Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 359 posts

Re: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project

#241

Post by bad_user »

lucasverra wrote: post #236
te_chris wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like the eur, usd, aud, nzd, gbp, jpy? That sort of stable and reliable currency with a strong banking infrastructure?

yeah, those are the ones you can't sent 2 or 3 units of abroad in a minute by chat, where the receiver is not taxed 2-5%

There are newer services like Revolut proving that it can be done.

All you need is somebody's phone number and the transfer is instant and with no taxes. You can also exchange currency at the interbank exchange rate during the week. And transferring that money to your local bank account is also free of taxes.

Not sure if Revolut will last, but I've been very happy with it.

Re: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project

#242

Post by asjw »

lucasverra wrote: post #236
te_chris wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like the eur, usd, aud, nzd, gbp, jpy? That sort of stable and reliable currency with a strong banking infrastructure?

yeah, those are the ones you can't sent 2 or 3 units of abroad in a minute by chat, where the receiver is not taxed 2-5%

Why should I send 2 or 3 euros to someone over a chat?

In Europe I can authorize a seller to directly take money from my account, if it's money for someone I trust (family, close friends) I can give them my prepaid credit card number and charge it with just the amount they need

Do you really think that Libra would make this simpler?

Re: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project

#243

Post by concordDance »

echelon wrote: post #6
justinzollars wrote: post #3

I'm actually kind of bummed out about this. I may not like FB, but I like the idea of a digital currency backed by a floating basket of currencies.

Not one that isn't regulated and that is controlled by a company with a penchant for walking the legal gray area line.

Better than one regulated and controlled by USGOV. An entity with so many evil acts in its past and present it's a meme.

Re: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project

#244

Post by repolfx »

vertex-four wrote: post #123
southerndrift wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How else can facebook prevent people from moving on to wechat with its internal payment system? Why should people stick to facebook if wechat can offer a whole bunch of services that need (micro) transactions?

Facebook can have an internal payment system that uses local currencies. There is no reason it needs to create its own currency, except as a power grab. Building out a Paypal clone is fine enough.

How can it be a power grab, Libra was going to be at least an open system with it's own wallet protocols and market for implementations. A WeChat style system would be totally closed from the ground up.

Re: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project

#245

Post by repolfx »

shakkhar wrote: post #153

I have no interest in Libra, but the fact that government basically bullied these companies out of this initiative is alarming. If the regulators think that they should scrutinize these companies deeper, being involved in Libra should not matter. It's like saying, "withdraw from Libra and we'll continue to look the other way on your sketchy non-Libra activities".

Regulators have very little to do with how law is meant to work in theory, especially in the USA. Financial regulators are pure extensions of arbitrary government power: they can make up new laws on the fly without Congress, and many rules are phrased vaguely enough that anyone could be violating them if they want it that way.

Basically financial regulators can fine or imprison anyone in the financial system at any time for any reason or even no reason, unaccountably so. Not surprisingly this power gets abused. These firms were told they would be attacked and punished for working with Facebook, so of course they baked away.

Re: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project

#246

Post by jbverschoor »

lucasverra wrote: post #236
te_chris wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like the eur, usd, aud, nzd, gbp, jpy? That sort of stable and reliable currency with a strong banking infrastructure?

yeah, those are the ones you can't sent 2 or 3 units of abroad in a minute by chat, where the receiver is not taxed 2-5%

My revolut transaction for eur->cad didn't arrive. Now I have to pull all strings at bth banks to figure out what happened.

Re: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project

#247

Post by repolfx »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #152
jeremyjh wrote: post #31

It looks like a misstep followed by a hasty and ignominious retreat because thats exactly what happened - no one anticipated the reaction from lawmakers and rules agencies. Its kind of hard to see this from the perspective of people who follow tech and HN, but Libra really may have been the first occasion that the possibility of crypto as anything other than an investment instrument - e.g. an actual usage as currency…

> no one anticipated the reaction from lawmakers and rules agencies Everyone should have anticipated that reaction. Finance is filled with smart people trying to pull fast ones. Regulators and lawmakers are sensitive to being blindsided, moreso with anti-money laundering. The moment I saw the announcement I knew they screwed up. So did everyone in D.C. who isn’t selling blockchain consulting. It was hamfistedly intro…

That's a very D.C. mentality. In law there isn't meant to be a "wrong people" or "wrong time". Either something is illegal, or it's not. But the rule of law is very weak these days, especially given the huge bloat of regulations on the book in America related to AML.

