Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

741–750 of 821 posts

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#741

Post by erikpukinskis »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #618
HashThis wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... no peg to anything they do. Libra is still a problem. They start with a basket of USD + Yen + EURs to start. This appeases governments, just for the reason you mention "based on their currences". ...but Libra is designs that they can move away from them over time. It can move to revenue generating investments, like corporate bonds (like money markets do). Libra can then wait until closer to countries defaulting…

I would much rather have world using bitcoin than a global currency controlled by private cartel.

Yes, Bitcoin is relatively speaking a pure idea. It competes in the realm of other pure ideas. At least, if we are unmooring ourselves from national identity it is a clean break with new dangers and new opportunities.

Libra is an idea AND a political entity, which feels like some mixture of status quo and new world which makes me uncomfortable.

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#742

Post by erikpukinskis »

scoobyyabbadoo wrote: post #735
erikpukinskis wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Assume good faith” doesn’t mean “ignore evidence of bad faith”.

What evidence of bad faith are you referring to? Interesting how you and "other people" going through my comments have no actual objections to the content of what I say. Hard to have a productive conversation when all you have are dismissive remarks and insults.

Sure, I will try to unpack my thoughts.

You go after Jewish people as a class, rather than specific institutions controlled by Jewish people, which I think is bad faith argumentation. If you criticized Israel, for example, or some specific set of banks I would be ok with that.

I admit I would not have the same reaction against another person criticizing “white people” as a class. But I believe I am justified in that because whiteness is not an ethnicity, it is the practice of denial of ethnicity. That makes it a specific institution not a group of people.

I am vulnerable also to accusations of hypocrisy because I sometimes criticize men as a class. Maybe that should be out of bounds, (probably is out of bounds on HN) as men are clearly a real biological group and not a concept.

However, masculinity (as opposed to manhood) is not a biological reality, it is a system of identity constructed to hold childbearing women in a sex class (i.e. submitting to control of their bodies). So to the extent that men identify with masculinity as opposed to just having a penis and some hormones, I would say we are also open to being attacked as a class, and lose our protected status as an actual “tribe” of people.

Although as a side note, I do suspect that when masculinity was originally invented it was quite possibly an identity constructed for the protection of men as an actual ethnographic class of underserved people. Pregnancy does confer actual power and patriarchy I suspect was invented to counterbalance that. However I don’t believe it functions that way today.

I suppose you could argue that Jewishness has crossed that rubicon but I don’t see how you could credibly do without getting into holocaust denial which I would also put in the bad faith category.

Serious apologies to any Jewish people reading this who may feel by engaging these questions I am being blasé about the threat of antisemitism. I really don’t want to do that, but I also want to hold a hand out for people who are having a hard time understanding the reasoning behind the rules of liberal discourse.

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#743

Post by jokoon »

It reminds me of this off shore city facebook wanted to build or something like that.

The problem with big money and big idea people, is that at some point they want to build a new world, but if you ask them about the old world, they don't have a solution, and deep inside they would rather see the old world burn to the ground. They're not even obsessed with power, they just want to build new things like they built an app in 1 month, to see if it could work, because the idea is sound and that it might solve many problems.

Those guys always have big big ideas but the truth is that they have absolutely no clue how the actual real world have been working for centuries and what are the real cogs of human society. It's like history doesn't matter, and that silicon made everything completely obsolete.

If you understand this, in a way, you can definitely understand why China has a big firewall. And frankly it sounds like the internet has just turned into a big advertising, political propaganda machine that just turn people into consumerist monkeys. Of course it's serving american hegemony pretty well, especially if you look at how google is siphoning data all over the world. I'm glad that countries are realizing that internet is not the cool thing of the 90s anymore.

What's weird is that facebook is now a thing for old people, the young doesn't even use facebook. I stopped using facebook in 2010 so I would never have known anyway.

