Can anyone explain how this will be different (from a user perspective) than any other tech enabled payments platform (Alipay, Paypal, Venmo etc)? What's the rationale?
The white paper will be published next week, then we'll know more.
Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency Gets Big Backers
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Re: Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency Gets Big Backers
#102> It has been a decade since bitcoin was born, yet consumers hardly use it—or the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies—to pay for things.
And why would they? Adding two extra steps to paying someone -- the buyer converting local currency to bitcoin, and then the seller converting bitcoin to local currency -- can never compete with just transferring local currency directly. Cryptocurrency was meant to be much more than just a payment system.
Cryptocurrencies will not succeed until they close the loop: people receive their wages in cryptocurrency, which they use to pay for consumer goods in retail stores that accept only cryptocurrency (because their suppliers would pay their employees in cryptocurrency).
This is where cryptocurrency would shine, ie. by creating a global credit market, since the unit of account could be the same for e.g. Turkey, Nicaragua and Vietnam. A global cryptocurrency-credit market could arise, in which savers finance e.g. consumer goods on the shelves of retail shops. This would incentivize savers to purchase cryptocurrency in order to earn a low-risk return on their money -- something which is not possible to do in most Western economies with short-term interest rates at zero or below.
PS: If anyone is interested in creating the software infrastructure to make this happen, please let me know.
Re: Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency Gets Big Backers
#103> It has been a decade since bitcoin was born, yet consumers hardly use it—or the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies—to pay for things. And why would they? Adding two extra steps to paying someone -- the buyer converting local currency to bitcoin, and then the seller converting bitcoin to local currency -- can never compete with just transferring local currency directly. Cryptocurrency was meant to be much more than…
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Re: Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency Gets Big Backers
#104As it's said in another comment, it's not cryptocurrency when it's centralized and by a singe entity
i'm seeing it like all the in-game currency, controlled by the entity convert your local currency to this platform bucks to use it ONLY inside that platform
Re: Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency Gets Big Backers
#105Ugh. This will pass too. The value of Bitcoin is in the fact that nobody can control and censor it. It's black market money. If it didn't have this quality, it'd be useless. Nobody (meaning customers) cares about Facebook launching a coin. Facebook will not be the champion of freedom. How do I know? Ask yourself, if Facebook Coin is going to be available in Crimea (currently under sanctions) or Iran (currently under…
I'm just going to add to this: it's been 10 years. Hacker News is still hoping very hard this so called libertarian wet dream cryptocurrency called Bitcoin will soon be out of the picture, replaced by something proper, that is fair and doesn't make you feel angry. And yet, it's still here, angering a whole bunch of people who didn't buy early and think the distribution is unfair & the political ideas behind it are aw…
Except next to no one is using Bitcoin, not to mention Ethereum or Lightning Network.
It's very much like the Linux Desktop - it exists, some people love it, it's never going to disappear, but it is very much a niche interest that will never be mainstream, for a multitude of reasons.
Re: Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency Gets Big Backers
#106Why does this centralized stablecoin need to be crypto? It's not like they need to raise funding for this. They could have made their own boring but extremely well positioned WePay / Paypal alternative ages ago, and instead they waited until cryptocurrencies are past peak hype to launch this. Puzzling. I guess the only thing they have to sell here is the privacy aspect of crypto, but I doubt you'll get effective priv…
It has to be turned around to make sense:
because FB already rapes user privacy to the max and knows everything about the foolish follower it is a perfect match to attach a payment system to that data pool!
We can not let China lead the BigBrother revolution!
Re: Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency Gets Big Backers
#107> It has been a decade since bitcoin was born, yet consumers hardly use it—or the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies—to pay for things. And why would they? Adding two extra steps to paying someone -- the buyer converting local currency to bitcoin, and then the seller converting bitcoin to local currency -- can never compete with just transferring local currency directly. Cryptocurrency was meant to be much more than…
Couldn't my employer then see what I'm spending money on? If they know the address of the wallet they're putting money into, they know where that money then goes?
Also, with a distributed ledger and billions of transactions a day, how is anyone supposed to actually index and understand all the transaction data? I like how Bitcoin I can actually sync all the data and (potentially) see stuff, but that was GBs of data and no where near as widely used.
Cryptocurrencies have a place, but they are a solution to a small subset of problems while creating others. There's a reason why people still use cash over cards.
Re: Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency Gets Big Backers
#108> It has been a decade since bitcoin was born, yet consumers hardly use it—or the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies—to pay for things. And why would they? Adding two extra steps to paying someone -- the buyer converting local currency to bitcoin, and then the seller converting bitcoin to local currency -- can never compete with just transferring local currency directly. Cryptocurrency was meant to be much more than…
You probably can't have a stable global cryptocurrency without a central bank. Bitcoin fundamentally cannot work for credit because the risk to the lender is ridiculous.
Macroeconomics doesn't work in diverse economies if you can't partition off areas of the globe and create friction at the borders for trade (with monetary policy).
The same products and services need to have location based costs to ensure local economies can function.
Now complete isolation is worse that perfect free trade, but there must be a balance. Lack of balance brings wealth concentration, poverty, starvation, and war.
Re: Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency Gets Big Backers
#109Is it really a cryptocurrency when it's completely centralized? No. This is just Facebook-bucks. Store dollars. It's has absolutely none of the benefits of a real cryptocurrency.
there seems to be a desire, arising from confusion and encouraged by opportunism, to conflate the term cryptocurrency with conventional notions of electronic cash. I've listened to people from the world bank, the IDB and at least one representative of a central bank explain to me with enthusiasm how their pet crypto and blockchain projects were creating new opportunities for their organizations. There's always some c…
Having done different projects both in the public and private blockchain space, I believe the majority of the confusion comes from almost no one actually understanding the point of something like Bitcoin. While it's clear for IT people to look at a Paypal like system and point to the obvious central point of failure (the company behind it, the website "paypal.com', etc), almost no one outside of IT understands decentralization and why someone would want it.
Especially after learning all the downsides you get with these kind of distributed systems (slow finality, low throughput, limited in capabilities, inefficient, open to new attack vectors).
Re: Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency Gets Big Backers
#110> It isn’t known, even to some members of the consortium, how the coin will work or what their roles will be, people familiar with the project said.
Such a stablecoin still requires a regulatory approval process before roll-out.
Just as a reminder that there are open alternatives, GNU Taler would offer a more privacy-oriented stablecoin with an already clear specification, but has not yet been adopted by banks that require the regulatory approval. On the mailing list, the developer wrote that they work on the two missing features needed for approval (cross-device synchronization and an integrated backup solution).