11–20 of 58 posts
People 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 all…
Cryptocurrency 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).
People 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 all…
Yes, we probably should, now that better alternatives exist. We should have public postal banking, so no one is unbanked. And then we should stop issuing cash.
> So, first, Libra will be a “stablecoin,” in the sense that its value will be pinned to conventional financial assets. Unlike most stablecoins, though, it will be pinned to a basket “of low-volatility assets, including bank deposits and government securities” in different currencies, so it won’t consistently be worth one dollar or one euro or anything else. “As the value of Libra will be effectively linked to a basket of fiat currencies, from the point of view of any specific currency, there will be fluctuations in the value of Libra.”
> This strikes me as very annoying, but it has some obvious advantages for Facebook/Libra. For one thing, they’ll only need to manage one general Libra, rather than having different stablecoins corresponding to different national currencies. For another thing, if Libra gains widespread acceptance, its lack of one-to-one correspondence will give it a tendency to displace national currencies. If you mostly spend dollars, and Libra is always going up and down against the dollar, that will be annoying and you won’t want as many Libras. But if you mostly spend Libras—if Facebook is successful at making this the main currency of the internet—then that dynamic will reverse. If the dollar is always going up and down against the Libra, that will be annoying and you’ll want more Libras. The dollar will start to seem unstable and useless. If you buy most things online, and if everything online is priced in Libras, then you’ll end up living your life denominated in Libras, and only converting your Libras into dollars on your occasional touristic visits to the physical world.[4] The goal is for Libra to be more useful than any national currency, accepted in more places and with fewer complications; pegging it to a single national currency would only hold it back.
"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.
"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.
The author thinks that the USD is the unmovable absolute and it's everything else that changes in relation to it.
Cryptocurrency 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).
"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.