Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#751

Post by ei8htyfi5e » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:26 PM UTC

r00fus wrote: post #736

ei8htyfi5e wrote: post #720

I've lived in China and seen how this plays out. Facebook's new Libra Blockchain will be a centralized bank but way more dangerous. It will allow for a worldwide social credit system. If Facebook decides to remove you for wrong speak or wrong think, your money and many services will be inaccessible. Further, they have no mandate like the central bank does to increase employment. Their mandate is to make money for cor…

For this reason, unless the backers of this are powerful enough I see this being under intense scrutiny and possibly heavily regulated. Fin system panicking? hah - Visa backs this. And no downside for FB if this fails (other than opportunity cost).

Visa is a player and doesn't represent the financial system at large. They're doing this because they realize it's existential that they do.

Look at what regulators will say in the coming days. Europe is already saying under no circumstances will they allow a sovereign currency to operate unabated.

The US Federal Reserve is a major source of American power. It's "rumored" the US has invaded countries before for threatening to price oil in alternate currencies. You think they're going to accept this affront to their global hegemony laying down?

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#752

Post by p1esk » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

camgunz wrote: post #534

conanbatt wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an oligarchy just like the nearest hotdog stand is a dictatorship. Don't like it don't use it. Try saying the same to the governments come tax-time.

In the US, we have a democracy, so we have at least some say in how things go: the government is us. Facebook is not us, we obviously didn't elect Zuck or anyone else there. This is a tired, old, fallacious comparison.

If enough people choose to use Libra, it can eventually become a de facto (or even the only) payment method.

Facebook is us: 2.4B users willingly give Zuck the power to make potentially high impact decisions like this.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#753

Post by FridgeSeal » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

vivekd wrote: post #557

This is an interesting story and I would like to learn more about libra-coin. Unfortunately I think hackernews has a strong anti-facebook bias that is making the opinions here nearly universally one sided. I think we can say three things fairly uncontroversially in favor of this 1. The world could use an online independent currency 2. Adding stability to blockchain currencies and having that work on a large scale is…

> 1. The world could use an online independent currency

Could it? Why? Independent from who? Because watching the disasters and scams that go on in cryptocurrencies because they don’t have any regulatory oversight, doesn’t make me inclined to think an “independent” currency will be any better. Anyways, it’s not even independent, it’s controlled by a conglomerate of tech and finance companies and lorded over by Facebook, it’s about as un-independent as you can get.

> 2. Adding stability to blockchain currencies and having that work on a large scale is a good thing

Because as we all know, adding yet another currency to the mix has functioned to stabilise things previously. Except now this time it’s run by corporations and lacks anything about what made crypto currencies interesting or worthwhile in the first place.

> 3. Unlike government issued currencies, any monopoly or control facebook derives isn't done through force, it's by making a coin better than all the other coins. Other people are still free to make their competing coins.

In theory, yes; in reality, no. Humans are not creatures of perfect rationality that balance up all their options and make informed, ideal decisions at every point. The crypto currency market has been the perfect example of this: huge fluctuations due to hype and pump-and-dump schemes. Coins unequivocally do not succeed on their technical or theoretical merit. Moreover, all things being equal, I think a crypto currency backed by Facebook is something that should be avoided with a 10 foot pole.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#754

Post by mrfenk » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:31 PM UTC

app4soft wrote: post #730

ei8htyfi5e wrote: post #720

I've lived in China and seen how this plays out. Facebook's new Libra Blockchain will be a centralized bank but way more dangerous. It will allow for a worldwide social credit system. If Facebook decides to remove you for wrong speak or wrong think, your money and many services will be inaccessible. Further, they have no mandate like the central bank does to increase employment. Their mandate is to make money for cor…

> It will allow for a worldwide social credit system. If Facebook decides to remove you, your money and many services will be inaccessible. And this is creepy thing here.

A lot of people in this thread don't distinct between Libra the currency and Calibra the Facebook wallet. A wallet controlled by Facebook is indeed worrying, and I hope that there will be enough worthy competing alternatives. The Libra network on the other hand looks very solid.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#755

Post by r00fus » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:34 PM UTC

ei8htyfi5e wrote: post #751

r00fus wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this reason, unless the backers of this are powerful enough I see this being under intense scrutiny and possibly heavily regulated. Fin system panicking? hah - Visa backs this. And no downside for FB if this fails (other than opportunity cost).

Visa is a player and doesn't represent the financial system at large. They're doing this because they realize it's existential that they do. Look at what regulators will say in the coming days. Europe is already saying under no circumstances will they allow a sovereign currency to operate unabated. The US Federal Reserve is a major source of American power. It's "rumored" the US has invaded countries before for threa…

I agree with you. The fact that there is one player makes me wonder how many other players are in the game but not announced.

