France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra • Hacker News Board

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#251

Post by totalZero » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

dannyr wrote: post #90

I dislike Facebook but I kind of feel sorry for them now because any ambitious thing that they'll attempt will probably be blocked by governments now. Facebook and Zuckerberg deserves it though.

Let's be honest, just because something is ambitious doesn't mean it's good for the world. Facebook has tremendous impact on the world already, and events like the Cambridge Analytica scandal have demonstrated that Facebook can't manage its own empire.

After a company grows beyond its ability to maintain order within its own activities, it should always prune down toward its essential businesses and reform itself before the next stage of growth. Facebook is trying to do the opposite by extending to currency instead of resolving its existing problems.

I don't feel sorry for Zuckerberg.

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#252

Post by tastroder » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #46

freddie_mercury wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you think this is so hard? You pass a law. Most people don't break the law. You make it illegal for banks to transfer to known Libra things. You audit people. You apply big fines. Murder is illegal but that doesn't mean nobody can commit murder .

If Libra becomes a thing, I would guess people will start selling things with it and Europeans will sell their services with Libra if Americans ell their services with Libra. Maybe in Germany, most people will stay away from it but in Bulgaria, Spain, Italy etc. - in places where people are more "relaxed" about the law enforcement will not miss business opportunities just because their rich neighbours can afford to m…

I'm one of these European users. An American shop only offering payments via Libra would end up the same fate as American shops that don't offer PayPal or another convenient payment method do right now. Why would I even remotely want this? These crypto threads make it out like it's the second coming, we have a more or less functioning financial system and even if it's broken I would not trust Facebook of all companies to offer up a better, global, alternative.

The forming of a financial underworld in the Eurozone is pretty doubtful in my mind. Sure, enforcement varies country by country but if this would get a big enough problem we also have international efforts in the EU to get rid of it. Worst case somebody gets a data dump in lieu of Swiss tax evasion dumps on CDs a few years in and the laws against it get even stricter.

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#253

Post by asveikau » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:02 PM UTC

I thought it was irresponsible of FB to announce this thing. All over the world the question is not whether or not to regulate Facebook. It is how to do so. So, it strikes me as some kind of supreme arrogance or dishonesty to announce a currency without expecting it to be immediately shut down by governments. How does this pass internal review?

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#254

Post by nijynot » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:04 PM UTC

Libra is not all that bad. While there are problems with Facebook gaining yet another source for information that takes advantage of privacy terms, I think a stablecoin by GAFA is in the right direction. It speeds up the adoption of cryptocurrency by a lot.

Paypal and other "digital cash" solutions are fully centralized which makes it impossible for devs to build on top of their platform. This means that problems that arise cannot be solved by devs looking at the problem from the outside.

Libra gets around this by having an open platform that anyone can build on. Anyone can create a Libra wallet, and anyone can build Libra services. If we have a big privacy problem with Libra in the future, we might be able to find a way around it. Libra supports scripting on-chain which would make atomic swaps possible. If something like atomic swaps are possible, can we hide information from Facebook et al? Or what about mixing Libra on-chain?

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#255

Post by Erlich_Bachman » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:05 PM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #192

bongobongo wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Think this is less about liberalism (it doesn't argue for government to be run like a business) and more about US-inspired thinking where businesses are better than governments.

Not arguing with the statement, but note to you: he said "libertarianism", not "liberalism". The two are obviously very different.

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#256

Post by KhoomeiK » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:05 PM UTC

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #225

I'm of course not familiar with the specific mindsets and the history of this decision, but I want to share a bit of cultural perspective from Germany that is so far not really considered in this comment section: Germany is very, very keen on preventing powerful entities from acting outside of regulation and similarly, if not more, on preventing a single entity to get in control of everything. This is largely due to…

> Germany is very, very keen on preventing powerful entities from acting outside of regulation and similarly, if not more, on preventing a single entity to get in control of everything. This is largely due to some foobar in the last century, which I'm sure everyone is aware of.

Ironic that aforementioned foobar in the last century was a governmental entity that existed entirely within the limits of regulation. Not to mention the completely reckless monetary policy of the Weimar Republic with respect to the Papiermark that arguably caused the rise of Nazi Germany.

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#257

Post by Erlich_Bachman » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:06 PM UTC

r00fus wrote: post #239

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin has no Facebook-sized entity That is exactly the point. That would be a threat as they see it (just from reading the statement even). That's why bitcoin which is not a private entity, is not seen as a threat at this time.

mrb's comment that "we will block Libra and we will not block Bitcoin* as some sort of tacit approval is bullshit. Bitcoin is tolerated because it's not centralized, and no one (obvious) entity is controlling it. If the EU governments could, they totally would ban Bitcoin. Libra, on the other hand, is a power grab by someone they can regulate, so they will.

So you're basically agreeing with the parent comment? (Just have some disagreement about governments underlying motivations?)

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#258

Post by arcticbull » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:06 PM UTC

Qasaur wrote: post #243

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #225

I'm of course not familiar with the specific mindsets and the history of this decision, but I want to share a bit of cultural perspective from Germany that is so far not really considered in this comment section: Germany is very, very keen on preventing powerful entities from acting outside of regulation and similarly, if not more, on preventing a single entity to get in control of everything. This is largely due to…

Ironic that the German government wants to avoid irresponsible monetary policy through a private entity when it is literally printing money to stimulate growth through the ECB.

Monetary and fiscal policy is not the same as us balancing a checkbook at the end of the month. Money is created over time for many reasons, on a micro scale for stimulus, and on a macro scale because the economy grows over time and money represents a slice of economic activity. Keeping it from going up and giving disproportionate gains to money holders past is part of the job. There's nothing ironic about it, this is the job of central banks, and there's nothing shady about it.

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#259

Post by yxhuvud » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:06 PM UTC

Avamander wrote: post #26

aniforprez wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AH the bit about the goal being to make payments fast makes a ton of sense. The rest of the world has left the US in the dust with extremely fast payments systems. In India, the UPI system has taken the country by storm with direct,instant bank-to-bank money transfers which take seconds to complete and have no fees attached for the consumer

Europe has SEPA (Instant). The Chinese have WeChat Pay and similar? I'm curious, what other solutions other countries have?

Sweden have a thing called Swish which has instant transfer to anyone who you the mobile phone number of. End users have no fees when using the system to transfer to each others. Businesses that use it pay some though.

It has gotten very prevalent.

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#260

Post by Qasaur » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:07 PM UTC

I think this action is a symptom of a much larger, and much more serious disease, namely the fall in trust for traditional fiat currencies like the euro and the dollar. Decades of irresponsible monetary policy and runaway inflation (CPI does not capture the whole picture, look at asset prices the past decade) since the abolishment of the gold standard has lead the general public to indirectly feel disenfranchised with the current monetary regime and I truly believe that we will see more of this kind of action in the future as fiat currencies continue to lose value and eventually collapse due to the extraordinary injection of money that most western central banks have been pursuing in the past couple of years.

Governments feel threatened as the power to levy the inflation tax is being eroded with the rise of cryptocurrency, and I think the next couple of years are going to be very interesting as more businesses adopt crypto as a means of payment. And I wholeheartedly support this development, because much of the inequality that we've seen in recent years and general social turmoil is a direct consequence of irresponsible monetary policy.