Telegram reveals users IP addresses, CEO confirms

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In August 2024, Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested dramatically at Le Bourget airport near Paris.

At the time, speculation about whether he had been arrested or turned himself in was rife. The rumor mill went into overdrive when Durov was released on bail for $5.5 million on September 5.

While the answers to exactly what happened may never be known, Durov has shed light on some other questions, and they reveal that Telegram is not a safe tool for criminals, as some had assumed. He confirmed that Telegram’s process for disclosing IP addresses when legally requested had been in place since 2018.

“Whenever we received a properly formed legal request via relevant communication lines, we would verify it and disclose the IP addresses/phone numbers of dangerous criminals. This process had been in place long before last week,” Durov said.

Telegram is not safe for criminals, and neither is Bitcoin

Telegram is used by drug and people traffickers, organized crime networks, terrorists, and other undesirables. Until now, many have been operating under the illusion that the messaging app is fully encrypted and cannot be penetrated by authorities. It’s yet another misunderstanding of a fringe technology and the widespread misunderstanding of how encryption works and what its limitations are.

Something similar happened in the early days of Bitcoin when Ross Ulbricht encouraged people worldwide to use it to buy and sell illegal contraband on his Silk Road website. Just as Ulbricht’s fundamental misunderstanding of what Bitcoin is and how it works led him to life in prison, many criminals who thought the Telegram app gave them carte blanche to do as they please may soon face similar fates.

The law always applies, even with distributed networks

While Telegram is a centralized entity that can be handed legal orders, it must comply with them; many don’t yet understand that the same can happen to so-called ‘decentralized’ networks.

In reality, blockchains like BTC are far less decentralized than the marketing hype portrays, and a few large mining companies control the majority of hash power on the network.

What does this mean from a legal standpoint? Those same miners can be issued valid legal notices and must comply with them. This may involve refusing to process transactions from blacklisted wallets, freezing coins, and even reassigning them via Digital Asset Recovery (DAR) orders.

While some Telegram data is truly end-to-end encrypted and cannot be decrypted even by the company, all Bitcoin transactions are visible on the public blockchain in clear text. Encryption is fundamental to Bitcoin’s digital signatures, hash functions, and private/public key pairs. Still, all transaction timestamps are visible and traceable by anyone who cares to investigate.

Bitcoin can also be used for secure communications

While BTC advocates promote Bitcoin as nothing other than digital gold to be stored for future value, it is much more than that. Once scaled to millions of transactions per second, Bitcoin will be used for secure, peer-to-peer communications many dream of.

How will this work? Users could send each other messages encrypted with their private keys so that only the recipients could read them after using the associated public keys to decrypt them.

Furthermore, the distributed nature of the Bitcoin blockchain would make it virtually impossible for any third party to censor messages. While a timestamped record of the fee paid to relay the message would be visible on the public ledger, little else would be publicly known about it, making the blockchain a truly immutable and private communication layer.

When combined with complementary technology like IPv6, privacy could be enhanced even further. IPv6 allows each device to have a unique IP address (or even more than one), making it difficult to pinpoint the device(s) to specific messages should they be intercepted. This would have hugely positive implications for dissident journalists, political activists, and others.

Those disappointed by Telegram should look to build a more secure, private messaging app on the only scalable version of Bitcoin—BSV. However, it is not for crime—Bitcoin leaves a timestamped record of the metadata associated with messages. There’s no way to avoid getting caught when involved in the type of heinous activity many on Telegram were mixed up with.

Those interested in knowing more about all the wonderful things the Bitcoin network can be used for should subscribe to CoinGeek.com. Blockchain entrepreneurs are working on some cutting-edge apps in cybersecurity, supply chains, and decentralized media, and we’re here to report on all of it!

Watch: Adaptable blockchain system to tackle real-world problems