Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#81

Post by svd4anything » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:28 PM UTC

duguxu wrote: post #71

camgunz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The developing world would hugely benefit from a scalable technology that can efficiently service digital transactions. The piece demonstrates this with how quickly WeChat Pay and Alipay penetrated China. I hear this a lot in cryptocurrency threads, and I vehemently disagree. There's no doubt that using "some other currency" (currency or cryptocurrency) is better than using a corrupt, authoritarian regime's currenc…

People living in these country here. Thank you for pointing out these concerns. Besides currency manipulation, another issue with cryptocurrency is about responsibility and accountability. For traditional central bank, before a greedy bad policy made, local governors must carefully think about the aftermath like unrest and they might be held for account and get punished. In the worst scenario, people keep the choice…

> But this is not the case for cryptocurrency. There might be no one punished for terribly wrong decision, just because the public have no idea who the decision maker is, or he/she is in another country and escapes the rule of law. Just like 1997 financial crisis for southeast asian people.

What kind of “decision” are you imagining? I thought part of the point of cryptocurrencies is to remove power to even have these “decisions”. So I’m not sure what the scenario you imagine is.

What if Gold was used as currency easily, is there a problem that would occur?

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#82

Post by filereaper » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:30 PM UTC

Tangential, but has Facebook done anything to reduce the power-consumption in Libra?

I'm not enthused about supporting anything that worsens the global climate crisis and its irresponsible of large companies to support cryptocurrencies with its terrible power usage right now.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#83

Post by svd4anything » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:30 PM UTC

chasing wrote: post #75

svd4anything wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're also not going to partner with an international consortium to have them replaced with something they only partially control. It seems that Libra is going to demonstrate exactly why only a decentralized design like Bitcoin’s or other similar cryptocurrencies has any chance of breaking that control. They will be much much harder to attack and shutdown once governments decide this competition in their monopoly…

Government control over currency is a good thing.

Is that really truly settled by economists? Objectively. I mean there have sure been a lot of currency crisis and hyperinflation events in modern world history.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#84

Post by adventured » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

gooseus wrote: post #45

> The largest leap will come last: Libra as a genuine currency, not simply a medium for transaction. This will be function of volume in the previous two use cases, and is understandably concerning to governments all over the world. Well that's certainly an understatement. This is literally the only mention of government through-out the entire article. The only mention of banks is in the previous paragraph stating the…

> No government is going to let FB and any coalition do an end run around their national currency and their banking institutions.

That's the point of confusion. This is not an end around. This is about extracting tolls - slivers - from economic activity. They will all comply with the status quo, they will say what needs to be said, they will bow as they need to bow, they merely want to get their little cut on a billion transactions. It's nothing more than an attempt to layer another transaction processing fee-based system into/onto the global economy. There is no other point, it's why Facebook has partners like Visa interested.

These guys could not care less about replacing national currencies or doing an end run around of political control. In fact it's the exact opposite: they would want the regulators to make sure Libra is the standard that they can properly exploit, and raise the walls to other competition. That is how these companies always behave, it's rather obnoxiously predictable. They will be thrilled to work with regulators to keep things exactly as they are, with a little exception for their new baby parasite that gets 0.3% of everything (and please regulators, while you're at it, make it really hard to compete, make the regulations impossible for everybody else to comply with).

They do not want the political power, responsibility and conflicts that come with national currencies. They want the money, the fat juicy profits, that come with extracting high margin tolls. It's ideal to leave the national fiat currencies intact, so they can extract additional fees everytime people want to change their money. Libra is a rider, national currencies come and go.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#85

Post by RobertoG » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #78

buboard wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banking has existed for a few centuries, and state controlled money is something recent too, it used to be that multiple sources minted coins. And bitcoin which has existed for 10 years and is far more threatening to governments has not been extinguished.

Gold coins can be minted at multiple places, or admitted foreign, because their value is gold by weight. Mass fiat money are no more than 2 centuries old, in most places less than 60 years (see Bretton-Woods). They have to be tightly controled by state.

>>"Gold coins can be minted at multiple places, or admitted foreign, because their value is gold by weight."

If the value of the coin come from the gold in it, why mint them instead of using the gold directly?

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#86

Post by cschneid » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

vocatus_gate wrote: post #62

cschneid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paypal can reverse transactions, can Libra? Or is it like bitcoin, where I must protect my private key by any and all means, and then if it's lost, sucks to be me? And yeah, I mean "lose all your money due to a 0 day in your browser".

At least in crypto, that's why things like the Ledger or Trezor are really important, at least if you're storing any non-de-minimus amount. Protects against things like 0-days, etc.

And my question was if Libra was any different. If it's like Bitcoin, there's zero chance this wont' be a hacker's paradise, and fail miserably as a way to immediately have your money stolen.

How would Libra ever work if general population using it have the normal level of computer security?

I foresee a headline like: "$20m worth of Libra stolen due to newly found security flaw. Facebook says 'sucks to be you, it's irreversible'".

(or is the protocol different, and it is reversible? How? Who controls that?)

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#87

Post by ghayes » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

My primary concern is that with a set of 20 or 100 validators, you can’t call it a decentralized platform (it’s a blockchain run exclusively by a centralized consortium). The article discusses the fact they intend to to decentralize it in 5 years, but that would be the equivalent of a dictator stepping down and promoting democracy which... doesn’t always come to pass.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#88

Post by nabla9 » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

Zoo3y wrote: post #20

The missing information here is how much of this currency will belong to facebook, and to each constituent. No matter how many orgs are added to the coalition, if facebook owns 50% of the coin then it's all a sham.

Owning coins does not provide excessive value or control for the owners, because it's basically just money market fund attached to the payment system.

FB probably wants to tap into user payment records and that's why they push this.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#89

Post by narrator » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

What is the benefit of Libra exactly? Why not just set it up like WeChatPay or Paypal as a centralized database?

I guess like gambling chips or video arcade tokens, the lack of belief that it's real money might confuse some people into spending it more freely.

Another thing is is that they can take all the money that's paid into Libra and run a hedge fund with the reserves because they can write their terms and conditions so they can do whatever the heck they want with the "reserves" and not tell anyone what they're doing.

Another benefit is that they can facilitate illegal commerce on facebook by letting people conduct cross border transactions outside of AML/KYC land that a PayPal like system would require.

They can also tie identities to coin transactions to analyze transactions for further ad targeting.

Did I miss anything?

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#90

Post by xxpor » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

svd4anything wrote: post #83

chasing wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government control over currency is a good thing.

Is that really truly settled by economists? Objectively. I mean there have sure been a lot of currency crisis and hyperinflation events in modern world history.

I don't think pure economics are the only thing to worry about here. Anti-money laundering/sanctions/stopping terrorist financing efforts are generally a good thing that not ideal from an economic perspective.