241–250 of 313 posts
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> Libra is essentially an ETF But what they invest in will be interesting: what happens when the next financial crisis comes ? When the dollar plunges ?
These sorts of "currency" are typically invested in short term, low-risk deposits. Think bank certificates of deposit, US treasuries and the equivalents in foreign currencies.
Adding the words blockchain and cryptocurrency to this new Facebook initiative gives it an air of "innovation", the sort that reacts to criticism with "this is too new and innovative for you to understand", and "stogy governments don't like to innovate like we do, so they want to stop us with old timey regulation (and consumer protections)". Libra is essentially an ETF. It's a vehicle that will take deposits from cus…
Light touches of financial regulation (written by their lobbyists, in the most cynical case) will help Facebook immensely if they become a social payments platform.
If you want to pay your rent or split that bill with your friends using Libra, it seems reasonable that you might first need to do some Airbnb/fintech style identity validation with their friendly automated systems. Just a photo of your ID and a brief video, and you can have your Libra balance within 15 minutes.
And, just like that, Facebook has gained:
- a real identity to associate with that tracking pixel
- an extension of their network effects even further into the real-world, where you then need to maintain a (validated) account to participate in many common social transactions.
It has the potential to both slow the exodus of millennials and tie a slew of real identities to their accounts. If later on they get transaction data (I agree that this seems inevitable, weren't Google already buying it from CC companies?) or their currency grows to dwarf the dollar in global utility that's just icing on the cake.
For now, their model is still collecting valid + valuable personal data, then selling access to cohorts, and this plays right into that.
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> 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 don't think you understand bitcoin as well as you think you do. 51% attacks do not work like this.
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?
Completely wrong. There is a set of rules which define whether a Bitcoin block is valid or not, things like "the block's hash has this many zero bits" (simplifying a bit here, the actual rule is a bit more complex), "all transactions have a valid signature" (simplifying a lot here, it actually runs a sort of a small program) and "no transaction spends outputs which have already been spent". It doesn't matter how much Bitcoin you have or how much hash power you have, even if you have 100% of all Bitcoin and 100% of all hash power, if the block doesn't follow the rules it will be ignored by all validating Bitcoin nodes.
What having 51% or more of the Bitcoin hash power gains you is only that you can rewrite history. You can present a chain of blocks to other nodes, and later present a different "longer" chain of blocks to the same nodes, and they'll accept the "longer" chain and discard the older one. All these blocks, however, still have to be valid to be accepted.
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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.
Bills of exchange were privately issued by banks since the high middles ages in Europe and functioned a lot like dollars when convertability was still a thing. It's only relatively recently that they've been tightly controlled. they weren't in mass use like metal coinage was but they were essential to the re-establishment of long-range trade.
I have a totally out of the box thought here. I think Libra is a distraction from Facebook for people to forget Cambridge Analytica etc. FB may have unleashed this as a weapon for people to rally up or againast and Fb doesn't care if it succeeds or fails because it is a new category and doesn't affect it's bottomline.
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
> 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…
>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…
You think destroying bank records will remove the power inequality from the system? Good luck with that, kid.
Power has money, but money isn't power. It's the table scraps the rest of us chase after. It's also why you can tax the rich all you want and it won't take their power away. The transactions that truly matter to them aren't usually denominated in dollars. Cash is Plan B at best.
Don't believe me? Look at stories about nouveau rich not being taken seriously. You have to work your butts off to get your kids taken seriously (if you aren't lucky or fast enough, your grandkids, assuming your kids haven't blown their inheritance by then). You don't know anybody, and you don't have anything they need. All you have is money.
Trump talked about this every time he filed for bankruptcy. I'm sure his buddies would have preferred he kept his big mouth shut.
> 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…
Oligopolies do sometimes end when conditions change. People once thought that TV news, highly regulated by the government, would have an indefinite monopoly. Credit cards irritated incumbent banks in the 60s. It’s not inconceivable that banking’s control of money could end.
Technically the oligopoly is overthrown. Practically, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
"In practice, it is much more complicated: while a limited set of “validators” — aka miners — share a history of transactions in (individual) blocks that are chained together (i.e. a blockchain), what Libra actually exposes is the current state of the ledger. In practice this means that adding new transactions can be much quicker and more efficient — more akin to adding a line to a spreadsheet than rebuilding the entire spreadsheet from scratch."
How is this different than Bitcoin, and why does it require a different level of trust?
You are still trusting the validators (miners) either way, correct? And how is it more efficient?