Am I the only one concerned about giving even more information to Facebook about my spending?
Facebook plans cryptocurrency debut
171–180 of 345 posts
Re: Facebook plans cryptocurrency debut
#172Can anyone explain what the point of a pegged cryptocurrency is? Since you are dependent on the issuing entity to honour the stated peg, why not just have your balance be an entry in a regular database maintained by that entity? What exactly does the blockchain gain you here? One thing it does _not_ get you is censorship resistance. If the central authority wants to take away coins from a wallet, all it needs to do i…
On paper, you're basically entirely right. Stablecoins including FB are all smokescreens to sell managing fiat on an internal database for you with "blockchain" wrapped around it. This project and stablecoins in general have nothing to do with cryptocurrencies. With that said i can tell you at least one solid reason why any issuer would do it. At a bare minimum they can earn overnight on the holdings since stablecoin…
>That's a regulatory loophole though one could imagine the US would start complaining about if this really took off.
Seriously. I don't see the fundamental difference in a digital widget that is used to transfer value backed by hard currency from transferring money between accounts by wire. It's like leaving a box on your doorstep by drone instead of truck and saying you're not delivering packages because the mechanism is different.
This sounds to me like they're opening bank accounts and debit payment services by a different name with the added bonus they can devalue your account at will and you have no FICA protection or chargeback mechanism.
Re: Facebook plans cryptocurrency debut
#173I don’t think this will be particularly successful. We already have a variety of ways to send money. Yes Facebook is big, but so is, say, Apple and it’s Apple Pay functionality. I don’t know what use case this solves that isn’t fairly competitive already although it will probably have a bitcoin style valuation bubble. It’s also sort of capped in its utility. If it overshadows national government currencies... the gov…
> it will probably have a bitcoin style valuation bubble
It's a stable coin so it can't have such a bubble. It's main utility will probably only be cross border p2p payments for countries that allow it.
Re: Facebook plans cryptocurrency debut
#174Ultimately, the goal seems to be "one currency to rule them all." The peg may prove necessary only initially, to gain confidence. Unlike most other currencies, Facebook's new currency will be readily available to and easily usable by virtually everyone everywhere, and it will likely have very low transaction costs -- much lower than those of most financial intermediaries. You will be able to use it as easily from New…
> Why use traditional nation-backed money when you can click a button on your phone instead? Wait, you can't do that with your nation-backed currency? In Australia, I can literally open my bank app and send money to any Australian account with just a phone number and they receive it in 30 seconds or so with no fees... Yeah, international transfers are a little harder, but for domestic transfers it's super easy.
Here in the US, moving money is a huge PITA. Unless you both bank at the same bank, money usually takes days to move. And banking at the same bank is no guarantee it will happen faster.
Private party transactions up into the thousands of dollars (say, buying a used car) generally require cash.
It's incredibly archaic.
Re: Facebook plans cryptocurrency debut
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that doesn't really answer the question being asked. If the cryptocurrency is completely controlled by a centralized authority who has absolute rights over the system, why bother with the technical and cognitive hurdles of using a blockchain? A standard ledger in a centralized database is more than adequate for that task, and much easier to maintain.
I responded to a few comments in kind, and I’d say it’s impossible to answer in a vacuum without knowing the actual token use case/function. Generically, we have seen instances where centralized ledgers/databases are manipulated and permit double spend. Even in the case of multi billion dollar publicly traded companies going Private, during due diligence we have seen upward of double the issued shares of stock than a…
Plenty of blockchains have allowed double spending as well due to errors in coding of either the clients, the blockchain implementation itself, or due to faulty contracts.
Re: Facebook plans cryptocurrency debut
#176[deleted]
Re: Facebook plans cryptocurrency debut
#177Okay, so like, I'll defend them on this in principle. That said, can you address, like, you know, the myriad scandals you have BEFORE doing something ELSE? It's a bad look.
Do they really need to address scandals? My understanding was that there's always some ruckus but it seems to slide right off their backs in a matter of months.
Re: Facebook plans cryptocurrency debut
#178Can anyone explain what the point of a pegged cryptocurrency is? Since you are dependent on the issuing entity to honour the stated peg, why not just have your balance be an entry in a regular database maintained by that entity? What exactly does the blockchain gain you here? One thing it does _not_ get you is censorship resistance. If the central authority wants to take away coins from a wallet, all it needs to do i…
They're doing it to skirt GDPR laws. When GDPR passed, all users were automatically opted out of personal data sharing, targeted marketing, etc. With ZuckCoin, they're going to pay users a small amount of coins to use the site, but in order for users to be eligible for that they'll be required to opt into all of the personal data sharing stuff. And since it will be considered a monetary transaction, Facebook will be required to keep the data from every transaction for 10 years for tax purposes. People won't even be able to ask that Facebook delete their data because they'll be required to store it for 10 years.
edit: If you want to listen to the explanation in more detail, Meanhash explained it on a recent episode of the Hashr8 podcast: https://h4shr8.libsyn.com/meanhash
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/bx9dik/face...
Re: Facebook plans cryptocurrency debut
#179Facebook's blockchain will most likely be a consortium of corporate validators. In this case you could say that the blockchain is "just" a normal distributed append-only hash-linked ledger with public verifiable records, but nowadays the more concise term for that is "blockchain."
Your definition is missing the "block" from blockchain and it's also missing a concensus protocol.
Re: Facebook plans cryptocurrency debut
#180I will revisit this thread in 2021 just to see how wrong everyone was. FB has billions of users that interact with its product everyday. People who make plans, attend events, split all sort of bills. A borderless stablecoin will be a gamechanger. It can fuel commerce but above that it will kill many middlemen and rightly so.
Yeah, I can't wait until FB starts selling my entire transaction history to anyone that wants it to pay for this magical free service.
Also, PayPal already tried to do this 20 years ago. It won't happen.