Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#41

Post by JumpCrisscross » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC

camgunz wrote: post #30

padobson wrote: post #9

I can't help but think that Facebook doomed this "distributed ledger" possibility by trying to be first to market with a tarnished brand. The developing world would hugely benefit from a scalable technology that can efficiently service digital transactions. The piece demonstrates this with how quickly WeChat Pay and Alipay penetrated China. I can't imagine the possibility for prosperity when 3 billion consumers enter…

> The developing world would hugely benefit from a scalable technology that can efficiently service digital transactions. The piece demonstrates this with how quickly WeChat Pay and Alipay penetrated China. I hear this a lot in cryptocurrency threads, and I vehemently disagree. There's no doubt that using "some other currency" (currency or cryptocurrency) is better than using a corrupt, authoritarian regime's currenc…

> there's a huge political push to try and get the "developing world" (with all the hand-waving that's been applied to this term) onto cryptocurrencies,

Is there? There's a lot of discussion around it. But I've never seen a legitimate push.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#42

Post by foobardev » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC

padobson wrote: post #9

I can't help but think that Facebook doomed this "distributed ledger" possibility by trying to be first to market with a tarnished brand. The developing world would hugely benefit from a scalable technology that can efficiently service digital transactions. The piece demonstrates this with how quickly WeChat Pay and Alipay penetrated China. I can't imagine the possibility for prosperity when 3 billion consumers enter…

China has WeChat & Alipay. India has PayTm & PhonePe (+others), the government also has a really good initiative called UPI. South East Asia has a bunch of similar apps as well.

I think the developing world is ahead of US & EU in this regard, card & bank account usage is bound to decline in the long run.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#43

Post by scarface74 » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:02 PM UTC

padobson wrote: post #9

I can't help but think that Facebook doomed this "distributed ledger" possibility by trying to be first to market with a tarnished brand. The developing world would hugely benefit from a scalable technology that can efficiently service digital transactions. The piece demonstrates this with how quickly WeChat Pay and Alipay penetrated China. I can't imagine the possibility for prosperity when 3 billion consumers enter…

The “tarnished brand” of Facebook is hugely overstated. Facebook is not losing users.

Libra is already “spun off”. FB only owns a tiny share.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#44

Post by kabwj » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:02 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #37

kabwj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The developing world doesn’t care about the reputation Facebook has on HN.

> The developing world doesn’t care about the reputation Facebook has on HN The developed world does: "based on an analysis of SimilarWeb Android data, Jefferies analyst Brent Thill found daily average users for core Facebook have declined in the U.S., U.K., Germany and France over the last 12 months—although he notes sequential user growth across geographies in April and May. In the U.S., time spent on core Facebook…

Libra is not for the developed world; I didn’t mention the developed world in my message.

It remains to be seen what it will happen to it in the developing world, but the reputation of Facebook won’t be an obstacle.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#45

Post by gooseus » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

> The largest leap will come last: Libra as a genuine currency, not simply a medium for transaction. This will be function of volume in the previous two use cases, and is understandably concerning to governments all over the world.

Well that's certainly an understatement.

This is literally the only mention of government through-out the entire article. The only mention of banks is in the previous paragraph stating there are no banks in the coalition.

Banks and governments go together like peas and carrots, they also control pretty much everything and have for hundreds and thousands of years. This control is derived from a few places, but primarily from a monopoly on the control of the currency and the monopoly on coercive force.

No government is going to let FB and any coalition do an end run around their national currency and their banking institutions. They're also not going to partner with an international consortium to have them replaced with something they only partially control.

I really don't know why this isn't a larger part of this conversation. I think people need to be cracking more history books and less William Gibson and Neil Stephenson novels.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#46

Post by salawat » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I too dismissed Libra out of hand, but the coalition that Facebook is building is interesting. People say that "Fintech threatens the banks" but almost all Fintech companies partner with the banks in one way or another. Look at the companies involved with Libra and see that none of them are banks. Libra will still have a lot of money on deposit with the banks, but it might be the first Fintech that will really bypass…

That's not going to happen. As soon as it does, we'll be seeing a crackdown on a wider swathe than just banks. What scares the bejesus out of me is what happens when tooling to link up personal data from data aggregators plus sufficient tooling around blockchain analysis is built such that a realtime tracking system of financial to other activity becomes possible. A full public record of all financial transactions is a hell of a surveillance tool, and with enough ancillary data, transactions are trivially deanonymized (assuming Libra is structured in a pro-anonymity way, which it won't be, because otherwise, banks won't have a thing to do with it.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#47

Post by cconroy » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

Pink plane reasoning like this makes you dismiss bitcoin as not scalable. The blue idea is to scale off chain with smart contracts whether centralized or not.

Compare cos fighting this to those not like cash app which are building on top of bitcoin.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#48

Post by MBCook » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #43

padobson wrote: post #9

I can't help but think that Facebook doomed this "distributed ledger" possibility by trying to be first to market with a tarnished brand. The developing world would hugely benefit from a scalable technology that can efficiently service digital transactions. The piece demonstrates this with how quickly WeChat Pay and Alipay penetrated China. I can't imagine the possibility for prosperity when 3 billion consumers enter…

The “tarnished brand” of Facebook is hugely overstated. Facebook is not losing users. Libra is already “spun off”. FB only owns a tiny share.

The fact that people are willing to trust FB with their personal photos or favorite political memes doesn’t mean they’re willing to trust them with money.

And it doesn’t matter who controls Libra if everyone thinks of it as ‘the Facebook money thing’.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#49

Post by scarface74 » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

warp_factor wrote: post #11

I'm crossing my fingers that this pseudo crypto money never takes off. Having Facebook control this would be so terrible and the proof that we didn't learn anything over the last couple months. Don't fool yourself even though they released a white paper and some pseudo decentralized schemes this is no different than a casino chip. Unfortunately I feel like it might pick up and become a thing.

The article specifically says that FB does not have a controlling interest or the ability to decide who joins the consortium.

Re: Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

#50

Post by anbop » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

padobson wrote: post #9

I can't help but think that Facebook doomed this "distributed ledger" possibility by trying to be first to market with a tarnished brand. The developing world would hugely benefit from a scalable technology that can efficiently service digital transactions. The piece demonstrates this with how quickly WeChat Pay and Alipay penetrated China. I can't imagine the possibility for prosperity when 3 billion consumers enter…

Which consumer brand at this scale isn’t tarnished? Amazon? Google? Apple (not even applicable since they build only for their device users? Walmart? Bank of America?