opens Its Black Box 

Telegram, crypto’s favorite encrypted messaging app, has flipped on its long standing stance of complete privacy and anonymity.

What exactly is the change?

Telegram will provide users’ IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities in response to valid legal requests, according to Chief Executive Officer Pavel Durov.

Why is this happening?

Last month, Pavel Durov was arrested and charged with a number of crimes. Icymi, here’s some of the charges brought against him:

• Complicity in the organized gang distribution of images of minors of a child pornographic nature

• Drug trafficking

• Organized gang fraud

• Criminal conspiracy to commit crimes or misdemeanors

In response to the ongoing case, which we really don’t know much about, Pavel announced the change yesterday. We don’t want to speculate on the criminal side, that’s not our expertise. If you want to read more into the criminal activity on telegram, here’s a comprehensive piece.  

Why should I care? I’m not a high level criminal. 

These charges are serious of course. We DO NOT condone gang orgs doing child porn. But we also understand that this is about more than just this case. 

The concept of a CEO being arrested for activities and content on the platform he manages being enforceable is a very dangerous precedent for crypto and all of the internet.  

Are there bad people on telegram? Certainly. Should every CEO with a social platform be imprisoned because there are bad people on it? We don’t think so. Such drastic measures will probably lead to less collaboration between tech and government, not more. 

It’s also concerning that a CEO can trade user data access for personal or company troubles. We aren’t arguing that authorities shouldn’t be able to have access to information that could stop terrorists. But we are saying that you should be careful with any information on a centralized platform, even if it is a “black box”.

How could this affect growth? 

Telegram’s growth can without a doubt be directly attributed to its assumed privacy and anonymity. Everyone reading this already knows that. So if the dominoes start to fall and that black box gets shattered, do you think a significant amount of users will leave telegram? 

What We’re Reading

• Altman predicts that humanity may achieve superintelligence within just a few thousand days

• When robots can't riddle: What puzzles reveal about the depths of our own minds

• In Russia, some crypto miners go underground - literally

• Bitget predicts TON ‘de-Telegramization’ in the next 2 years

• Only 43% of users qualified for Hamster Kombat’s season 1 airdrop

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