Of course, some random african lady on the front page, look how progressive people behind Diem are
Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
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Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#52Earlier 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…
I would rather people learned the basics of RDBM's and concepts like "primary keys", "indexes". The kids these days depend on that stuff being hidden from them by CPU/disk speeds and ORMs. If they can't get the concepts of a technology they are most likely to encounter in their day jobs, what chance do they have with Blockchain, considering that it is NOT a trivial thing.
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#53Of course, some random african lady on the front page, look how progressive people behind Diem are
They claim to care about the “unbanked” so it's fitting surely?
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#54Sometimes 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.
I thought of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngo_Dinh_Diem
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#55FB’s brand is suffering. They understand this themselves obviously. It’s best to liberate new products from the word “facebook” and make it appear as a seperate entity. That’s basically what this is.
I’m not sure about that. Whatsapp and Instagram are going in the opposite direction, they added Facebook in the Splash Screen.
Interestingly too, I noticed the box for their Oculus Quests only subtly display the FB connection. And on the recent model, using a different/new 'thinner, all-caps' logo.
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#56Ok, so let's focus on the underlying idea, without the "Facebook is trying to rebrand their evil brand" cruft.
Basically, I think the underlying idea is valuable - low-cost, fast, reliable, accessible money transfers - clearly something missing right now in this world, even for the "global rich" (citizens of first-world countries), let alone for the "unbanked". It could even scale even more to a money store but that's basically being a bank, which is related but somewhat orthogonal (e.g. both Revolut and TransferWise started as mostly money-sending services and are now moving towards the "bank" stage).
So, my thoughts / questions are the following:
1) Is there a reason this is tied to the blockchain? For most purposes, blockchain without proof of work is just a glorified git repository, and I'm pretty sure that not even the most law-abiding citizens want all their transactions to be public.
2) Is there a reason this would be tied to a company, instead of being run by e.g. a charity? I understand why Facebook / Apple might be more successful with launching this than e.g. TransferWise (they can utilize their platform to push this (or any other) idea to a massive userbase), but really there's no underlying reason why you'd want this to be run by a non-financial company (and an ad ("use people's data to manipulate them") company) and many reasons why you wouldn't want to comingle your financial data with the likes of Facebook / Google / Apple.
3) Why a "new currency" ("stablecoin")? I understand that it might have some desirable properties but I'm pretty sure that most people would be negatively surprised if their "stable" coins started losing value (in terms of their local currency). Also, I'd say that most people don't even care/think about "FX rates" etc. and those that do are mainly currency traders / "speculators". So I envision the "ideal" system to be basically just an app displaying "sending 100EUR to person A in country Z will cost you 0.3% and the payment will arrive in 20 minutes" and the other person seeing "person B sent you 8919 INR".
4) I'm sure there are many issues with fraud/reversible transactions/KYC/anti-terrorism/anti-money-laundering that would need to be resolved somehow.
I think this is an ideal case scenario for a charity - an almost-government (non-profit, "for the people") organisation handling an area of "social tech" that global governments aren't tackling (because they aren't incentivized to) but fundamentally all the pieces of technology are there.
If anyone is interested in funding / founding such an organization, let me know.
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#57The 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 ca…
> The 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.
Who says the countries this will be used in have KYC/AML? The unbanked people this would be for aren't in countries that have those laws.
> 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.
Can't use transferwise, so can't use something else.
This isn't aimed at people who can use banking where KYC or AML apply. It's for people who are curently using other unbanking payment methods.
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#58Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#59Interestingly hosted by Wordpress.com (VIP).
Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
#60Anything by Facebook is a no. Anything cryptocurrency by Facebook is a double, triple, quadruple no.