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Regulators Have Doubts About Facebook Cryptocurrency, and So Do Its Partners

nytimes.com

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Re: Regulators Have Doubts About Facebook Cryptocurrency, and So Do Its Partners

#71

Post by rtkwe »

Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #39

Why not we all just... let them launch and see what happens? Libra is nothing more than the latest iteration of a long line of stablecoins a-la Tether, USDC, GUSD etc. I find the industry and regulatory overreaction puzzling, surely these issues have been explored before? The "But it's Facebook!" argument disingenuous, any one of the popular chat app has, or can replicate this experiment (Wechat, Telegram, Slack, Kak…

It's not just Facebook though it's also Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and PayPal (along with a handful of capital companies I don't recognize right off the bat and a couple that are probably large payment providers in their own country I don't recognize, eg Meracdo Pago and PayU). If Bitcoin had come out of the gate with the world's major payment processors already signed on you bet people would have paid way more attention from the start.

Re: Regulators Have Doubts About Facebook Cryptocurrency, and So Do Its Partners

#72

Post by jshowa3 »

lammalamma25 wrote: post #13

Call me dumb for saying this, but I can go to a casino or chuck e. cheese and trade in USD for chips I use at their location. I could take those chips somewhere else if I wanted to and use them with anyone willing to take them. Why is Libra so upsetting? Isn't it the same thing? It seems to me like criticizing Facebook is just the fashionable response to it right now.

The upsetting part, to me anyway, is not that it uses blockchain. It's because:

a) not a true crypto-currency because it's centralized

b) such currencies are not regulated yet in the slightest

c) the centralized authority is a consortium of private corporations of which one, Facebook, is providing the entire infrastructure

d) Facebook is known to not handle data appropriately and is not well regulated when it comes to privacy and data protection

e) I haven't seen any method to allow other people to invest or directly convert the money back to nation currencies which makes it easy for the consortium to just decide to pull the plug and exit scam with no insurance for people who bought Libra

f) The consortium have essentially become a bank out of thin air and that comes with a whole slew of regulatory issues

Re: Regulators Have Doubts About Facebook Cryptocurrency, and So Do Its Partners

#73

Post by snarf21 »

lammalamma25 wrote: post #13

Call me dumb for saying this, but I can go to a casino or chuck e. cheese and trade in USD for chips I use at their location. I could take those chips somewhere else if I wanted to and use them with anyone willing to take them. Why is Libra so upsetting? Isn't it the same thing? It seems to me like criticizing Facebook is just the fashionable response to it right now.

The whole cryptocurrency part is just misdirection and a red herring so they can claim that it is "decentralized". This is a banking consortium and they want to leverage the FB network effect to rent seek on cross border payments and the unbanked.

The problem with your analogy is that unlike your CeC tokens, the FB Mafia completely controls whether you can give them to someone else or not. You can't trade them on their (fake) blockchain to someone else if they say no and without making a direct payment to the FB Mafia. It is also likely you can't even try to do the exchange without using the FB Mafia's wallet application. There is no physical thing that can be exchanged like with your tokens. They have also said they will comply with any government regulations. So if someone reports your CeC tokens as stolen, the FB Mafia can just steal them back and you have no recourse.

Re: Regulators Have Doubts About Facebook Cryptocurrency, and So Do Its Partners

#74

Post by inetknght »

dageshi wrote: post #61
ses1984 wrote: post #60

Can anyone imagine laundering dirty money through purchasing apps and stickers that are just fronts? Suddenly Facebook becoming complicit in the drug trade, terrorism, human trafficking, like HSBC.

This has been happening for years with Valve videogames, so far as I know it hasn't been limited or cracked down on.

Do you have more information on that?

Re: Regulators Have Doubts About Facebook Cryptocurrency, and So Do Its Partners

#75

Post by ryanlol »

dageshi wrote: post #61
ses1984 wrote: post #60

Can anyone imagine laundering dirty money through purchasing apps and stickers that are just fronts? Suddenly Facebook becoming complicit in the drug trade, terrorism, human trafficking, like HSBC.