Re: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project

#248

Post by grey-area »

starfallg wrote: post #238
grey-area wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people who work at large banks, they work nothing like a tech company. Tech/IT is seen as a cost centre, often outsourced, and if not outsourced performed by disillusioned teams with neither influence nor autonomy. The back end of big banks is a huge mess of legacy systems, they had to be forced to adopt open banking, and the leadership don’t recognise that everything will be software soon. They are the antith…

> I know people who work at large banks, they work nothing like a tech company. > Tech/IT is seen as a cost centre, often outsourced, and if not outsourced performed by disillusioned teams with neither influence nor autonomy. That may be true, but how people work is beside the point. That's a question of culture and dependent on the industry and it's maturity. Yes, it may make or break individual companies, but on th…

That may be true, but how people work is beside the point.

I disagree.

Re: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project

#249

Post by asjw »

grey-area wrote: post #229
starfallg wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I see it as inevitable and, for the reasons you point out, not too difficult, as the incumbents are sclerotic and unable to grasp the importance of software. It's not inevitable at all. This is because (retail) banks operate more or less in the same way in their back office. The change is the front office - retail branches are being replaced with apps. But they have seen this before - with telephone and online banki…

I know people who work at large banks, they work nothing like a tech company. Tech/IT is seen as a cost centre, often outsourced, and if not outsourced performed by disillusioned teams with neither influence nor autonomy. The back end of big banks is a huge mess of legacy systems, they had to be forced to adopt open banking, and the leadership don’t recognise that everything will be software soon. They are the antith…

I worked for large banks and fintech startups

It's true banks don't work like tech companies, it is also true that tech companies don't work like bank and the 100% of them failed to replace banks, because banks are more trustworthy when it's about client'money safety.

legacy systems are a good thing, it means they already solved a lot of edge cases and been working good enough for years (or tens of years)

The new shiny toy might look good, but if it does 1/20 of what's needed by the business, it's useless.

I work now in insurance, evolving legacy systems to new technologies, legacy systems suck, but they are also rock solid and a lot of things they do are vital for the company and, more often than not, save people's jobs.

A lot of rules we don't understand are there to avoid abuses

I'm working on a system that's offline from 11pm to 7am to avoid that agents created insurance policies over night making unfair competition to real agencies with offices, employees and regulated opening hours.

It's been put there probably 20 years ago, it looks silly now, but it served a purpose

In one year I've been able to replace alone maybe 1/30 of what the main legacy system does. Which, btw, sometimes still calls an even more legacy system on the backend, just like my system exposes what the new system still doesn't handle as a safer wrapper to the legacy one. It's a good pace, we have proved it can be done without breaking the workflow, now it's time to accelerate and build a little team around the project.

Evolution is layered, disruption is a jouvenile sin and usually it is bad for company's workers more than for companies.

Re: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project

#250

Post by kuschku »

lucasverra wrote: post #236
te_chris wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like the eur, usd, aud, nzd, gbp, jpy? That sort of stable and reliable currency with a strong banking infrastructure?

yeah, those are the ones you can't sent 2 or 3 units of abroad in a minute by chat, where the receiver is not taxed 2-5%

Why not? Thanks to SEPA ICT I can send up to 15'000€ in less than 10 seconds — actually faster than Bitcoin or anything else — to anyone else in the EU.

Why would I need to use Libra or anything else, what does it provide me that normal money doesn't?

Why should a broken commercial currency with surveillance integration be used globally just because the US payment situation is broken?

Post reply on HN