I don't think an interesting cryptocurrency will ever come out of the US , they have the dollar.
So you reject the hypothesis that the NSA developed bitcoin?
Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
41–50 of 425 posts
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#42Sometimes those names make you wonder. Is it a bad attempt at name squatting? As in diem25? So that all the kids will think of FB currency first, when they hear diem25? Or is it the latin word "diem"? Did they mean to write "dime" and have a typo? And of course in typical FB fashion, the website will be garbage, if you don't allow all their abusive scripts.
Yup, FB is primarily attempting to subvert a fringe European political movement.
Well, I wouldn't put it past them, since they are quite anti-democratic in their nature.
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#43The whole “unbanked” thing is really unconvincing, because there's no way Libra/Diem will be usable for people who don't have identity documents and the evidence needed for KYC/AML forms, and that excludes most unbanked people.
As for international money transfers: TransferWise and the like are already providing better solutions in that space without forcing you to use Facebook Coins. Now you might say that mostly caters to the rich world, and that's true, but the people who can't use TransferWise are probably not going to be able to use Libra/Diem either for the same reasons they can't use TransferWise: ID documents, KYC/AML, plus capital controls and sanction regimes which aren't magically going to disappear for this new currency.
It won't provide one of the few benefits of Bitcoin etc either, namely the ability to make illegal transactions more easily.
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#44I don't think an interesting cryptocurrency will ever come out of the US , they have the dollar.
Maybe Facebook sees that the US dollar will no longer be the reserve currency one day relatively soon?
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#45Libra was interesting. With their basket of currencies and easily programmable contracts, it was a semi-unique project in crypto space. Over the months, their ambition has been cut a lot by regulators. No more basket of currencies, now just US Dollar. At this point I'm not sure there's any benefit to it being on the blockchain either.
> Over the months, their ambition has been cut a lot by regulators.
I don't see how this is a surprise. Facebook basically wanted to take monetary sovereignty away from states and give control to private companies. What did they expect? Especially when right now people are noticing the reach Facebook has into our lives and how irresponsibly they're acting with it. Why would any sane person give Facebook any more control over their lives?
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#46Wow. They really want to get away from the facebook brand. Zero mentions of Libra or facebook, despite the fact it was renamed only a few days ago. Not even in the FAQs.
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#47Libra was interesting. With their basket of currencies and easily programmable contracts, it was a semi-unique project in crypto space. Over the months, their ambition has been cut a lot by regulators. No more basket of currencies, now just US Dollar. At this point I'm not sure there's any benefit to it being on the blockchain either.
The website still says "The Diem payment system will support single-currency stablecoins (e.g., ≋USD, ≋EUR, and ≋GBP) and a multi-currency coin (≋XDM)."
Is that no longer true? I'm not sure if the website is up to date.
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#48Libra was interesting. With their basket of currencies and easily programmable contracts, it was a semi-unique project in crypto space. Over the months, their ambition has been cut a lot by regulators. No more basket of currencies, now just US Dollar. At this point I'm not sure there's any benefit to it being on the blockchain either.
Was there ever any benefit to using a blockchain - other than marketing BS, of course? It was always Facebook (or their chosen partners) who controlled the coin, so the blockchain was pointless - there never was any decentralized trust, as I understand it?
Blockchain has a zinger name, but it's useless when real-world applications are in play. It is slow and energy inefficient. Considering that it got "reset" by the owners once after a divergence, it's not that "decentralized". It has a group that controls it.
Secondly, it's definitely not secure in the sense that is advertised. Aside from regular social engineering and old-school hacks to get people's tokens, governments have been successful in tracing transections in investigations. That's how SilkRoad got got, and recently Japan did it as well.
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#49Article title at the time of this post, in case HN editors change it: > Diem - A rebrand of Facebook Libra Understanding who is behind this is extremely relevant.
Pretty scary that there is almost no mention of Facebook on the website (only in the logo of Novi, the wallet app for Diem by Facebook).
I'm wondering if all involvement in Diem at Facebook goes through Novi, and with that the members section is "truthful" (though still obfuscating the involvement), and/or if they will cherry-pick which companies appear on the list of members based on how good/bad their image is.
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was there ever any benefit to using a blockchain - other than marketing BS, of course? It was always Facebook (or their chosen partners) who controlled the coin, so the blockchain was pointless - there never was any decentralized trust, as I understand it?
"Blockchain" in some sense can also be seen as a programming framework where you have a common set of functionality that people know how to work with and can gain a transferable skill set with. Similar to how MVC knowledge is to some degree transferable between Rails and Django. So in that regard I wouldn't immediately dismiss a usage of a blockchain as pointless. Given that PoA chains are usually pretty efficient, t…
We normally call that an 'API', no chains of blocks required!