241–250 of 345 posts
Can 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…
What is the best way to profit from all this crypto hype, as a rational person who’s convinced all coins will eventually go to zero?
If you are so confident then why not open an account on Bitmex, Kraken, Bitstamp or any exchange that offers leveraged short positions? You say you are confident but will you put your skin in the game?
A cryptocurrency that violates one of the main tenants of cryptocurrencies. The fact is doesn't require a centralized authority. This is basically Twitch bits and shouldn't be classified as a cryptocurrency. As others have stated, probably the only reason to use one is because an existing blockchain can simply be used under a new brand.
Didn't Kik try and do something similar as well and came under fire from the SEC?
Stablecoins, where you explicitly state that it's never ever going to appreciate and make you richer by just holding it, don't meet that criteria so SEC doesn't (and isn't allowed to) regulate them.
IRS/tax issues, and AML/KYC (anti money laundering/know your customer) laws still are a potential issue, but that's not handled by SEC.
To all the cryptocurrency devotees dreaming of a new world cryptocurrency displacing existing government-backed central banks - be careful what you wish for, it just might come true. This might be the next phase of surveillance capitalism, like Orwell except driven by a private corporation for profit rather than accountable governments for "the greater good".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main gain is in acting as a trusted clearing system. Clearing takes less time than FedWire or ACH. Settlement, on the other hand, still has to go through the Federal Reserve.
But using a database as a ledger would clear faster than even the fastest blockchain, wouldn’t it? Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by “clearing”. I’m assuming you mean how long it takes for person A to get money to person B.
Most of the time is spent managing risk. Sure, that includes persistence, but that is also marginal. You also have to validate integrity, authenticity, cross-reference against legal requirements (eg. enforce rates, detect fraud — including internal fraud, apply sanctions lists, estimate AML-CFT risk, …). You have to make sure all accounting rules are followed. You have to abide by the procedures that you and the regulator determined. All that with no downtime.
All of this takes time. Historically, a large part was manual. While automation has helped, there are quite a few clearing houses where an army of programmers is spent battling the chaos.
A system least tolerant to inconsistencies and most tolerant to failure, increases reliability while reducing risk. The cryptographic properties of a distributed blockchain help there, regardless of whether the system has open membership (which is not Facebook’s case, unlike most cryptocurrencies).
A different ledger design can be equally powerful or more. In fact, I expect that a lot of the compliance and accounting logic can be expressed elegantly in a custom design.
If you're interested in conspiracy theories, this may be a way for Facebook to circumvent GDPR, since financial data needs to be kept for at least 10 years. Once you make any trade using this currency, you won't be able to request deletion of personal data, since it's required to be kept as financial information.
If they were going to use the "for tax purposes" data for ad targeting or something else, then that's a GDPR violation - if they're going to intentionally violate GDPR, then they might as well simply store and use the data without permission and lie that it's been deleted; there's no need to bother with the charade.
More and more I get the feeling that the majority of the HN crowd are FB employees. Any other post about crypto is a scam. Any other tech than react is immature. Etc etc. Have fun at FB guys, I hope your share vest soon
Are you joking? In every thread about FB besides this one, almost every single comment actively bashes FB.
Can 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…
I 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.
Can 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…