I assume you still had access to your old phone and could approve the transfer from it. If not, then your phone number is your password, which is even worse, in my opinion (it’s basically public information).

With my limited knowledge of cryptography, this is how I understand it:

The distinction to make is that the user’s password is not the encryption key - it only gives access to the key. So even if the user has the same password on a new device, there would be no way to decrypt the data without the original key.

In order to maintain full privacy, data has to be encrypted on device before sending it through any server (whether to another participant in a chat, or for backup). This means that the encryption key has to be on device.

If that key was copied over to a location not controlled by the user (e.g. Telegram server), then that location would have access to the key and can decrypt any data encrypted by that key. In the same vein, if a user loses their phone then that encryption key must be lost, so encrypted data cannot be decrypted on a new phone.

Which means that the only way that Telegram can provide the chats on a new phone (when the user has no access to the old phone) is if they have access to the encryption key and can provide it to the new phone.

well that was… something

Hyperion is the first book in a 4-book series: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion.

If I recall correctly, the first two were supposed to be one book, but were split to two because the publisher wanted more money or something to that effect. So finishing the first book leaves you effectively hanging with a lot of unresolved threads.

By itself, Hyperion seems like a collection of loosely related stories in the same universe. But the rest of the books in the series answer a lot (if not all, read it a long time ago) of the question and threads in the first book.

I can’t go into much detail without [mildly] spoiling the series, so I’ll just say this: the story is told by different speakers, but it all ties in pretty well.

I’m not sure where ConnectBot stores its keys, so I can’t help with the ‘transferring to termux’ part :-)

What I can tell you is that you should be able to generate and use SSH keys directly in Termux. Here’s a quick guide on how to do it: https://gist.github.com/evandrocoan/f503188587587d7b1d1ba8746c9c6107

I’ve switched phones recently, and I haven’t set up my keys yet, but as far as I recall I went through a similar process a few years ago to set up SSH keys on my phone (I haven’t tried the steps in that article myself).