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Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

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Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#471

Post by espadrine »

crazygringo wrote: post #170
tetrisgm wrote: post #22

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. Then W3C and the USB-IF are also "oligarchies" and dystopian? A bunch of institutions working together is presumably a lot more trustworthy and less prone to abuse by anyone individually than a single institution, which maybe you would call a "monarchy"? Really not sure what's dystopian about this at all . Do you thi…

> Do you think MasterCard and Visa networks are dystopian too, or that national currencies themselves are dystopian?

There is a major difference between settlement being operated by a democratic government, which will therefore handle the payments market with the public’s interest in mind…

…and it being operated by a for-profit.

Monetary policy (eg. target inflation rates) can be driven by investors, at the expense of social stability.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#472

Post by ThomPete »

jayd16 wrote: post #420
moosey wrote: post #233

If this succeeds, it will be a data collection tool the likes of which the world has never seen, which is why so many companies are willing to put their name on it. The data, along with ML/AI, and our contemporary understanding of the human mind, means that this is a major step towards control that we can't understand. Dr. Harari explains it better than I do in "21 Lessons for the 21st Century", but this tool is part…

>the world has never seen Credit cards already have similar data, no?

No, they don't have itemized data. Only the POS's have that.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#473

Post by tsrautde007 »

floatrock wrote: post #439
tsrautde007 wrote: post #417

Why Facebook’s Libra could be a runaway success https://medium.com/@tejas_rd/why-facebooks-libra-could-be-a-...

The last two points apply to any crypto, but the first two, Scale and Network, are plausible. Basically the tl;dr is facebook and the other "tech titan" validator nodes provide a large, existing distribution channel, and presumably they can unleash their armies of developers to make all the techie crypto stuff Just Work. A long running bitcoin criticism has been that it's been like PGP -- built on sound principles, b…

Last two points are predicated on fulfillment of the first two.

Network first and technology later vs. most of the industry's 'build first and get the stakeholders later' approach could be the sole differentiation in this thing flying off

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#474

Post by otakucode »

yumraj wrote: post #278
_bxg1 wrote: post #200

Terrifying, really. The world is hurdling back towards a feudalist society, with corporations instead of kings.

What is even more terrifying is that this is being done by Facebook which has a person like Mark Zuckerberg, who has again and again shown that he has no moral compass and has complete disregard for people privacy rights and by extension other rights, as its dictator, with no real board oversight due to how stocks are structured.

I would not say Zuckerberg has no moral compass. He definitely has one. Hell, he started only eating meat that he personally killed. What I would say is that his moral compass points in a VERY different direction than the vast majority of society is familiar with. He's a kook, basically. His views on privacy are not that he 'doesn't care'. He made it clear early on what his viewpoint was. He sees privacy as an antiquated, outdated notion that everyone will benefit from the death of. He believes that once everything is out in the open, people will grow up and stop being judgemental about things that are statistically normal despite being in contravention of social norms. He is, of course, completely wrong on that point and gives the majority of society far too much credit. But it's wrong to say he has no opinion on the matter.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#475

Post by la_barba »

I think this is an interesting move from FB. Google has been trying to get payments data by extracting it out of your emails and any other data that resides on their servers. I don't know if they've been correlating it with search/dns/ad data, but I suspect they sneakily have been. By getting all the major payment processors on board for the operations/logistics, and with FB providing the tech, they can all share the data between them and FB probably thinks they can profit the most out of this. Apple's pro-privacy payment system is unlikely to take off (IMHO) given that it doesn't align with the profit motives of the payment companies. The only way it can take off is from the bottom-up if people choose to use it in droves.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#476

Post by helen___keller »

tgb29 wrote: post #466

It's very possible this initiative will be low impact. Most people don't care about currency -- they just want to spend their money in the terms they're used to. My one concern: if the libra's value is based on a basket of assets, will US users still see the value in terms of USD? Will French users see their value in Euro? Will the value of my USD change based on the basket of securities backing libra? I just want an…

>My one concern: if the libra's value is based on a basket of assets, will US users still see the value in terms of USD? Will French users see their value in Euro? Will the value of my USD change based on the basket of securities backing libra?

I don't know what the UI will be like, but I guarantee that there will be an exchange rate of USD to Libra and it will shift as USD's value shifts against other currencies in the basket.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#477

Post by firethief »

staplers wrote: post #416
mountainofdeath wrote: post #390

It's amazing how short of a memory people have. The financial system has at least a few centuries of experience and todays regulatory climate is a reflection of the lessons learned. To some, these rules may seem arbitrary and they sometimes are but people forget how things before. I find it amusing that the big selling point behind the initial round of cryptocurrency was its lack of regulation.

its lack of regulation. This is false actually. Cryptocurrency's "selling point" is being regulated by mathematical rules and not by potentially-corrupted policymakers.

Fundamental rules govern its existence, but not what's done with it. Most cryptocurrency in use today isn't "regulated" by mathematics any more than banknotes are "regulated" by physics.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#478

Post by Humdeee »

pjmorris wrote: post #426
jayd16 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the world has never seen Credit cards already have similar data, no?

No. The credit card is limited to locations where it can be swiped. The phone is online everywhere, all the time.

They're not exclusive anymore. The credit card is largely just a physical application that the phone can do anyways. Every modern phone can be a credit card. Besides, when leaving your home you likely take the big 3 collectively: cell, wallet, keys.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#479

Post by la_barba »

cowpig wrote: post #462
la_barba wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That sounds amazingly dystopian. I mean, that’s literally a money built on an oligarchy. By design. You can already kind of do that with other crypto currencies. For e.g. > 70% of bitcoin mining happens inside China, and the currency is susceptible to a 51% attack (in theory anyway). This site calculates the cost of executing such an attack. https://www.crypto51.app/

I think there's an argument to be made that Bitcoin is oligarchical, but saying that 70+% of mining happens in China doesn't support the statement. Nor is susceptibility to a 51% attack relevant to that point.

You're right, the fact that they're in China might be irrelevant. I should have mentioned that a very large percentage of mining happens on a handful of pools.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#480

Post by helen___keller »

tim333 wrote: post #454

From the technical paper it seems to be able to be transferred anonymously like bitcoin etc >To create a new account, a user first generates a fresh verification/signature key-pair >The Libra protocol does not link accounts to a real-world identity. A user is free to create multiple accounts by generating multiple key-pairs. Accounts controlled by the same user have no inherent link to each other. This scheme follows…

I think the trick here is that Facebook is not inherently in charge of transactions, each validator is. Meaning, each validator will have their own efforts to make sure nobody pushing transactions on their node is doing crime (and/or that their identity is known so it can be forwarded to police when linked with crime).

In practice what this probably means is that each validator will require a lot of personal information tied to each public key before accepting transactions from that public key. In other words, I would wait until/if someone trustworthy partners as a Libra node (e.g. my bank who already knows my financial history) until I sign up to give it a shot.

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