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His analogy is pretty poor IMO. A more realistic analogy is: imagine if a group of people got together and bought a plot of land to mine gold. Then imagine these people told all of their friends that they had a gold mine and were willing to split the output of the gold mine with all of their friends for just $10k/piece.

Now imagine the government said: hey, you don't even know if there's gold on that land, but you're promising your investors that there is. And not only are they telling us we can't sell part of our non-existent gold to our friends, we can't sell it to people ANYWHERE.

Sound completely unfair? Government overstep? We aren't allowed to sell people something that doesn't exist?

I highly recommend that people read the full SEC complaint: https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2019/comp-pr2019-2...

It's pretty obvious that Telegram was simply planning to pump and then dump a bunch of worthless tokens on retail investors.

this is a disingenuous post. The crux of the SEC effort against them is because they created this chain and token during the 2017 gold rush (actually in 2018 but obviously the 2017 bull run is what sparked the interest) and very clearly were trying to cash in. When you create what by all accounts is a security specifically for investment and asset appreciation but don't register it as a security with the SEC, they get a little unhappy. Reading back through some of the articles before this when the SEC intervened Telegram had raised 1.7 billion dollars off this. When you make a few billion off an unregistered security offering, people are going to sit up and take notice.

Regardless of your feelings on the SEC, crypto, et al, it's pretty obvious why the SEC intervened and to see this eventual outcome.

Previously: "SEC halts Telegram's $1.7B token offering" (7 months ago, 201 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21228415

“We allege that the defendants have failed to provide investors with information regarding Grams and Telegram’s business operations, financial condition, risk factors, and management that the securities laws require.”

“Telegram seeks to obtain the benefits of a public offering without complying with the long-established disclosure responsibilities designed to protect the investing public.”

What do they have to hide?

Filing for a US initial public offering requires much writing and some audits, but it's not inherently difficult. Thousands of marginal companies have done IPOs. That's where penny stocks come from. The SEC doesn't evaluate your business model. All they insist is that you don't lie.

Now, if you want to list on an exchange, have your IPO underwritten by a major financial firm, and get institutional investors to buy your stock, there's more to do. But those aren't SEC requirements. You can IPO without them and peddle your own shares.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/rules/other/2018/34-83723.pdf

When reading this article, I got an impression that US government banned Telegram from issuing certain securities, but after reading comments and links I come to the conclusion it's not the case and actually US government just said "it's a security, so you have to follow our securities procedures". Granted, those are not very fun, but that's not what Telegram complaint is - it looks like they tried to sneak a fast one and it didn't work. Well done Telegram marketing for temporarily misleading me, I guess.

As a long time Telegram fan - albeit less than before - I'm happy to see this go:

Why do everyone have to try to create another blockchain?

Why can't companies just be honest enough to either name a price up front or make a freemium model or something?

Hopefully this will cause them to reconsider payments like old WhatsApp or something else that aligns with the interests of the users?

Edit: add second part of a broken sentence. Also: the niche that WhatsApp used to hold (paid, reasonable price, good ux, no ads or spying) still isn't too crowded.

Signal is important and I am happy to recommend it but there's a lot of room still for others who want to enter the small communities/group-of-friends messaging space. The best alternatives I have found so far are: MeWe (pretty close to Google+, but with a business model that isn't based on selling data or ads), Telegram and of course still WhatsApp if you can stomach it.

Eleven paragraphs to say, "I'm taking my ball and going home!"

When the SEC shuts down your unregistered securities offering, saying you saw the project as a literal gold mine is maybe a poor choice of analogy.

To all the people says that they should have just followed security laws, you don't understand the purpose of TON and GRAM. It CAN NOT work if it is a security. The Idea was that Telegram user have a wallet and can store/send GRAMs to each-other Donate/tip and buy stuff. This is not possible/allowed with securities. You can only buy/sell securities form/to regulated exchanges. It completely destroys it's whole use-case.

Anyway they could still do it with some kind of distributed token generation, similar to mining so tokens are generated by the users and not sold. But this obviously would not make the investors happy because they get nothing then.

I've found David Gerard's periodic updates to be useful (on this and other cryptocurrency nonsense/scams/etc). His latest one about Telegram is: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/04/14/news-cooking... Link to the "telegram" tag on his blog: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/tag/telegram/

I wonder how Telegram will subsist and how it’s going to generate money for the longer term.

