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Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra

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Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra

#311

Post by notahacker »

jMyles wrote: post #278
noelsusman wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be good to free currency from government regulation? This is something I often see crypto advocates blow right past as if it's self explanatory, but I don't think it is. I like that the currency I use is managed by my government. Why should I want to switch?

> Why would it be good to free currency from government regulation? Obviously this is a huuuuge question, but it's such a good one. The simplest compact answer, at least to me (and it may in fact be an oversimplification) goes something like this: * Nearly invariably (and with a decreasing number of exceptions as technology advances), states which have control over both sides of the economic equation (ie, monetary co…

The problem with an argument that welfare states 'nearly invariably' devolve into empire is that even the most cursory examination of the world's welfare states makes it clear they nearly invariably don't.

The reverse argument actually works much better: throughout millenia of metallic standards countries regularly fought wars to plunder gold reserves from weaker states to repay their debts or boost their economy. And didn't even make enough from doing so to be able to afford welfare. Now they don't have to acquire shiny metal every time things are bad, they very seldom fight wars and even relinquished control over the empires they'd built under the gold standard. If there is a causal relationship between monetary systems and empire building, it's quite clear that it works the opposite way round and fiat money reduces the tendency to use military power in service of economic growth.

Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra

#312

Post by wlesieutre »

wpietri wrote: post #292
tomp wrote: post #56

Ok, 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'…

> Is there a reason this is tied to the blockchain? The only legitimate reason I can think of would be cynically drafting on the hype cycle. But I've been reading David Gerard's book Libra Shrugged [1] and it looks like the actual answer is that "blockchain" has a quasi-religious belief system built up around it, and the people involved are members of the faith. One of the stunning things for me about "blockchain" re…

Could just be thanks to technology office politicking. Some senior engineer or manager says "I want to work on blockchain projects", invents a reason to do that within Facebook, or maybe their boss really wants to keep them there, and somehow they get enough buy-in to create Libra. Now they have a blockchain project.

This seems more likely to me than someone at Facebook saying "We need a our own money system," evaluating blockchain against a centralized design, and deciding for technical reasons that Facebook Money should be a blockchain project.

Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra

#313

Post by ampdepolymerase »

baby wrote: post #140
tomp wrote: post #56

Ok, 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'…

1) think of it as a centralized database that needs replication, you’d be a bit worried if this central place got attacked, so then you need some gossip-based protocol in place to allow some users to police the system. Consensus is a simple one because it allows most users to trust that consensus was agreed on correctly, as opposed to systems like transparency protocols that require users to more willingly engage in…

If a sufficiently large nation state orders the companies involved to deny or override a transaction, is the gossip protocol/blockchain useful at all in denying this? Or is this one of those mechanisms only used for keeping out low level/underfunded attackers?

Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra

#314

Post by rognjen »

tomp wrote: post #56

Ok, 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'…

> Is there a reason this is tied to the blockchain?

Yes: so that Facebook can do as it wishes and not have to follow government financial regulation.

Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra

#315

Post by spurgu »

pavlov wrote: post #118
tomp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree. First of all, it's not "Europe" but rather "Euro-accounts" (so no cross-currency transfers). Also not that fast - don't work overnight, on the weekends, payments might take a day to arrive. I just checked - paying 10EUR from my UK account to the EUR area takes 2-4 days (I'd need to pay 15GBP for an "urgent" next- business -day transfer) (same rate as TransferWise) whereas if I want to send 10kEU…

The 250 GBP must be the exchange fee? If your account is in GBP and the destination is in EUR, the bank gets to charge you for the exchange. 2.5% is a typical rate. That's unfortunate, but is unrelated to the cost of transfer. Euro transfers have become instant and 24/7 thanks to the SEPA Instant Credit architecture: https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta... You can transfer up to 100k EUR in le…

My Revolut account is moving to Lithuania though. Are UK customers keeping their UK ones?

From experience with bank accounts from 4 different European countries those instant transfers definitely don't work everywhere and are often accompanied by an extra fee.

Edit: And this is 2020. I highly welcome some innovation in this field - five years ago..

Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra

#316

Post by MrsPeaches »

notahacker wrote: post #149
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #43

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. 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…

Even if those hurdles could be crossed, there's the hurdle of actually converting the unbanked to use their service. Unbanked people are unbanked because it's not profitable for local banks to convert them to customers , generally because they live in cash economies and don't have very much of it, and WU/Moneygram or the hawala service is difficult to beat on the last mile of remittances. M-PESA filled some gaps beca…

I know it's a bit frowned up but just wanted to say this is a great comment.

> as if the reason the unbanked were unbanked is because the local banks don't write whitepapers

Made me chuckle.

Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra

#317

Post by emteycz »

giovannibonetti wrote: post #268
grey-area wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK, I have low-cost, fast, reliable, accessible money transfers. Basic bank accounts are free, and come with reliable free instant transfers to any other UK bank. That may not be reality in all countries, but it is in many. That's quite a high bar for rival payment methods to clear, but I think the main problem for corporate currencies like this will be rivalry from government issuers. Governments jealously gu…

> In the UK, I have low-cost, fast, reliable, accessible money transfers. Basic bank accounts are free, and come with reliable free instant transfers to any other UK bank. That may not be reality in all countries, but it is in many. It is also a reality in Brazil. Last month the government and the banks released a standard money transfer protocol (PIX) which superseeds the other protocols (similar to ACH in USA). Che…

What about sending money out of Brazil, and non-permanent residents of Brazil?

Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra

#318

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

tsimionescu wrote: post #255
dmantis wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume that government is good and prohibited uses are bad. But your gov banned wikileaks bank accounts in the past and that is the perfect example of the case when the gov is definitely is a malicious actor (while their behaviour perfectly rational from their side of things). Govs do war crimes, mass espionage and human rights violations. That should be addressed as well.

Yes, but it should be addressed democratically - protests, lobbying your representatives, even voting. Inventing a new currency that is, for a little while, hard to track by the government isn't a real solution, it's just pretending the problem doesn't exist. The government is persecuting WikiLeaks financially because that is easy to do. Even if a cryptocurrency were to take off as a currency and still be untraceable…

> it should be addressed democratically - protests, lobbying your representatives, even voting.

That hasn't worked yet for Wikileaks. If this worked and/or was the best way to deal with the types of problems Wikileaks is exposing, there would be no need for Wikileaks to exist.

The reason Wikileaks does exist is because, typically, when we attempt to address atrocities "democratically" we get nowhere.

On the other hand...

> Inventing a new currency that is, for a little while, hard to track by the government

This _has_ worked for Wikileaks in the past. When the US persecuted Wikileaks, Bitcoin helped to heavily negate the immediate impact of this action.

> The form that persecution takes is secondary.

In that case, why can't the form that Wikileaks' solutions take be secondary as well? If we are in agreement that Wikileaks is an important organization, then when addressing atrocities "democratically" fails, what would be wrong with short-term innovation?

Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra

#319

Post by cloudinshape »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #304
samatman wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opinions differ substantially on this point.

No, they really don't. Uninformed opinions will argue this because they're just that... uninformed. I'm sorry but no one who has studied economics will believe this there's zero evidence to support the idea a low-level of inflation is bad. There's only crackpots and idiots who don't have economics degrees, or even enough math to understand the fucking equations (which aren't hard but also don't always provide intuiti…

Not true at all.

People, and state economists, have confused inflation and deflation so much for their propaganda that right now is almost imposible to have a discussion around it primarily because different people don't mean the same things when they use those words.

Is the inflation you talk about consumer price inflation? is it assets price inflation? or is it money supply inflation? is the deflation caused by increases in productivity or is it caused by decrease in demand? Is inflation a product of regulations? of corruption? or was it caused by central banks and politicians' stupidity?

Those are all very different situations that require very different approaches, but because the "inflation-good deflation-bad" mantra has been repeated for so long (without any actual proof!) idiots now can't see past it, and think it's fine because they call themselves economists.

Re: Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra

#320

Post by jiofih »

TigeriusKirk wrote: post #205
ExtraServings wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so again, which countries?

Many, many countries don't have KYC/AML laws as strict as the US. If you want specifics, I encourage you to look into it.

Countries like...? You must have a source or some knowledge backing that statement?
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