> portion of the investment return I'm not super on top of a lot of the details here, but I thought Libra was like a currency. What investment return?
The foundation and validators have various ways of making a return The users do not.
Sure but how is that an investment return? Usually when you hear "take a portion of the investment returns" you're thinking expense ratios, some small fraction of the returns that the user is getting.
If the user gets no additional returns, then it's just a fee, no?
There is a relatively low understanding among the public of how money is created and how the economy expands in today's modern economy after 1971 Gold standard deviation. If some part of the monetary system is taken over by something that is not money, it is almost impossible to be able to control the amount of money in circulation or inflation or the need for new government money will be uncalculatable. I can not co…
One key difference between a government issued currency and a distributed cryptocurrency is that the former is based on a promise and the latter is based on trust . A government issued currency is based on the promise [1] given by a state that this money must be accepted by everybody else. Everyone can enforce his rights by law. A distributed cryptocurrency is based on trust given mutually by the users. The trust rel…
It’s still “trust” in both cases. One must trust the power of the government making the promise, or rather the global system of governance.
> you can't risk to have anything even remotely approaching a monopoly in any part of the systems involved in making transactions. AFAIK US is a monopoly for international money transfer. You just cannot bypass a US intermediary bank and US Dollar conversion.
Even between EU countries? I wouldn't think so, but I'm no expert.
EU internal ones are likely an exception. Not an expert myself, it just consolidated in my mind as a fact from all the books and articles over the years.
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?
For domestic bank-to-bank payments, China has CNAPS https://www.bis.org/cpmi/publ/d105_cn.pdf [PDF] - the paper (2012) could be updated especially in regard to foreign currency.
tl;dr CNAPS is a bank-to-bank system, but in effect means domestic CNY transfers between major banks should settle within 30 minutes.
WeChat Pay / AliPay are a bit different, more like PayPal (though not completely like PayPal).
I feel there is a conflation here. Facebook is free to apply for a banking license in countries they want to operate as a bank in. Facebook shouldn’t be able to circumvent banking over site and regulations by coming in as a technology company with fancy words. The conflation here is Facebook isn’t being blocked form becoming a licensed bank in Germany - correct me if I’m wrong
But they don’t want to become a bank. They want to build a cryptocurrency. There are already hundreds of cryptocurrencies that operate in France and Germany, and the developers do not have to have banking licenses.
Even if they don't fall within the traditional banking definition, which I have doubts about, they'd at least play the role of the exchange or broker and as such are subject to, at least, authorization through BaFin in Germany. Random hipsters buying BTC privately and Facebook attempting to erode traditional currencies are two wildly different things.
I think the trend of demonopolizing currencies is unstoppable, just take time. I argue that this can be part of a new cold war dimension between countries and when some countries block financial initiatives others fund an opportunity. I wrote a little bit more about this vision in [1]. [1] https://blog.coinfabrik.com/libra-association-a-menace-and-a...
Perhaps a cryptocurrency is unstoppable, but Libra is the same as Visa. Banning Libra is like banning a company like Visa, it's not anything like banning Bitcoin which would be very hard indeed. > Libra will not rely on cryptocurrency mining. Only members of the Libra Association will be able to process transactions via the permissioned blockchain. (From Wikipedia) It's just a payment processor. I don't know why it's…
> “banning Bitcoin would be very hard indeed”
It’s hard to take crypto enthusiasts seriously because of delusions like this.
Banning bitcoin would be trivial: no legitimate business would accept it, making it useless except to fringe outlaws.
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…
Is it just another kind of foreign currency, not controlled by German government. The reason why bitcoin is popular is that people believe governments and central banks cannot be trusted, and they are evil anyway.
I understand why the governments do this, because they fear losing control.