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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

#211
post #208

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 accoun…

You are severely over estimating the integrity of cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Some of the most highly valued "cryptocurrencies" today are centralized tokens handled by companies with worst reputations than Facebook (XRP, EOS, Tron, ...), yet people do buy and use them. If anything the communities from these tokens might flock en masse to Facebook coin. And if Facebook actually manages to pull off a system where they…

> yet people do buy and use them.

I mean some people do, but they're a very small niche.

> communities from these tokens might flock en masse to Facebook coin

Yes, I agree, that's what I said in my OP, but this is a relatively small group of people, and they will likely only use it as an onramp into spendable money and continue to favor their preferred token.

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millions-facebook-user-records-... I'm guessing your response will be that it wasn't Facebook's fault. I would also note that there aren't even 10 billion people living on earth, so it sounds like you're just making stuff up.

you 'll notice in that article that it wasn't facebook's servers that were breached. Also facebook has probably way more accounts than humans, i think just recently they deleted 3 billion fake ones. Regardless, imho from many years working with their platform, they do take security seriously and they ve helped to popularize methods for securing accounts and passwords.

> you 'll notice in that article that it wasn't facebook's servers that were breached

A distinction without a difference. If Facebook's security policy permits PII to be moved into insecure systems then Facebook itself is insecure.

Here's another:

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-uploaded-1-5-millio...

Yeah. 1.5 million, who cares right? No big deal. This is clearly a pattern, not an isolated incident.

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

#213

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What is the substantive meaning behind "fuckn suck"? As an example, most exchanges and processors have both BTC and BCH so if you're not a speculator there isn't much functional difference. (I know there are technical differences, but those differences don't change the fact that they are fungible blockchain tokens)

There isn't that much difference from a functional perspective. However, they will never achieve the value of bitcoin because many of them have forsaken the properties that give bitcoin its value. There is too much argument over which chain will win, imo, its like asking which nation will win- it doesn't have an answer. We are humans, we excel at patchworked cooperation, which is why we have so many nation states and…

> However, they will never achieve the value of bitcoin because many of them have forsaken the properties that give bitcoin its value.

A subjective opinion that is also irrelevant to the point. It doesn't matter how likely you think a fork is to succeed, the argument that computer software is impossible to change because "nobody would ever agree to those changes" is incorrect.

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

#214

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>all of these random tokens are functionally identical from the perspective of most users. If a clone of Bitcoin is identical to Bitcoin then why does Bitcoin trade 25x the price of a clone? Your argument would cary weight if the protocol and price facets were similar. The market says otherwise.

"why does Bitcoin trade 25x the price of a clone?" Because humans are stupid, faddish creatures. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

The point was, in fact the bitcoin and bitcoin clones are not "functionally the same thing". If they were, there wouldn't be discrepancies between the two. Clearly the market punished the clone.

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

#215

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BTC forks all the time. Almost every new version of the code is technically a fork. It's just the forks usually have a single branch.

That is not what a fork means

Yes it is.

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

#216

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Well, Facebook has a pretty poor history with regard to security, so I'm not so sure either way.

Do they ?

I keep coming back to this blog when it comes to Facebook's handling of PII -- they didn't lose it accidentally, but they gave access to it in exchange for developing popular / viral apps for facebook as a platform,

"What the f* was facebook thinking" https://medium.com/@jamesallworth/what-the-f-was-facebook-th...

They gave out users' unique global ID with the export API so it was trivial to merge PII from multiple sources. They didn't have to be hacked, they left the door open. Facebook was full of dumb 'which x-movie-character are you' because every one of those grabbed a few more profiles and at one point, private inbox messages, all to be merged back into somebody's data trove.

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The surrounding context around an idea is always changing. Facebook itself was tried many times with various degrees of success (MySpace; Friendster; LiveJournal; Classmates.com; Xanga; EZBoards; AOL; Usenet; fingerd; BBSes; etc.), but it took a new and relatively trusting generation getting online and being packed onto dense college campuses to make it take off. I personally think that Facebook's cryptocurrency will…

Facebook's original success was because the platform was somewhat pure (no arbitrary CSS decorating profiles) and exclusive. They reached the critical mass they needed at that phase then opened it to the public

Indeed.. fast, Microsoft-like, pure css, complete profiles.

Then it copied/pivoted to twitter’s timeline. And finally took off with a proper mobile app, and social apis for gaming. All while copying/buying - stories from Snapchat/Instagram, Whatsapp/messenger, live/ig to/twitch

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

#218

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Is it possible to increase the block size?

Anything is Possible with Bitcoin ᵗᵐ Except something as simple as increasing the block size to allow Bitcoin to process more than 7 transactions a second (Visa handles 42,000 tx/s comparatively). Theoretically it is possible, but the way Bitcoin is designed puts changes in control of people who stand to profit from preventing certain changes (i.e. Tragedy of the commons) like block size increases - and they are bloc…

if the commons actually wanted larger blocks there was an opportunity with the bitcoin cash hardfork, but that chain has less value and less hashrate now. So when given the opportunity people didn't move to the chain with more transaction space, so it seems the votes are in.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is known as ETH then it is the main chain, not the fork.

Right. That's my point. Even though ETH hard forked to undo transaction history, the fork is still considered "ETH" because that is what the leaders decided (and the community agreed to that decision). If Vitalik had made a different decision then the "ETC" chain would still be called "ETH" today.

whats missing here I think is the value of social consensus. None of these coins have any staying power without the social consensus that makes them the main chain. Its why there can't be clones with the same value popping up every day, there is clout that the dominant chains maintain
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