Since it stores all messages and media by default (except secret chats) on its cloud, the infrastructure costs will keep going up at some pace with time.

It was only a few weeks ago that Telegram announced that it has 400 million monthly active users.

How long can Pavel Durov’s wealth keep it alive and how much of his wealth will he continue to commit to the platform as time passes? The platform is surely synonymous with him (at least from his perspective), and there are millions of people who need it and trust it (it’s the only app that large groups of protestors in Hong Kong could safely use).

I like Telegram as an app and service but have reasonable doubt of how it’s gonna be sustainable. WhatsApp had 400m MAU and $1m monthly cost in 2013 before acquisition, Telegram reached same MAU recently and avg cost is 4x or more. Founder had about $300m when forced to exit VK. If my math is right, he can’t really keep running this all free much longer.

The graphic at the top and the first few paragraphs come off as extremely patronizing, if not propagandistic. Then he goes off on a rant about sovereignty to cover for TON's lack of legitimacy.

Not a good look for Telegram, and good riddance to TON. I realize this blockchain garbage is probably never going to die but it is good to see the real world doing what it does best.

I don't exactly understand how US court could forbid Telegram anything. Yeah-yeah, there is an "explanation", but I have hard time buying into it. USA can have far more power than it should, but by no means it's all-powerful, there is a ton of shit in the world that USA may not like, but it exists anyway and even manages to have USA-based customers through some shady as fuck, absolutely nonsensical, but still somehow legal schemes.

So I'm reading this as "our plan has failed for whatever reason, so now we are getting rid of it, while pretending that it is a very hard decision for us and somebody else entirely is to blame".

> Unfortunately, we – the 96% of the world’s population living elsewhere – are dependent on decision makers elected by the 4% living in the US.

Calling your bluff on this one. Other world powers are available if that's really your argument.

It turns out that if you want customers in the US, then yes you have to follow US law.

> Imagine that several people put their money together to build a gold mine.

This is what's wrong about what they're trying to do.

TON is selling tokenized access to the supposed gold mine. The gold is the TON product which is just a chat software.

I'm glad regulators ban it. It's a scam.

You need to look at the gold, the business. The BNB Binance token could be a better token. At least, their business has better prospect. I would stay away from these tokens. They're just security masquerading as crypto. They're likely scams.

Maybe I don't get it but the gov didn't ban TON. It banned the sale of said tokens. Nothing stops them from further developing the tech with VC money.

Just wait until governments actually start attacking cryptocurrencies. They're dumb and slow but when they finally catch on, the game is up.

All these stupid glorified link lists have never been backed by anything other than speculation and eventually market forces will always win.

If you sell shares in a gold mine it is a security. All SEC wanted is for TON to be treated like a security, which is exactly what shares in a gold mine are.

If they really cared about decentralization, they would still release the protocol and software even if they cannot profit from it. I'm tired of greedy cryptocurrency advocates putting on airs of social responsibility.

It looks as if Durov wants to distance himself and Telegram from the cryptocurrency subproject, in connection with the latest claims of regulatory authorities.

OK so they built this great blockchain and you can't continue but where is the link to the source?

[0] https://test.ton.org/

Their first mistake was being subject to US jurisdiction.

Admins, please fix this clickbait title. Compare to the TechCrunch story that's titled "Telegram abandons its TON blockchain platform".

So... why not just leave that feature out of the US versions in the app store and everything is fine. Or am I missing something?

> blockchain platform called TON and a cryptocurrency we were going to name Gram

And no one in marketing said anything about naming your platform and curency after units of mass. How come no one raised the SEO issue?

This was inevitable after the SEC got involved.

just another crypto pyramid scheme

...and nothing of value was lost.

Is KiK still fighting SEC? This can't be good news for them as well.

So do people get refunds...?

The opening image looks like the start of a scam: https://telegra.ph/file/c6f281b62b5909d0c5bad.png

Group of faceless people against a scenic vista, arms around and supporting each other, under the flag of the "product", facing a gold mine that apparently self-produces gold and a sun that just so happens to be shining light on all that wonderful gold... with a dog(?) chasing a golden butterfly.

I've never used telegram before but I think the CEO should distance himself a bit more.

This is good for the environment.

They are basically blocking USD competitors. This makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

Update: The SEC statement makes more sense than my original comment :)