81–90 of 125 posts
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Why do we need nation states?
Nation in nation state is pretty recent addition and already dying off (fortunately), but the state owing allegiance to its citizens (ever imperfect) is better than slide back to feudal-authoritarian corporation that is in no way on the hook for anything towards the common man.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In cypherpunk terms, what’s dreamy about a crypto currency with no anonymity, that shifts power from international democratic governments to private US corporations?
Because you thunk governements having power over currency is a good thing? At least with corporations you can choose to deal or not with them, that's the dream.
How/why is a corporation better? A corporation's main goal is to profit.
Conspicuously missing from the entire libra story is how they are actually going to manage the peg. How will they handle the custodian counter-party risk? What I mean by that is: for libra to actually be a stablecoin, for every libra unit in circulation, FB and their merry band of friends will need to stash a frozen combo of {dollar, euro, yen} somewhere. That "somewhere" is actually not easy at all to design from a…
> Conspicuously missing from the entire libra story All of this is answered in the Libra whitepaper. > is how they are actually going to manage the peg. How will they handle the custodian counter-party risk? "The assets in the Libra Reserve will be held by a geographically distributed network of custodians with investment-grade credit rating to provide both security and decentralization of the assets." > be regularly…
They're underestimating how difficult it will be to avoid losing money.
Bank deposits So what if Facebook and their partners don't park their reserves in mortgages and derivatives if their banking intermediaries do? Banks routinely go insolvent in recessions and financial crises.
Short-term government securities Which are currently paying negative interest rates in "stable" and "reputable" nations like Germany and Japan.
A "negative interest rate" means you buy a government obligation for $1000, and a year later you get back $997.
Can Libra reserves earn a high enough return to (a) fund their admin and security apparatus, (b) cover insolvent partners and institutions, and (c) cover fraud and abuse?
It's clear from the whitepaper that there is no upside to holding this currency, but it's not at all clear that it won't "break the buck" and actually lose money.
Sooner or later, FB partners will go to a fractional reserve model and effectively convert this "cryptocurrency" into a vehicle for inflating the money supply to a multiple of actual reserves by issuing debt.
My bet is this will happen sooner rather than later, because there's zero profit in sitting on giant pile of short-term cash.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nation in nation state is pretty recent addition and already dying off (fortunately), but the state owing allegiance to its citizens (ever imperfect) is better than slide back to feudal-authoritarian corporation that is in no way on the hook for anything towards the common man.
At least you can choose the corporation you want to deal with, unlike the nation state you live in.
You'd have to pick your allegiance and then face the consequences. Or they'd pick you before you had a chance to choose yourself. Do you think the lords of old let the serfs have a say in whether they wanted to leave or stay? No. It would be the same for us. Going to digital lords and barons and no states to rein them in would be regressing.
Government only really needs to do a few things to be essential, one of those things is securing and backing the legal tender, and yes this is also one of the ways they exert authority. It's also how they maintain legitimacy, this has been true for thousands of years.
What country is going to give up this power and hand it over to a consortium of multinational corporations (with 0 banks in it) led by a corporation that is controlled by a sole person?
If it can't be nationalized then they won't let it be adopted and I'm sure every country (including the US) has any number of laws that will allow them to prevent the undermining of their currency.
They let Bitcoin do its thing because it lacked all the things this has, which let them classify it as something closer to commodity/security, and not a currency. If this thing isn't that, then I don't see how this is going to be acceptable without the government demanding a massive hand in how it is run.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nation in nation state is pretty recent addition and already dying off (fortunately), but the state owing allegiance to its citizens (ever imperfect) is better than slide back to feudal-authoritarian corporation that is in no way on the hook for anything towards the common man.
At least you can choose the corporation you want to deal with, unlike the nation state you live in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In cypherpunk terms, what’s dreamy about a crypto currency with no anonymity, that shifts power from international democratic governments to private US corporations?
Because you thunk governements having power over currency is a good thing? At least with corporations you can choose to deal or not with them, that's the dream.
For example, Experian has your data and is a significant factor in whether you can get a loan. You never chose to do business with them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought the same, but then it makes sense if you look at it from the sort of fuck-you attitude that FB leadership tends to have: "So you want to undermine us, fine. But what if we undermine you first?"
My read is that it IS the USD. '...it may actually cement the dollar as the world currency once and for all. As the Association mops up all the fiat in the world they’ll likely turn it into dollars on the back end anyway, so Euros and Yen become Dollars and cents.'
Sure it'll be nice to make easy money off the interest on deposits. And it'll be nice to make money on the analytics that can be run on all the worlds' transactions. Great. But the biggest pay off is that once consumers buy into Libra as a thing on its own, the policy can be changed to no longer link it to any basket of currencies, and it can then be issued without that annoying and expensive currency-buying-thing. J…
Can someone explain what this provides to users over, say, a credit or debit card? You don't have the rebellious notions of sticking it to traditional banks, not do you have (completely imagined) anonymity crypto fans have gravitated to. You don't have any of the intangibles crypto fans like. It just seems like Facebook wants a central bank. Who's asking for that?
It is unlikely that you will need to sit in a bank and fill out forms to get a card. You will have no more hoops to go through than in-game tokens. Which makes me wonder, why haven't there been in-game tokens made universal yet? I don't do Facebook but didn't they once have a large Zynga game thing on the go, very much tied into the platform? A monopoly on a virtual currency should have happened by now, one that only…
As soon as (for example) Zynga claims that tokens can be cashed out for hard currency or used to buy arbitrary real-world things outside of that game, that would mean that all kinds of money-related regulations would start to apply for them. For example, many game mechanics that include these tokens and randomness would fall under gambling laws; and money laundering/KYC laws would start to be relevant. That's why pretty much every company offering such tokens will pinky-swear that they're not redeemable for cash and real world things, and take at least some visible action to combat any black market for such sales lest they'd be considered aiding money laundering.
In essence, you can't really have your cake and eat it too - there can be a cryptopunk-ideal digital currency but pretty much every legitimate business selling real world things would be prohibited from touching it (at least in nontrivial amounts, if they don't do their own deanonymization of customers like all the legitimate Bitcoin exchanges do); or you can have a digital currency that's usable on a scale (like Libra) but it can be that way only by implementing KYC (i.e. anti-anonymity) and AML (i.e. possibility for censoring payments).