Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 313 posts

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#231

Post by CodiePetersen »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #76
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…

Actually, the US used to have any number of currencies in the 19th centuries and it was a mess. Having a centralized currency is a reasonable thing, though the Fed is a private entity, it operates ultimately like other central banks. The banks don't have any special power - if you want to open one, you can do that right now. If they did have some special sauce, VC would be pouring it, and mostly, it's not. Banks don'…

The federal reserve does exactly that and is a bank.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#232

Post by figlicious »

Thing with libra is that its not a cryptocurrency nor does it move the distributed agenda forward. It moves transactions from happening off-the platform to being on it.

FB is in it for themselves. The consortium of third party players is for shielding themselves from anti-trust concerns

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#233

Post by tonfa »

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.

Even in Roman times currency were debased though. Financial technology has a pretty long history (Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible, was a pretty cool read on that).

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#234

Post by ausbah »

Macross8299 wrote: post #227
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…

>Cryptocurrency advocates saying, "we know what's best for you" is super troubling to me. How is this fundamentally different from an unelected monetary economist working at the IMF or Federal Reserve deciding they know what's best for millions of people in a country? Given that you're presenting a country that can manipulate their own currency as the superior choice.

Because the monetary economists work to improve the economy of their whole country, while "cryptocurrency advocates" are more likely to be vouching for a system that stands to personally benefit them?

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#235

Post by Macross8299 »

ausbah wrote: post #234
Macross8299 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Cryptocurrency advocates saying, "we know what's best for you" is super troubling to me. How is this fundamentally different from an unelected monetary economist working at the IMF or Federal Reserve deciding they know what's best for millions of people in a country? Given that you're presenting a country that can manipulate their own currency as the superior choice.

Because the monetary economists work to improve the economy of their whole country, while "cryptocurrency advocates" are more likely to be vouching for a system that stands to personally benefit them?

>Because the monetary economists work to improve the economy of their whole country

I'm really not so sure that can be stated as some universal truth when it comes to things like the IMF.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#236

Post by sharadov »

sprafa wrote: post #101
simias wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I really don't know why this isn't a larger part of this conversation. That's been the elephant in the room ever since Satoshi published its paper more than a decade ago. When I discuss with cryptocurrency enthusiasts I often get the impression that they think that banks are this kind of useless parasite body that somehow appears like mosquitoes around a pond in summer. That they only serve to basically operate ATMs…

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…

My fundamental issue was that the value is so wildly varying and not being accepted at regular places that it fails horribly as a medium of exchange for goods and services.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#237

Post by VarFarYonder »

sprafa wrote: post #194
MichaelConlon wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin uses proof of work [1] to verify transactions on the network. For someone to effectively rewrite the network they would need to control 51% of the total computing power (in hashes/sec) on the bitcoin network. [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work

I see so I was mistaken about that. I still don’t understand why people don’t see that it would be trivial for a major bank (or now that Bitcoin has grown, a government) to look into making enough computational power they would destroy it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-La8gyNVCI

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#238

Post by superkuh »

rookonaut wrote: post #23

Could the problem with the damaged brand be a reason why Apple is so keen on becoming a "privacy-as-a-service"-company?

No. Apple cares about privacy and security because it wants to become a bank and payment processor. It had/has so much liquid capital it just makes sense. They've been moving that way ever since 2013 or so. All the concentration on security is so that their phones can be payment terminals and Apple can seek rent.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#239

Post by ses1984 »

sprafa wrote: post #194
MichaelConlon wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin uses proof of work [1] to verify transactions on the network. For someone to effectively rewrite the network they would need to control 51% of the total computing power (in hashes/sec) on the bitcoin network. [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work

I see so I was mistaken about that. I still don’t understand why people don’t see that it would be trivial for a major bank (or now that Bitcoin has grown, a government) to look into making enough computational power they would destroy it.

Just having 51% of the network doesn't mean checkmate. It allows you to perform something called a double spend. I could buy something from you with bitcoin, while at the same time I attempted to send the same funds back to myself. If I controlled 51% of the network, there is a slim chance that would work, because the other 49% of the hash power is still validating the transaction where I sent you the funds, not the secret one I sent myself.

If this were a big transaction, I might choose to wait for more than one confirmation before completing my end of the transaction. The longer I wait, the more expensive it becomes for you to conduct your 51% attack.

It really is prohibitively expensive, to conduct such an attack, when you consider a few other factors. I could double spend the money to myself, but after news of such an attack came out, the price likely could crash, reducing the prize.

Not to mention opportunity cost. If you have the means to conduct a 51% attack it means you have a lot of capital and expertise. You could put those two together to make a giant pile of money through legitimate means, like operating a hedge fund. The risk is a lot less.

The only group that would be motivated enough and capable enough to perpetrate such an attack would be a state, and why would they bother when, like was mentioned elsewhere, they could attack bitcoin with the stroke of a pen, via regulation etc. It's waaay less effort.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#240

Post by VarFarYonder »

sprafa wrote: post #151
tiluha wrote: post #144

Earlier 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).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AecPrwqjbGw
Post reply on HN