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From the white paper: > "Libra’s mission is to enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people." They do this by issuing coins in exchange for fiat money, which is held by the reserve. > "Interest on the reserve assets will be used to cover the costs of the system, ensure low transaction fees, pay dividends to investors who provided capital to jumpstart the ecosystem [...…
It’s going to be interesting. “Unlike previous stablecoins, Libra will not be issued by a central party. Instead, Facebook has enlisted 27 fellow Silicon Valley titans—among them PayPal, Visa, Spotify, Mastercard, Uber, and eBay—to operate as preliminary “validator nodes” who will each share a transparent copy of a vast ledger of transactions reflecting all the activity on the network.” That sounds amazingly dystopia…
> That sounds amazingly dystopian. I mean, that’s literally a money built on an oligarchy. By design. IMO, it's a small step towards a better direction. The "validator" consensus (oligarchy) is a much more transparent/inclusive solution compared to the closed financial ecosystems of Wechat/Alipay/Paytm/Grab. If Libra is an oligarchy, closed financial systems are dictatorships
Their next efforts will probably be lobby like crazy to ban any other coin that is not "Approved".
It’s funny how one of the core believes of cryptocurrencies has always been that (a) government will fear and attempt to ban it, and (b) that the technology would make such attempts impossible. Yet what we have seen over the years is really more of a bemused interest from existing institutions, with targeted and rather effective interventions only where actual harm was done, such as ICOs. It’s almost as if these cons…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cryptocoins are not about privacy, the ledgers are public so no conflict there.
There are cryptocoins like zcash where the ledger isn't open in the same sense it is on Bitcoin or Libra.
From the white paper: > "Libra’s mission is to enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people." They do this by issuing coins in exchange for fiat money, which is held by the reserve. > "Interest on the reserve assets will be used to cover the costs of the system, ensure low transaction fees, pay dividends to investors who provided capital to jumpstart the ecosystem [...…
I disagree that this is "conceptually" a bank. Facebook's business model isn't lending out the reserves. If it was, banking regulation would apply.
Also, in a modern bank, reserves are maybe 10%, and you get less than zero percent interest after inflation for that risk exposure.
We've all seen in the past on how well "financial oversight" worked. At this point, I think I'd honestly rather put my money with Facebook than many of those actual banks out there. Facebook is at least a profitable company in its own right.
The concept of nationalized central banks is new.
Terrifying, really. The world is hurdling back towards a feudalist society, with corporations instead of kings.
If they succeed in getting mass adoption for this thing, I feel like the companies on-board have basically bootstrapped themselves to sovereignty. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out, if nothing else!
I'm no expert in US law at all, but my impression as an outsider is that anything that could look like money laundering or a way to hide financial transactions will not be looked kindly upon, and that slapping the "crypto" moniker on this new currency won't make much difference.
It’s going to be interesting. “Unlike previous stablecoins, Libra will not be issued by a central party. Instead, Facebook has enlisted 27 fellow Silicon Valley titans—among them PayPal, Visa, Spotify, Mastercard, Uber, and eBay—to operate as preliminary “validator nodes” who will each share a transparent copy of a vast ledger of transactions reflecting all the activity on the network.” That sounds amazingly dystopia…
What's actually far more dystopian is the power that Visa, Mastercard and Paypal already have. It's not getting worse with this new thing, it's getting better.
Nobody has to use Libra, but getting by without access to Visa/Mastercard/Paypal is a real problem for businesses.