271–277 of 277 posts
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You're forgetting how much credit card transaction suck. As I see it this is the main problem facebook could solve through sheer volume of use: microtransactions. Granted this is about the worst way this future could come about....
Who thinks credit card transactions suck?
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the advantage is you get to be part of the token pyramid before the next guy.
It's a stablecoin...
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> Arguably there already is a global dollar-denominated credit market, it's just highly intermediated. Correct. However, the fact that the Federal Reserve can underbid everyone (with regards to interest) on short term credit causes a destabilization of interest rates (which is why they've been falling for the past ~40 years). There's no point in saving dollars when you can't protest against a too-low rate of interest…
> This can't happen with non-centrally produced money. As cryptocurrency investors keep finding out the hard way, you can create credit in bitcoin very easily, every exchange balance is a credit; what the lack of a central bank means is that when there is a bank run or "liquidity event" you definitely can't get your money back. The Tether people have been very effective at centrally producing decentralised money too.…
With regards to bank runs, they are not a problem if the deposited money is invested in something sufficiently liquid (like the Bill of Exchange). After all, a bank run just means you sell into the market whatever instrument you've purchased for the deposited money, and this will only be a problem if this instrument isn't liquid enough. Bonds, for example, are not sufficiently liquid to sell into the market in case of a bank run. The lesson here is to not invest demand deposits in bonds (or anything else of insufficient liquidity).
> OK, so what does the other side of this equation look like: what's the advantage to the borrower in taking out more expensive credit?
The advantage to the retail credit borrower is that they don't have to compete with businesses who are good friends with the commercial banks (who have access to the Fed's cheap credit). All savers, world-wide, become lenders, instead of just a few huge banks, who don't really care to lift a finger unless there are huge profits in sight.
Also, a reasonable, market-based 3% discount rate compared to, say, a cheaper Fed-funded 1% rate, is relatively insignificant in the context of retail credit with a maximum duration of three months. For goods that take three months to clear, the retail shop will pay three fourths of a percent instead of one quarter of a percent. That's a very small additional price to pay for widely available retail credit (ie. not having to rely on big banks to give you a credit line).
> Even worse, they're taking out credit in a currency that's appreciating against the dollar?
Taking out credit in a currency that's not stable against the dollar is only a problem if your income is dollar-denominated. After all, millions of people take out non-dollar denominated debt every day, which is fine since their income is denominated in that same currency.
Every time I see this kind of news, I wonder, how do journalists get so much information when "an official spokesman declined to comment". Is this mainly just buzz so FB is in the headlines?
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I agree that "global" would be a better word than "central", but that doesn't really affect treelovinhippie's point. > If you don't have central consensus you can't have digital currency. From what I can tell, the Holochain developers agree with this: you can't have a single global currency without global consensus. Their approach seems to be: rather than having a single global currency, have a network of IOUs, trust…
I started reading with that article but it doesn't really seem to answer the questions it's claiming to answer. It's talking about how Bitcoin et al. have a shared consensus that's updated once every 10 minutes, and how everyone needs to validate everything which is inefficient (I agree). But while trying to explain how holochain does it different I don't read how except for insect analogies, for example: > ## Order…
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are you confusing it with libre?
I'm not confusing it. I'm arguing that it's an intentional allusion to liberty. Which, being totally under Facebook's control, it will clearly not be.