Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#871

Post by IloveHN84 » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 5:25 AM UTC

mekoka wrote: post #853

Let's play a game of predictions. Regardless of HN's opinion of Facebook (and regardless of my own for that matter) I predict that this thing will work. This is only one thing my crystal ball showed me. Facebook's presence in developing economies is massive. To the point of being synonymous with "The Internet" in a number of places. But they've had a nagging problem. People in these economies consume contents, but do…

You forgot about Apple coin on their credit card. Available at 999$ for the exchange rate.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#872

Post by baby » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 5:31 AM UTC

Vervious wrote: post #834

baby wrote: post #21

I'm biased as I'm working on this project. But I'm super happy it's finally out there :) There's a lot of really cool cryptography and tech on this project and there's still a lot for people to discover!

There's also very cool cryptography and tech on other projects, that are actually decentralized . E.g. Algorand, where I work. Facebook's protocol is permissioned - not so much theoretical novelty there over PBFT (or even non-Byzantine Paxos... companies are under contract anyways, why model them as Byzantine actors?) No way it will scale to 1000+ nodes, in a permissionless gossip network where you cannot directly un…

Vervious I invite you to read the paper, we actually do plan to go full permissionless.

BTW I'm a huge fan of Algorand as well. You guys are doing really good work.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#873

Post by postcynical » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 5:32 AM UTC

How are blockchain/cryptocurrencies affected by a possible breakthrough in quantum computing? It is my understanding that quantum computing makes it trivial to break todays crypto. So a single actor with a quantum computer could break any crypto currency?

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#874

Post by freddie_mercury » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 5:35 AM UTC

jlmorton wrote: post #459

fnoof wrote: post #195

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 [...…

This is not a bank. It's an asset and a payment network. Banks are organizations that borrow short to lend long. This is a stablecoin backed very closely 1:1 with fiat currency. There is no fractional reserve, and there is no lending.

You don't need either of those things to be a bank. Check out "narrow banking" for the history, theory, and current attempts at it.

From one survey:

"Prior to the early-twentieth century, US banks tended to be much narrower than they are today. Common modern banking practices, such as maturity transformation and explicit loan commitments, arose only after the creation of the Federal Reserve and the FDIC"

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#875

Post by quickthrower2 » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 5:45 AM UTC

jpmattia wrote: post #714

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the bank cannot reduce your balance in secret without your authorization, since transactions are signed and the ledger is public This capability is pretty pointless when the bank can indefinitely suspend your ability to make transactions. The ability to block transactions is an essential part of compliance with anti-money-laundering and other banking regulations.

> This capability is pretty pointless when the bank can indefinitely suspend your ability to make transactions. You beat me to it: Having cryptographically signed transactions simply does not matter when you have to submit the transaction to what Zuck calls a "validator". The validator will just refuse to validate if your address is on a blacklist. The net effect is that the coins are frozen. And since this is a back…

Might as well use PayPal if that’s the case

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#876

Post by Bombthecat » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 5:53 AM UTC

mekoka wrote: post #853

Let's play a game of predictions. Regardless of HN's opinion of Facebook (and regardless of my own for that matter) I predict that this thing will work. This is only one thing my crystal ball showed me. Facebook's presence in developing economies is massive. To the point of being synonymous with "The Internet" in a number of places. But they've had a nagging problem. People in these economies consume contents, but do…

Yap,we will see way,way way more stable coins from a ton of different companies. Soon or later you will get paid in those ( probably not so stable coin anymore)

The world reminds me more and more like the world in the book(s) of shadowrun, minus the magic stuff..really facinating...

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#877

Post by goatinaboat » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 5:59 AM UTC

taurath wrote: post #652

generalk wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. The world could use an online independent currency 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? > 2. Adding stability to blockchain currencies and having > that work on a large scale is a good thing Having a blo…

> 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 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 two assumptions you are making, both of which are false. The first is that handling cash isn't expensive, but it is. You have to store in various secure locations, transport it between those locations, count it multiple times... And that's true even if you're a market trader or a small shop. For those people it could easily be a significant part of their day and a significant risk, all of which goes away with cards (and the fee is nowhere near 3-4%, it's more like 1-2%).

