Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple and Google are still dealing with merchant fees. So is PayPal for many transactions. A PayPal style system might work, but it is only low-cost low-friction (the main appeal for crypto) for the transactions that occur completely within it's own ecosystem. And they don't call it a currency, so they dodge some issues there. Paypal also dodges issues of "being a bank" because funds equivalent to customer balances a…
So, what stops Facebook from trying to push Libra everywhere and then bowing out in the countries it doesn't take hold in? I doubt that many developing countries would be able to shut the door on them. It might even be a boon for those developing countries, because it could enable trade between them without some heavy fees in converting currency.
Paypal Withdraws from Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency
281–290 of 293 posts
Re: Paypal Withdraws from Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure Crypto backed by a particular company might not happen, but I don’t see BTC and similar P2P blockchain currencies going anywhere. It’s about as easy to stop as digital piracy, which is to say in other words physically impossible to regulate.
The US has a tremendous amount of power in the world financial system. If they want to inhibit crypto currencies, they can make it illegal to use credit cards to buy them, illegal for US banks to transfer to or from an exchange, and illegal for US banks to deal with any bank in any country that allows such activity, or any bank that deals with another bank that allows it.
They can't make it illegal to work for cryptocurrencies. Or to spend them for digital services like content, anonymous server hosting, or paying people for work. It's just not possible without destroying cryptography itself
Re: Paypal Withdraws from Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think any of this is desirable. For me, it's similar to digital voting, I have strong technical concerns with crypto currencies. The cryptography behind them or the implementations will be broken. People claim that it's different now than it used to be. Every cryptographic system of the past has been broken, but now we have the computing power to make them future proof. There are no mathematical proofs for th…
how is this different than getting a bank mainframe hacked?
It's a difference of scale. A single bank is less likely to drag down a whole economy and might even be insured against certain types of losses due to criminal activities. In contrast to this, if the value of a whole currency is destroyed over night, then the consequences are way more severe. Bear in mind that currency speculations and transactions can even get traditional currencies into trouble, see e.g. what happened in Argentinia.
Re: Paypal Withdraws from Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can't convert your bitcoin into fiat, then your only option is to use your btcs to purchase goods and services directly, which would further disincentivize businesses from accepting bitcoin as a form of payment. And if you can't send fiat to an exchange, you can't increase your holdings.
You could simply convert bitcoin into fiat in the 200+ other countries that are not the United States.
This would require you to open a foreign bank account, which you must tell the U.S. government about. Not telling them is a serious crime. See the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act
Re: Paypal Withdraws from Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody actually uses bitcoin in the US for anything besides investment speculation and really rare toy applications. It isn't being seen as a threat to anybody's central bank, because for all its enthusiasts and speculators, it hasn't developed into any sort of competition for the existing financial system unless you are doing something really illicit.
It's been a little over 10 years since the first bitcoins were mined and today's market cap is $147,490,754,701. Given that there are now bitcoin investment products like ETFs, some folks have a portion of their 401k's invested in bitcoin. It certainly will be competition for central banks, especially in countries where the monetary policy is kinda wacky, like Venezuela, where bitcoin is breaking usage records. Here'…
> It certainly will be competition for central banks, especially in countries where the monetary policy is kinda wacky, like Venezuela, where bitcoin is breaking usage records.
Zimbabwe also: https://qz.com/africa/1662753/bitcoin-crypto-soar-in-zimbabw...
There's really quite an opportunity here for Bitcoin to help people in these countries leap their financial markets forward a few stages in development: https://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/f12930a4-a78b-43c0-9fe1-...
Re: Paypal Withdraws from Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree with your general point but I think Apple and Amazon are clear examples of big corps that have continued to innovate. My hypothesis is that companies with CEOs able to stay close to the end users and keep a product focus are able to counterbalance the main problem with big companies - that their decision makers are no longer close to their customers. I think they’re exceptions though.
Can you mention biggest Apple or Amazon innovations in the last 10 years that: 1. Are not incremental, or just leveraging existing business to obvious directions. 2. originated internally 3. turned into big profitable business.
I have no idea where your criteria come from.
But a few obvious massive innovations from both once established as large companies: Kindle, Alexa, AWS, iMac, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch. AWS alone is enough of a counterexample to make my point.