Frankly there are days I wish the internet would collapse. GDPR is already setting a big fight, the battle against US digital giants is far from being over and I hope it keeps going.

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#744

Post by dbtc »

jokoon wrote: post #743

It reminds me of this off shore city facebook wanted to build or something like that. The problem with big money and big idea people, is that at some point they want to build a new world, but if you ask them about the old world, they don't have a solution, and deep inside they would rather see the old world burn to the ground. They're not even obsessed with power, they just want to build new things like they built an…

Thanks, this resonates. But "there are days I wish the internet collapse" made me laugh! After how long will the internet be part of the old world, which the young disrupters wish would burn down so they could build something new instead? Maybe since it existed.

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#746

Post by _7fvc »

I think Libra is a fine digital currency. It explores semi-centralized/semi-decentralized category. The main problem with Libra is its timing. It's too early. I don't think the market is ready for it.

Most people think Bitcoin is working as a digital native currency. In reality, Bitcoin is not doing anything much. Bitcoin community is sticking with digital gold, Store of Value narrative. That makes Bitcoin uninteresting. Normal people cannot really use it.

There is a big gap between digital native crypto like Bitcoin and government issued currencies. The market needs to evolve to fill in the gap before we can use a currency like Libra.

I outline the problem I see in the below article. I think we need a digital native stablecoin to connect Bitcoin to the real world.

https://bitflate.org/post/2019/08/26/bitcoin-missing-link-to...

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#747

Post by drchaos »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #20
mrtksn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you stop people obtaining it and using it through their buddies on the internet? Is libra tied to an account like game money? AFAIK it's a cryptocurrency? Haven't looked at the details but cryptocurrency implies it stays on some distributed ladger and no 3rd parties have control over the transactions. Isn't that the case?

> Haven't looked at the details but cryptocurrency implies it stays on some distributed ladger and no 3rd parties have control over the transactions. Isn't that the case? It's about time we all disabused ourselves of the libertarian utopian dream that just because cryptocurrency is on a distributed ledger than governments can't control it. "How do you stop people obtaining it and using it through their buddies on the…

> "How do you stop people obtaining it and using it through their buddies on the internet" - quite simply, by telling them they'd go to jail, or get a hefty fine, for doing that.

That method does not work very well for e.g. weed.

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#748

Post by ivan_gammel »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #729
gjulianm wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has control as Germany is part of the Eurozone, the ECB is subjected to the EU treaty, operating under its guidelines, and is accountable to the European Parliament, in which the people of Germany have a say. Maybe it is not as accountable as we wish it were, but it is far from what Facebook would be.

Is “a vote in” and “control” really the same thing?

In case of Germany it’s very close to be the same thing.

Re: France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

#749

Post by dane-pgp »

repolfx wrote: post #734
wnkrshm wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective I think the EU/UK talks have gone nowhere because the brexiteers didn't have any strategy at all. It boils down to playing chicken and thinking the rest of the EU will flinch at the threat of the UK cutting all ties, when it has been clear that the UK (under May and now Johnson) desperately wants those ties. But the UK is not willing (or politically able) to make any concessions for those - conces…

"The EU" means both the institutions and the whims of a handful of national leaders. Nothing about what it does has anything to do with the will of its people. Where is that even measured? The text of the Withdrawal Agreement was written by the Commission, which controls the negotiations. And by the way, none of the things the UK is being asked to agree to have been presented as requirements to other countries. The o…

> The British press, despite what you may believe, is mostly pro-EU.

How are you measuring that, exactly? Here is a reasonably quantitative analysis:

https://rightsinfo.org/app/uploads/2016/06/Screen-Shot-2016-...

from this article:

https://rightsinfo.org/brexit-five-lessons/

> Many Brits have concluded that about the EU all by themselves, based on the actual actions it's taken.

I don't know how many Brits have reached their conclusions about the EU "all by themselves", without basing their information at all on what the media and UK politicians have told them.

Post reply on HN