Can someone use this if they espouse "white nationalist"-adjacent beliefs (such as building a border wall and deporting illegal immigrants)?
What does it mean if they can or cannot?
Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra
191–200 of 1001 posts
Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra
#192It’s going to be interesting. “Unlike previous stablecoins, Libra will not be issued by a central party. Instead, Facebook has enlisted 27 fellow Silicon Valley titans—among them PayPal, Visa, Spotify, Mastercard, Uber, and eBay—to operate as preliminary “validator nodes” who will each share a transparent copy of a vast ledger of transactions reflecting all the activity on the network.” That sounds amazingly dystopia…
> That sounds amazingly dystopian. I mean, that’s literally a money built on an oligarchy. By design. Then W3C and the USB-IF are also "oligarchies" and dystopian? A bunch of institutions working together is presumably a lot more trustworthy and less prone to abuse by anyone individually than a single institution, which maybe you would call a "monarchy"? Really not sure what's dystopian about this at all . Do you thi…
> Then W3C and the USB-IF are also "oligarchies" and dystopian?
Hm, I don't know, is the USB-IF habitually shaping political discourse of billions of people by either outright censoring or "demonetizing" [0] content creators with slightly different views?
[0] Of which this shitcoin is the logical strategy to cut off alternative income sources
Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra
#193It’s going to be interesting. “Unlike previous stablecoins, Libra will not be issued by a central party. Instead, Facebook has enlisted 27 fellow Silicon Valley titans—among them PayPal, Visa, Spotify, Mastercard, Uber, and eBay—to operate as preliminary “validator nodes” who will each share a transparent copy of a vast ledger of transactions reflecting all the activity on the network.” That sounds amazingly dystopia…
Exactly. What this does is create a wide open space for a "anti-establishment" crypto payments system. But one that people actually understand and trust. Fiat will likely be UOA for stage one of the transition to crypto. But as more people get educated we'll move to fully Open payments. Many will use Libra. But many will use other services. It's not binary. Multiple winners will emerge. Brand identity will be huge here. Think Patagonia v. Walmart v. Nike. How you pay for things will become part of how you present yourself to the world. It's about to get very interesting.
Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate on what Bitcoin failed at?
I tried to buy a cup of coffee recently at a bitcoin only cafe. Though I didn’t end up paying with bitcoin because it took a day for the bitcoin atm deposit to clear. So I asked a friend who worked in the building to spot me a cup of coffee, and he paid... by making a line on a piece of paper they used to do bookkeeping denoted in fiat because no-one wanted to go through the hassle of bitcoin transfers and no one had…
I mean, its Bitcoin, the worst from all the cryptos. In the meantime I am using Ethereum to get electricity to my home (via lition.io), use it to take a collaterized debt position (via MakerDAO) and spending crypto daily in seconds with the Coinbase debit card. Just days ago I paid for my NordVPN directly with Ether, the transaction cleared in under 30 seconds. Bitcoin was the experiment, Ethereum is the working, usable product (which will only get better in the future).
Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra
#195From the white paper:
> "Libra’s mission is to enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people."
They do this by issuing coins in exchange for fiat money, which is held by the reserve.
> "Interest on the reserve assets will be used to cover the costs of the system, ensure low transaction fees, pay dividends to investors who provided capital to jumpstart the ecosystem [...]. Users of Libra do not receive a return from the reserve."
Conceptually this is a bank, but with no interest returned to users, no financial oversight from governments, controlled by Silicon Valley's top companies.
Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook had already banned advertising other cryptocurrencies in the run-up to this announcement (well, back in January 2018), so the effort to prevent other cryptocurrencies from scaling is well underway.
That's unfair, there was a lot of pressure on companies to protect users from scammy crypto ads during the big bubble of Bitcoin. I think many companies banned ads for shady sites and to imply they did it only to promote their own coin isn't fair.
I totally agree that it was good move from a user perspective. It's just a happy coincidence. Or perhaps they saw how many outfits (shady or otherwise) were affected by the ban and decided it represented a good market opportunity for them to step in and fill a gap?
Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra
#197Certain activist groups put constant pressure on Facebook to “deplatform” and remove pages for both legitimate in it legitimate reasons.
Now we’re talking about giving Facebook control over the very means to do financial transactions. How long Before this also becomes weapononized, by Facebook, or by activists?
there is a reason why popular currency systems has been the purview of governments. We’re creating an awful lot of social repercussions by allowing corporations to own the basic financial fabric.
Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra
#198"Facebook is enforcing a strict separation between users’ social data—their Facebook likes, photos, etc—and the financial data that will be available on Libra’s network. There will not, he insisted, be a readily available data trove connecting users’ transactional data to their Facebook profiles" I find this extremely hard to believe coming from a company who's entire M.O. is building a profile of its users and track…
Facebook seems awfully quiet about WHY they're developing this thing. There's a lot of fancy and positive spin on "helping people in countries without access to banking" and that fine, but they do need to explain how they plan to turn a profit on the project. Until they do, we should assume that it WILL involve selling/exploiting the financial data of the users.
Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate on what Bitcoin failed at?
I tried to buy a cup of coffee recently at a bitcoin only cafe. Though I didn’t end up paying with bitcoin because it took a day for the bitcoin atm deposit to clear. So I asked a friend who worked in the building to spot me a cup of coffee, and he paid... by making a line on a piece of paper they used to do bookkeeping denoted in fiat because no-one wanted to go through the hassle of bitcoin transfers and no one had…
So you have bitcoin, visit bitcoin only cafes, and yet you or the business cant figure out how to pay for a cup of coffee with bitcoin...
It’s hard to tell if this is a joke, trolling, manifestation of dystopia/idiocracy.
All that’s really needed now is an underlying story of how the cafe couldn’t figure out how to accept payment, but due to being “bitcoin only” they received wild media attention and became an influencer, got SV capital investment, pivoted to a freemium model just giving away their bitcoin only coffee for free, gained market share over Starbucks thanks to SV Venture capital subsidizing our coffees and then they go public and the VCs/bitcoin coffee founders make billions unloading onto the public.
I’m so sold I was going to register both bitcoincoffee.com and bitcoincafe.com, looks like some savvy founders already beat me to the punch.
Re: Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra
#200Terrifying, really. The world is hurdling back towards a feudalist society, with corporations instead of kings.