Re: Paypal Withdraws from Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sending money across "borders" is hard only because governments made it so On the contrary, it's much easier than it has ever been in human history to send money across borders, mostly due to government regulation of international finance. For the absurdly wealthy, such regulation is a major pain of course. But the thing about the absurdly wealthy is... they can afford to deal with major pains. For the rest of the…
> would you rather have your money be regulated by your local government and the governments of those you wish to trade with, or would you rather have your money be regulated by Facebook? This is a false dichotomy: blockchain tech makes it clear that a third possibility is emerging - one which relies on no central authority at all, be it state or corporate.
The third option, despite not having a "central authority" seems to have been widely hijacked.
What we know about economics seems to fly in the face of design decisions repeated again and again by cryptocurrency originators.
The popularity of deflationary economics (maximum coin counts, diminishing mining rewards) incentivizes economic rictus-- eternal hoarding and austerity-- when basically every central bank on Earth recognizes that a modest, predictable inflation rate helps to spur consumer demand and actual economic activity. This is not some conspiracy to undermine your gold sovereigns and silver dollars, it's a century of data in action.
Then you've got the tendency to stick to unsavoury communities. While some of this may be because they're the funding method of last resort for businesses that can't touch conventional payment systems (criminal or just radioactively controversial), there does seem to be an active prioritization of privacy, unreversibility, and immunity from regulation features, over features non-enthusiast consumers want like "easy cashin/out to fiat" and "fraud protection".
If you said "here's a shiny happy new tech product. It's not designed as a treatise on the gold standard, to spar with governments, or create some speculative investment. It's just about using 21st century technology to undercut the high margins of Visa, Mastercard, and Western Union", that would hit real needs. But it would be 1) hard to bootstrap because there would be no philosophically or investment motivated enthusiasts to evangelize for it and 2) likely very different in structure and operation than today's cryptocurrency products. It might not even be a blockchain-crypto product, and it might even be outright ran by a state agency.
Re: Paypal Withdraws from Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Imagine being unable to buy food because an algorithm determined that “you violated our community standards” and there’s no way to contact them Not to defend Facebook in any way but, isn't that already the case with a bank system automatically blocking your card for no valid reason and no way to call them over the weekend for example? (happened to me a few times)
This is why I'm against a cacheless society as it becomes too easy to lock someone out of society, being it a bug, algorithm, network downtime, or abuse. And for the platform to automatically draw money for arbitrary reasons like fees or because you forgot to push some buttons in their web interface. And then you have to pay a percentage in all transactions and probably also a monthly fee. And the platform will keep…
cashless doesn’t mean always online.
Prepaid wallets with offline/anonymous use are a thing, already used for over a decade in some countries. It’s not easy to build in any way, but it’s already a reality.
Re: Paypal Withdraws from Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency
#289Libra can be a good idea, but probably not from Facebook. What Facebook lacks among Big Techs the most, is public trust. In an era where anything from Big Techs are meticulously scrutinized, something that seems to aim to bypass government regulation is probably the last thing people want.
What I don’t understand is, the whole point of using blockchain technology is it doesn’t matter who creates it, as long as the code does what it intend to do, there are no trust needed. (Assuming Libra eventually actually become a decentralized network)
Libra isn't designed to become decentralized.
It's a rent seeking scheme.
Libra is meant to hold an fiat backing balance by users putting money in. Facebook gets to reap 100% of the interest on said fiat with no money going to users, ever. They document it as such in their "whitepaper".
It's basically a scheme to create serfs.
Re: Paypal Withdraws from Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Imagine being unable to buy food because an algorithm determined that “you violated our community standards” and there’s no way to contact them Not to defend Facebook in any way but, isn't that already the case with a bank system automatically blocking your card for no valid reason and no way to call them over the weekend for example? (happened to me a few times)
Your card isn't your account, just an avenue to getting at the money in your account, so it's not quite the same. I can go into a bank branch, or log into online banking and still access my money. I can also go into a branch or phone my bank and get my card unblocked. In all cases where my bank has blocked my card, they've been contactable (24/7), though to be honest, they've always contacted me in less than a minute…
Well in France I can tell you that bank services are a big joke, no one ever called me when my card was blocked, worst, most of the time they don't even know why the card doesn't work. Happened to me on multiple occasions with different banks in different regions in France.
And if you dare pointing out how incompetent they are they'll just close you account and leave you in the wild.