They primarily want it shut down because it has enabled citizen journalism that they can’t control and that is a threat to status quo. Not because people can sell drugs, do money laundering, organize terrorism or share cp on there, that’s just the excuse for it. Like it has been for every outreach against privacy and freedom of information.

Ukraine and palestine have probably been the main motivator for this push against telegram. Like Russians can share it’s view of the war to almost a billion eye pairs. Western media and adjacent political power and institutions have awoken to the fact and find it untenable when they can’t enforce media and information blockade on people. It’s not even about the western population since telegram is much more popular in the third world that it’s in the west.

My biggest problem is that everything goes under the ECB, not to the national level central banks. The “they can see where and how much did you buy” is mute point, since they alredy could do that. And it’s even worse when there are private companies that sell your info for profit.

it’s more like the bits are representing physical cash, but in the future the physical cash will represent the bits. Most money is digital even now and even the physical cash is mostly just paper money, not precious metals, not even the coins probably have their worth in metals, so it makes sense.

They will try it again in like two to three years from now. This time they will just do a under the radar and somewhat diluted version of it.