This has been happening for years with Valve videogames, so far as I know it hasn't been limited or cracked down on.

I think you’re misrepresenting things. Credit card fraud is not terrorism.

There’s a plenty of illegal activity related to Valve games, but it’s not the kind mentioned in the parent (drug trade, terrorism, human trafficking). Not at any meaningful scale anyway.

Re: Regulators Have Doubts About Facebook Cryptocurrency, and So Do Its Partners

#76

Post by salawat »

lammalamma25 wrote: post #13

Call me dumb for saying this, but I can go to a casino or chuck e. cheese and trade in USD for chips I use at their location. I could take those chips somewhere else if I wanted to and use them with anyone willing to take them. Why is Libra so upsetting? Isn't it the same thing? It seems to me like criticizing Facebook is just the fashionable response to it right now.

There is also the whole issue surrounding the aggregation of things like location data or traffic analysis via Facebook's tendency to data vacuum combined with the right tooling around the blockchain.

Essentially, what you'd be doing by embracing Libra is giving Facebook access to one of the few types of information about you that they can't access by law. Throw in the extra creepiness of the inevitable forensic accounting services to governments the world over, and you've basically turned Facebook into something with damn near panoptiv capabilities if there isn't some serious revamps to how customer data is mandated to be treated.

Re: Regulators Have Doubts About Facebook Cryptocurrency, and So Do Its Partners

#77

Post by Kurtz79 »

mtnGoat wrote: post #69
Kurtz79 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general audience of Facebook has very little overlap with HN commenters.

Average HN commenter is bright enough to close their account year ago?

Correct. But the general FB audience cares much less (if at all) about their privacy than the general HN audience.

If you were to estimate FB's health as a company based on HN comments only, it should have been dead and buried long ago.

Re: Regulators Have Doubts About Facebook Cryptocurrency, and So Do Its Partners

#78

Post by xur17 »

mtnGoat wrote: post #67
logifail wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a "reward point" Are there reward points that you a) actually own, b) have a formal value, and/or c) are allowed to trade? For instance: https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/executive-club/terms-an... "21.1. Avios points, and all rights of title to and property in such Avios points issued at any time, remain with AGL at all times and never pass to the Member. 22.1. [...] Avios points are not transferable [...] 22.2…

Most hotel and airline miles allow for C. It might cost a fee to transfer them but that's the same with any monetary transfer. I can sell them as well on a few marketplaces online, so they have an agreed value as well. Most importantly, because I can sell and trade them... Does that not make them mine?

> Most hotel and airline miles allow for C. It might cost a fee to transfer them but that's the same with any monetary transfer.

While true, in a lot of cases it ends up costing almost as much as they are worth to transfer them, so I'd argue it's different.

Re: Regulators Have Doubts About Facebook Cryptocurrency, and So Do Its Partners

#79

Post by StavrosK »

This is semi-unrelated, and I've kind of lost hope of cryptocurrencies ever achieving popularity (since all everyone seems to do with them is speculate), but I recently came across a page explaining Stellar and it seems to me like it's the best of all worlds (decentralized, fast confirmations, inflationary, no mining, etc).

Does anyone know what the downsides are? I haven't been able to find any posted anywhere, but I don't trust something until I've seen the cons, so I'm wondering if anyone here has looked into it.

Re: Regulators Have Doubts About Facebook Cryptocurrency, and So Do Its Partners

#80

Post by woah »

StavrosK wrote: post #79

This is semi-unrelated, and I've kind of lost hope of cryptocurrencies ever achieving popularity (since all everyone seems to do with them is speculate), but I recently came across a page explaining Stellar and it seems to me like it's the best of all worlds (decentralized, fast confirmations, inflationary, no mining, etc). Does anyone know what the downsides are? I haven't been able to find any posted anywhere, but…

The whole network got taken down a couple months ago when a server run by the Stellar company crashed. Not very decentralized.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/stellar-node-outage-causes-tw...

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