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Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts

lawfareblog.com

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Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts

#51

Post by wtmt »

jlmorton wrote: post #41
wilg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What better alternatives exist?

Preferably low-cost digital payments, such as debit cards, mobile payments, or whatever else, perhaps including cryptocurrencies like Libra. I understand many of these methods as they exist in the US come with significant fees, although debit cards have improved significantly since Dodd-Frank. Sweden will stop accepting cash payments in 2023, and already nearly 90% of transactions are completed without it. There's no…

Debit cards and mobile payments are not low cost in many places. They may seem to be no cost to consumers, but the costs are added in every product or service that's being sold because every player and "middleperson" in the payment chain takes a fat enough cut. This affects the poorer people disproportionately, and they end up subsidizing the costlier digital payment modes used by the relatively richer people.

Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts

#52

Post by tim333 »

tenpies wrote: post #45
tim333 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trend seems the other way if anything, that its being more clamped down on. If you rob a bank and make off with $10m in banknotes the kind of offence would be your lawyer certifying it came from honest sources and letting you buy a mansion with it. The argument for criminalising it is the lawyer would be assisting in your operation and effectively encouraging you to rob more banks which is not victimless in the w…

Yes, the desired outcome by the governments seems to be: > You rob a bank and make off with $10 MM in bank notes > They strike those bank notes' serials from a central database and you are now holding a duffel bag of paper. Fiat currency is just make belief paper. It's backed by nothing but hopes and dreams at this point, so the actual paper you hold is really just a manifestation of that. It has no inherent value be…

Or rather you can't make off with $10m in bank notes because everything's gone cashless.

By the way fiat is backed by more than hopes and dreams, it's usually backed by quite a few institutions and societal expectations. Unlike many of the altcoins which really are hopes and dreams backed.

Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts

#53

Post by tim333 »

55555 wrote: post #15

You all need to read the following excerpt from Matt Levine's thoughts on Libra: > 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 e…

But if you mostly spend Libras... The dollar will start to seem unstable and useless.

For people who do business and fill tax returns there's a big incentive to use whatever currency you have to fill out the return in to prevent it getting awful complicated.

Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts

#54

Post by tim333 »

solveit wrote: post #28
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Money laundering, extortion, and other financial crimes have negative externalities. It's absolutely a problem if we invent the technology that allows me to pay a crypto-ransom, since that pretty directly creates a bunch of ransomers. Also, the principals involved in "disrupting" governments and existing financial institutions also face the problem of government reprisal. Liberty Reserve got seized and th…

> Also, the principals involved in "disrupting" governments and existing financial institutions also face the problem of government reprisal. Say what you will about Bitcoin, it's been remarkably successful on this front and I'm not exactly sure how.

Bitcoin was designed so there are no obvious principals to have reprisals against. Satoshi kept semi anonymous for a reason.

Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts

#55

Post by whamlastxmas »

tenpies wrote: post #45
tim333 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trend seems the other way if anything, that its being more clamped down on. If you rob a bank and make off with $10m in banknotes the kind of offence would be your lawyer certifying it came from honest sources and letting you buy a mansion with it. The argument for criminalising it is the lawyer would be assisting in your operation and effectively encouraging you to rob more banks which is not victimless in the w…

Yes, the desired outcome by the governments seems to be: > You rob a bank and make off with $10 MM in bank notes > They strike those bank notes' serials from a central database and you are now holding a duffel bag of paper. Fiat currency is just make belief paper. It's backed by nothing but hopes and dreams at this point, so the actual paper you hold is really just a manifestation of that. It has no inherent value be…

Having the $5 returned to you is an optimistic perspective

Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts

#56

Post by forgottenpass »

berns wrote: post #17
jameslevy wrote: post #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.

> Nobody wants to receive $10 from a friend only to have it turn into $9.80. The author thinks that the USD is the unmovable absolute and it's everything else that changes in relation to it.

No. The author thinks people anchor value assessment in their local currency without factoring in short term currency fluctations. Which they do.

Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts

#57

Post by jlmorton »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #47
jlmorton wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preferably low-cost digital payments, such as debit cards, mobile payments, or whatever else, perhaps including cryptocurrencies like Libra. I understand many of these methods as they exist in the US come with significant fees, although debit cards have improved significantly since Dodd-Frank. Sweden will stop accepting cash payments in 2023, and already nearly 90% of transactions are completed without it. There's no…

Electronic payments completely exclude the unbanked and cost proportionally far more for low-income brackets. Cash is the only near-zero or zero cost transaction method available.

Fixing that would be a prerequisite. Public/postal banking is one way to accomplish that. Regulation is another.

I actually disagree that cash is currently near-zero cost, though. The current situation is that credit cards charge large interchange fees, and their agreements with most merchants prohibit them from passing those fees to their customer. The result is that most of the fees are added to prices for all customers.

Unless you're paying with cash at a cash-only business, you're using one of the most expensive payment methods.

The closest you can come to a low-cost payment method is a rewards credit card that provides some of those interchange fees back in the form of cash bonuses, points, or whatever, and then paying off the balance each month.

Re: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts

#58

Post by gjs278 »

jlmorton wrote: post #41
wilg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What better alternatives exist?

Preferably low-cost digital payments, such as debit cards, mobile payments, or whatever else, perhaps including cryptocurrencies like Libra. I understand many of these methods as they exist in the US come with significant fees, although debit cards have improved significantly since Dodd-Frank. Sweden will stop accepting cash payments in 2023, and already nearly 90% of transactions are completed without it. There's no…

credit card companies charge swipe fees which isn’t fair to every business doing low cost transactiona
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