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Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency: Privacy and stability concerns

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Re: Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency: Privacy and stability concerns

#81

Post by ForHackernews »

buboard wrote: post #76
nutjob2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is the US, but in places like the EU and Australia, consumer level inter-bank transfers are now taking a few hours, minutes or seconds, at a price between free and less than $1. It's sort of a constructive proof that you don't need crypto currency, if that's the justification for its existence.

it's really mind boggling to me they take $1 at all. Why? Banks have a myriad ways to make money instead of taxing consumers (and overwhelmingly the small fish). It's 2019 and cash has 0 cost to transfer.

In the UK, the Faster Payments Service enables near-instant transfers (usually a few minutes) that are typically free to the consumer. This network has been operating for more than a decade.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service

Re: Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency: Privacy and stability concerns

#82

Post by travisjungroth »

hanniabu wrote: post #59
travisjungroth wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether you consider it legitimate or not, Bitcoin Cash has about 4% of the value of BTC. Here’s my point. Is it theoretically possible for some group of people in the physical world to take actions so that what we generally call Bitcoin has 1 more coin? I strongly believe yes. So the world isn’t as black and white as some people like to say it is.

Just as the stock market can only have 1 AAPL ticker, there can only be 1 BTC. Is it possible that in the future that BTC can have a change in emission and cap? Yes. I don't agree with that part of the parents statement. But there is in no way for there to be more than 1 BTC chain.

There’s only one AAPL because we all agree there is. What if the NYSE and NASDAQ disagreed? It all comes down to people.

This is the bait-and-switch of crypto. People act like it’s all code and messy humans aren’t involved and this just isn’t true.

The original comment I replied to said there will only ever ever be 21,000,000 Bitcoin. I believe this is not fundamentally true because “Bitcoin” is whatever people say it is. If we all agreed to accept a fork with 22mil and call it Bitcoin, then that’s what it is. Sure, that old fork only has 21mil, but who cares? Old forks get dropped all the time.

This all isn’t entirely theoretical. This already happened with the other major part of cryptocurrencies, the immutable blockchain. What we all call ETH has a rollback in it!

No, this hasn’t happened with BTC but there’s no reason it can’t. Every second that the Bitcoin blockchain doesn’t get rolled back, every second that there are only 21 mil possible Bitcoin is because we all collectively agree that’s the case.

Re: Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency: Privacy and stability concerns

#83

Post by root_axis »

I think Facebook's reputation will be enough to relegate this thing to the ash heap. The only people who are going to be interested in Facebook coins are some subset of cryptocurrency enthusiast who can find value in moving their cryptocurrency into a coin that will have more onramps to spendable money. For everyone else, it's going to be viewed as yet another digital money app you have to hook up to your bank account and there will be little incentive to do so since everyone is already comfortable with their cryptocurrency/venmo/paypal/cashapp of choice. When you mix in Facebook's horrible reputation, particularly with regard to tracking and privacy abuse I think we're going to find that people mostly just ignore this offering.

Re: Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency: Privacy and stability concerns

#85

Post by ForHackernews »

hello_1234 wrote: post #78
jiveturkey wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to have a fundamental misunderstanding of ACH vs wire. They aren't the same thing, with one of them having a fee just for the speed of it. 3-5 days is actually a feature of ACH. This delay includes the ability to reverse a transaction, a built-in risk management. For example, here is a quote from an article on the front page of HN right now (#5, SIM swap horror story): > After a couple of days, our bank re…

Here's a great podcast on NPR's planet money if you want to learn more - https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/01/10/576879734/epis... You cannot just give me two anecdotes to defend one of the most inefficient systems in the US.

How is ACH "inefficient"? It's certainly slow, but speed and efficiency are not the same thing. It's far more efficient than bitcoin.

It's a mainframe batch-processing system built in the 1970s, and it's mostly worked just fine for 40 years. That's pretty efficient!

Re: Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency: Privacy and stability concerns

#86

Post by notahacker »

rdiddly wrote: post #70

I can grasp the idea that Facebook would want to capture more payments like WeChat does; what I can't figure is how having their own cryptocurrency would add anything. Whom does it appeal to? I doubt Facebook wants the drug dealer/money launderer market segment for example. (I also doubt it'll be secure or anonymous enough to satisfy those people.) And it's no good for speculators, if it's pegged. Seems like at best…

Novelty or gimmicks are appealing when your payments business is only 2% of revenue and yet lots of people are discovering products and wasting money on pay-to-win-games through your platform. Their assumption is probably that Facebook gamers (and especially the "whales") are more likely to be the sort of people excited by breathless hype about cryptocurrency being the future without really understanding much about it, and less likely to be the sort of person that says "but you could do that with a centralised ledger".

Re: Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency: Privacy and stability concerns

#87

Post by TACIXAT »

jonlucc wrote: post #69
TACIXAT wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can move your money cheaper than credit and debit card networks. That is the only part I'm interested in. Given they are partnered with PayPal though, I'm not hopeful on it being low fee.

That makes sense, but when buying things, the price of those networks is opaque to the consumer and things won't get cheaper for consumers if a business is selling to both "traditional" purchasers and FBcoin purchasers.

Yea, agreed. My dream for it would be changing the way the internet is funded. If you could send 1 or 2 cents digitally, you could bill people for social media use rather than showing them ads. You could tip content creators and not have a payment network take 30%, same for in app purchases. The kill ads feature doesn't align with FB's interest though.

We'll see what their fee structure looks like.

Re: Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency: Privacy and stability concerns

#89

Post by beaner »

nosuchthing wrote: post #38
toomuchequate wrote: post #13

If it is pegged to USD, there is no investment potential. It is just as bad as cash. The idea behind bitcoin is that you don't need to rely on the US government for storing value. There are 21,000,000 BTC ever ever, you can't print more. That article did not address this at all. This is the most compelling reason to buy bitcoin.

No one should have to buy Bitcoin when you can mine it, oh wait it's all being printed in warehouses owned by wealthy capital holders. Surely this is Satoshi's design goal. Also don't worry about the exchanges operating out of obscure off shore islands, they probably arn't operating fractional reserves.

Miners have to sell their coin to remain profitable. This distributes the coin well, and ensures a highly liquid market.

The largest brokerage is US-based (coinbase) and the largest exchange is Binance, which has most of its funds auditable on various blockchains.

Also just hold your own keys if you're worried about it. The ability to opt-out of custodianship is kind of the point.

Re: Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency: Privacy and stability concerns

#90

Post by root_axis »

bduerst wrote: post #75
root_axis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unforeseen future circumstances could make people more amenable to any kind of changes imaginable. Either way, saying that it's impossible to print more is just not true.

Unforeseen future circumstances could make people less amenable. Saying "we just don't know what the future may hold" in support of a claim is an argument from ignorance.

> Unforeseen future circumstances could make people less amenable

True, but irrelevant. It doesn't matter either way. The point is that it can be done if that is what conventionial wisdom dictates is desirable at the time.

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