Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts
lawfareblog.com
Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts
1–10 of 58 posts
Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts
#2Poorly written and argued, while I agree with the title, the rest is garbage by someone who should not be talking about this
Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts
#3the arguments used here are backwards. this currency should be stopped because of too much kyc, not too little.
Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts
#4Poorly written and argued, while I agree with the title, the rest is garbage by someone who should not be talking about this
What precisely have they gotten wrong? From my point of view, the article looks spot on.
Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts
#5Cryptocurrency has a pretty big problem: "dollars, but without US Government oversight" is exactly what money launderers and other financial criminals want to have. The closer any cryptocurrency gets to being this, the more illegal activity it will facilitate and the more risk the project takes on of getting the entire operation seized and the principals arrested and extradited to the US (see also: Liberty Reserve).
Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts
#6Poorly written and argued, while I agree with the title, the rest is garbage by someone who should not be talking about this
What precisely have they gotten wrong? From my point of view, the article looks spot on.
The article’s objection is probably relevant, but not necessarily the most important. It’s almost guaranteed that this con (edit: “coin” was intended, but “con” works even better) will end up governed by existing KYC laws, just as has happened with BTC.
The more interesting objection is about Facebook “disrupting” not the payment processing business, but the international monetary system (national banks etc.). There is ample reason to be concerned about this possibility, most prominently the fundamental idea that this system should be governed democratically, and not by industry, and certainly not by Facebook. Bitcoin was bad enough, with your power correlated with your wealth like a dark age’s feudal system. Restricting control further to a Silicon Valley Oligarchy is just dystopian.
The article may have ignored this line of argumentation because the system as it is currently planned just doesn’t really do anything to that effect: it uses existing currencies as the backend, does not (yet) involve any of the usual mechanisms of monetary policy (policy-based control of currency creation etc.).
Bloomberg’s Matt Levine had a long article on this yesterday, including a discussion how the basket-of-currencies backing might be a play to actually compete with these existing currencies.
Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts
#7Poorly written and argued, while I agree with the title, the rest is garbage by someone who should not be talking about this
What precisely have they gotten wrong? From my point of view, the article looks spot on.
Abrupt topic change and thought flow, cyber criminal part, kyc...
Much better pieces have already been written
Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts
#8"But since Libra pegged is to a basket of currencies, it is not actually stable."
A weighted basket of the top 5 currencies by market capitalization should be more stable than the dollar.
The point about taxable income is true, although if I would rather pay tax on income I made from Libra than not had earned the income at all. Unless the dollar crashes hard I wouldn't expect this to be a meaningful amount of income.
Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts
#9Cryptocurrency has a pretty big problem: "dollars, but without US Government oversight" is exactly what money launderers and other financial criminals want to have. The closer any cryptocurrency gets to being this, the more illegal activity it will facilitate and the more risk the project takes on of getting the entire operation seized and the principals arrested and extradited to the US (see also: Liberty Reserve).
This is not a problem (for the cryptocurrency "thought leaders" at least). It is literally the primary motivation for its existence. Look at the message embedded into the Bitcoin Genesis block - it's no secret that the entire point was to evade, undermine, and ideally supplant government control over issuance and circulation of money.
Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts
#10People who think the government should have the technological power to decide who pays who in the world need to ask themselves this. Do you think that there should be a hardware filter on all internet fiber cables that allows the government to filter that traffic?
Banning cryptocurrencies because they physically allow money laundering is as logically indefensible as banning internet fibers because they physically allow illegal content. The solution is to make the transactions illegal but physically possible. I’ve seen no reasonable people saying that all transactions should be legal, but I’ve seen a lot of people here saying that technology which allows illegal transactions should be banned. This is mind boggling to me and seems like a dangerous precedent.
After all cash physically allows money laundering, should we ban cash? Cryptocurrencies are baby technologies, why would we make innovating on them illegal before we even know what they’re capable of?