The wishing of failure isn't great, my personal wish would be for the Telegram people to learn the errors of their ways rather than necessarily completely fail.

The wishing of failure isn't great, my personal wish would be for the Telegram people to learn the errors of their ways rather than necessarily completely fail. Overstated claims of privacy could get people killed if they trust them so it is a serious issue. Telegram have an arrogance that is inappropriate in security/crypto protocol development. Most crypto protocols, even those developed by experts initially have problems (at the protocol design level even ignoring the implementation bugs) which is why even experts only come up with new ones when there isn't any existing one with the required properties and even then reuse as much existing battle tested technology as possible and submit it to worldwide evaluation tentatively and nervously. The competition was set up in a way that clearly excluded most threats and was either another sign that Telegram didn't understand most of the threat space OR that they did and wanted to rig the competition to be unwinnable while claiming that it validated the security in some way. So at least until yesterday Telegram were arrogant and either completely clueless about crypto protocols or PR bullshitters with some clue and a poor protocol. They need to get a clue AND drop the arrogance to get support from me. Until these things happen Telegram are a danger that people should be warned about and not regard as secure. I am also a neutral party with no relationship with either party.