Do companies that bought in to join the Libra alliances for 10 million each mean that they'll receive all transaction history and purchasing patterns of everyone on the Libra network as well as receive a share of the fees in the future? Sounds like a bargain if that's the case
Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game
181–190 of 313 posts
Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding a country’s ability to manipulate their own currency or execute monetary policy which is mostly in the direction of printing more: the end game of crypto seems to take this option off the table for all governments in the long term. Why? Because assuming all other things being equal (convenience as medium of exchange etc.), an individual is always going to prefer holding currency that isn’t subject to inflat…
Governments can easily ban and pursue anti-crypto measures to prevent anything such as money they can't control. Yannis Varoufakis said it best: the idea of apolitical money is a fiction and a dream. Money has always been associated to and controlled by governments. Bitcoin currently is actually heavily manipulated/moved by Tether which is controlled by Bitfinex.
I agree governments will try to ban fixed supply currencies but I don't believe they will succeed.
China still can't stop its citizens accessing the open internet on VPN. North Korea still can't stop its citizens smuggling wikipedia into the country on USB sticks. Governments won't be able to stop citizens storing their wealth in fixed supply currencies.
> Bitcoin currently is actually heavily manipulated/moved by Tether
[citation needed]
Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game
#183Earlier 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.
Bitcoin hasn't been extinguished because it's not a replacement for fiat. Transaction scaling still isn't there and no one in their right mind spends their bitcoin on coffee when it could 10x in a year and then drop 90% from there just to 10x again. It's become an investment class and governments are fine with that because people are investing their fiat into it and then pulling it back out to fiat later. There's no…
Investment class is even more concerning for governments. The vast majority of USD is not used for buying coffee but stored in T bills
Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of the reasons I dropped out of crypto for years, most of its supporters were completely delusional and tragically uninformed about actual banks. I always considered two datapoints to be fulcral A) ease of use, which Bitcoin has never had and B) potential to be overtaken by an actual bank and twisted into whatever purposes it wanted due to the 51% error. That is, how hard would be it for JPMorgan or Deust…
> This is one of the reasons I dropped out of crypto for years, most of its supporters were completely delusional and tragically uninformed about actual banks. The reason I stayed in is because Bitcoin solved a seemingly intractable problem, it works in the real world, and it's survived and even thrived in the face of fierce attacks for a decade. Yes, there are many shills who are delusional and ignorant. Yes, specul…
> and it's survived and even thrived in the face of fierce attacks for a decade
What fierce attacks has bitcoin faced?
Sure, lots of people mock and criticize it, but no real action has been taken. The people criticizing it have just as much influence (or maybe even less) than the delusional and ignorant true believers.
To me, a fierce attack would be regulatory action taken by various world governments, but that hasn't happened. To the contrary, even countries that probably should care (e.g. China, with its capital controls, and bitcoin mining seemingly used to evade them) appear not to. If anything, that shows just how insignificant bitcoin is.
My vague impression (I don't follow this closely) of US regulators is that they have given bitcoin reasonable or even slightly favorable treatment.
Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeap what has changed is the scale. Never before have states exerted so strict monetary control in such vast areas. For medieval kings it was just impossible to prevent the use of other people's coins.
I’m not sure why anyone would really want to go back to a fractured system (inherently unstable, and very dominant in the early years in America) unless they live in an already unstable system. Universality of your currency is kind of the best selling point isn’t it?
Is it? i dont know. My understanding is that dominant coins exist to subsidize dominant armies, which then protect the dominant coin in a virtuous/vicious cycle.
Also, barter worked very well since forever, in which every product is a different "coin", it just doesnt scale physically, while digital currencies do.
Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would welcome a correction! My impression is if anyone has 51% of all bitcoin they can write whatever they’d like on the blockchain and validate it at will. Is this wrong?
Even for PoS cryptos where you require 51% of the currency to control the network, it would become prohibitively expensive to buy up 51% of the circulating supply due to market dynamics. PoS is arguably more secure than PoW. Arguably.
And then even if you do, you now own a lot of the currency and are in theory incentivized to keep the value from crashing.
Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are misinformed about how bitcoin works. Bitcoin doesn't care how much of it you have, as it uses Proof-of-Work not Proof-of-Stake. The only thing that matters is you computational power. Now it is true that large banks could just buy lots of ASICs and try to beat the network, but that would mean a continued investment: As soon as they stop mining, the network would return to normal. They can hurt bitcoin…
The transaction rate is deadly in my opinion, not just bad. A year or so ago the rates were running at ridiculous prices. It’s a black eye on the Bitcoin Core that they haven’t fixed this nor do they seem inclined to (the Bitcoin Cash Core seemed convinced they wanted nothing else but to control Bitcoin entirely).
It hasn't changed because the people who control the hard fork, the miners, benefit from the increased transaction fees that the low rate produces through competition to get in on the next (small) block. It's a textbook example of Tragedy of the Commons.
Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't pay my taxes in Crypto, so in that sense I don't think will ever completely replace fiat currency and the banks.
You can do this in at least one US state: Ohio[1]. I'm not sure of how many other states (if any) that have something similar. [1]: https://ohiocrypto.com/
>Please use Internet Explorer to view site and thank you for your cooperation.
There's some irony here.
Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game
#189> 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. They're also not going to partner with an international consortium to have them replaced with something they only partially control.
It's also strange to me that there is no discussion about that. Money is not only a currency you can use to buy goods and services. In case of US dollar it's a powerful political pressuring instrument. Most of goods on international markets are exchanged in US dollar. That's why US can print dollars and the rest of the world is paying the inflation costs. Additionally, money issuer (in this case US) can forbid anyone to use their currency, so they can shutdown Libra when they want and how they want, if pressured enough.
Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin hasn't been extinguished because it's not a replacement for fiat. Transaction scaling still isn't there and no one in their right mind spends their bitcoin on coffee when it could 10x in a year and then drop 90% from there just to 10x again. It's become an investment class and governments are fine with that because people are investing their fiat into it and then pulling it back out to fiat later. There's no…
Investment class is even more concerning for governments. The vast majority of USD is not used for buying coffee but stored in T bills
Nonsense. T-Bills have the lowest volatility because they're backed by the biggest guns on the planet. What is Bitcoin's volatility and how is that a threat again?