If the regulatory agencies aren't captured, we should expect crypto (at least stablecoins) to get some regulation soon.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#756

Post by benj111 » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:36 PM UTC

rt2dap wrote: post #659

taurath wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not 100% steeped in cryptocurrency theory, and so I don't understand why this is presented as if it's agreed on by everyone. What problems does the world have that would be solved by an online, independent [of any nation, presumably?] currency? Visa and Mastercard are taking a 3-4% cut of every single consumer payment made in much of the world. That ends up being a very, very big number. There are many people a…

Visa and Mastercard have invested so I wonder how they might weigh in on the project. Also, the Libra-coin should also have a transaction cost associated but I would expect/presume it stands an order of magnitude lower than 3-4%

It isn't clear to me that you wouldn't still have payment processors anyway.

In the UK right now I can send money to your account nearly instantly, and for free. I wouldn't want to purchase anything like that though, I'd want to use some kind of card, why would Libra be any different?

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#757

Post by allannienhuis » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:41 PM UTC

FridgeSeal wrote: post #737

tjkrusinski wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't the case, your wallet is not tied to your Facebook account.

Yeah not now, but given everything else they’ve done, it wouldn’t be a surprised if they introduced it as a feature later down the line.

That's kind of the definition of FUD spreading, isn't it? How is anyone supposed to defend themselves against accusations like that?

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#758

Post by polyomino » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:41 PM UTC

andrewla wrote: post #672

jpmattia wrote: post #546

Again: A ledger that is not decentralized is a bank database, not a cryptocurrency. As near as I can tell, Zuckbucks are nothing more than the JPMorganCryptocurrency but with a bigger consortium. The only difference seems to be who is given write privileges to the database.

The thing that separates this from a bank database is a small thing, but important, and that's that even the bank cannot reduce your balance in secret without your authorization, since transactions are signed and the ledger is public. That's because of the cryptographic primitives used. I think in the end we have to accept that taxonomies are going to have rough edges because the map is not the territory. With Bitcoi…

How can you be confident that the ledger that you're presented with now will be valid later?

This is what bitcoin does that none of these giftcard systems do.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#759

Post by JimiofEden » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

cafed00d wrote: post #623

vgoh1 wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly why I would love to see this fail. I try to be a non-Facebook user, but everyone uses Messenger, and my local Craigslist has deteriorated because everyone sells on Facebook now, so I use it for certain things. Every once in a while, I find myself getting sucked into the "feed" view on my way to the Facebook Marketplace, especially since on mobile, every time I press "back" from a listing that I go into detail…

One of the best things I did was unfollow everything (i.e. friends, family, pages, celebrities, the kitchen sink, EVERYTHING) on Facebook. This explicit unfollowing took a few weeks and wasn't something done in a day. Now, I have the advantage of using facebook for all the useful things I need such as "Login with Facebook" and Messenger without having the risk of ever succumbing to the "Feed" Part of my experience he…

I did this a few years ago when I found myself at a party, looking through my feed, and it made me start questioning what the hell was wrong with me.

Eliminating the feed entirely was fantastic. Soon I stopped checking my notifications (if I'm not seeing things on the feed, I'm not reacting or commenting, and not getting feedback.) Thus the only people I cared to check in on were literally the people I cared about. As a result, I grew much closer with those individuals.

Then messenger slowly started being useless, as all previously mentioned good friends were already either on hangouts/discord and preferred those (Mileage will obviously vary on this one.) I can still keep it around for my weekly check to make sure no-one is desperately trying to get a hold of me. And if they do, I immediately direct them to my chat platform of choice.

Events is still pretty handy, unfortunately, but not something I need to check in on often at all.

Honestly, I don't miss it at all, and I haven't really lost any value. I'm about as social as I was when I stopped, and in fact I consider the friendships I've had in my post-social media era to be stronger than ever.

The only people I have followed right now is a friend currently trying to break out as a social media author presence, in which case following her actually matters, and a band that one of my childhood friends is in, who I'm supporting for the same reason. (Though I often give them engagement elsewhere when I can.)

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#760

Post by objectivetruth » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #685

Morizero wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a strong anti-facebook bias I can tell you from own experience that Facebook's dark patterns are incredibly frustrating at best, and at worst come off as malicious to the end-user. For example, I refuse to download the Facebook app. When using the mobile website, it often shows me as having new messages. Clicking the notification then redirects me to download the app. Requesting the desktop site, however, shows no…

No, I think you misunderstood the notifications. I did at first. Basically Facebook shows you when someone read your messages. This shows up as a notification in messenger mobile but not in the web version. There are others too but I don’t remember the exact circumstances.

No, I think you misunderstood the parent because I've encountered the pattern EXACTLY as he described it. I have one device that I use for insecure stuff like FB Messenger and I have to go use it whenever I want to see new messages and I don't have access to a desktop.