The second is that, in a market that has demonstrated a willingness to accept the transaction fees of the major card providers, that anyone would "leave money on the table". Sure they'll undercut them initially to win market share but once they have it, the price will inexorably creep back up to the level the market will bear.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#878

Post by jillesvangurp » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 6:00 AM UTC

Facebook decided to reinvent the wheel and make it closed source. IMHO this is a mistake and a bad idea for any wannabe blockchain platform. I am curious about their motives for doing this. I'm guessing that it is simply that their plan is the same as that of any traditional payment solution: create a walled garden and profit through transaction fees. This requires a closed ecosystem.

In terms of design, this actually looks a lot like Ripple/Stellar. The difference being that those two are open source and anyone can run an independent validator. There's a growing number of those. And with IBM building world wire on top of Stellar together with a few dozen banks, here's now some traction for that platform at least.

It might still work for Facebook and I would not be surprised to learn that they took some of the Apache/MIT licensed code of either platform. but I'd say they'll have huge issues with people simply not trusting them with their money. They will also need links to other platforms via some exchanges. Again, Stellar comes to mind. It comes with an exchange and an ecosystem of fintech players already connected to that.

Facebook is of course not the only company planning to do their own coin. Telegram has similar plans and there are a gazillion of dapps on Ethereum and similar chains. Most of these seem to be struggling to find meaningful amounts of users. Unlocking crypto for the wider public is not something that anyone has accomplished yet. FB might pull this off given their large user base.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#879

Post by anonymous5133 » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 6:10 AM UTC

mekoka wrote: post #853

Let's play a game of predictions. Regardless of HN's opinion of Facebook (and regardless of my own for that matter) I predict that this thing will work. This is only one thing my crystal ball showed me. Facebook's presence in developing economies is massive. To the point of being synonymous with "The Internet" in a number of places. But they've had a nagging problem. People in these economies consume contents, but do…

Completely agree. Many people are thinking way too narrow for how big facebook is. Project libra will be the great equalizer and put everyone more or less on the same "economic playing field" so to speak. Since this community is heavily startup focused, everyone here should be thinking of how they can capitalize on this next frontier of the internet. The money isn't made by speculating on libra coin, it is made by creating innovative services/solutions.

Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

#880

Post by WA » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 6:14 AM UTC

edmundsauto wrote: post #786

WA wrote: post #205

> "On the first point, Marcus said that Facebook is enforcing a strict separation between users’ social data—their Facebook likes, photos, etc—and the financial data that will be available on Libra’s network. There will not, he insisted, be a readily available data trove connecting users’ transactional data to their Facebook profiles, and users’ funds themselves will be cryptographically secured. “We don’t want finan…

Was it the data that was merged with WhatsApp, or was it the infrastructure? AFAICT, FB can't connect what I said on whatsapp to what I say on Messenger because everything is e2e encrypted. They have metadata (would need it to route the messages, and for providing the service). What am I missing?

Mainly, they said they would not connect your phone number to your FB account, but then the did.

Furthermore, metadata is super critical already. Don’t forget that WhatsApp has your location data as well (if you enable it, what most people probably do to share their location with friends occasionally).

Although I have no proof, knowing FB, I bet they extract meta data from all of your photos and send them back. I mean, why not? Maybe not all the time, or maybe not in every version, but given FB‘s track history of giving zero fucks and trying everything under the sun to gather more data, it wouldn’t surprise me (same is obviously true for Instagram).

I try to use WhatsApp less and less and I removed all permissions except contacts. If I want to send a photo, I use the Share capability of iOS and select from Photos to share with WhatsApp. The insane part is: this behavior is not doable in Android. You either grant photo access or you can’t send anything.