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I find this extremely hard to believe coming from a company who's entire M.O. is building a profile of its users and tracking everything they do across the internet and beyond.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate on what Bitcoin failed at?
Conception. It’s pitched as a replacement for government backed, fiat currency. But I’ve never heard or seen a convincing, coherent explanation that makes it clear this is a currency. For one, a currency can’t be reliant on an internet connection for validity. My 1$ bill in my wallet absolutely does not rely on that. In fact, there’s an entire country validating that dollars usefulness. A gold coin essentially answer…
Cryptocurrencies is a better type of money for a few reasons:
* More acceptable than other digital money (banks and payment processors might say no)
* More easily divisible than for example gold coins and gold bars
* It's sound money whereas fiat is not (nobody can arbitrarily increase the supply)
* Much more portable. You can send any amount to anyone in the world, as long as they have internet.
To be clear, cryptocurrencies are like cash but in digital form. It's a great medium exchange, but it suffers from low adoption meaning it's a bad store of value (but so is fiat) and a bad unit of account (but so is gold).
> For one, a currency can’t be reliant on an internet connection for validity. My 1$ bill in my wallet absolutely does not rely on that
So you don't consider digital fiat currencies then?
Me not having internet for a period of time doesn't invalidate my cryptocurrency holdings. I just need internet to spend it (a fair constraint for digital money).
> A gold coin essentially answers the usual doubts in fiat currency.
Except for the fact that you can't send gold coins digitally.
Also, it's much more difficult to check for gold coins. And difficult to transport. It's easy with cryptocurrencies.
It says testnet only until early 2020. Coincidentally, Ethereum recently announced Ethereum 2.0 releasing in early 2020. I consider Libra Coin an effort to cash in on the cryptocurrency hype with a type of bank, before real cryptocurrencies can scale and become mainstream and therefore block such an effort. So I see it as a moral imperative for developers to try to kill the project. The fact that they are making it o…
What makes a cryptocurrency “real”?
With Libra its pretty clearly controlled by large tech companies so validating on the network isnt open to anyone. This means it not decentralized in my book. You also have to trust that the dollars or dollar equivalents are behind every token on the Libra network, this isnt the case in bitcoin/ethereum since there isnt an attempt to use dollar backed tokens at the base layer
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate on what Bitcoin failed at?
On being a currency, since its price fluctuates too much to be taken seriously, so it's used as an investment instead.
People spend a ton of energy (that could otherwise to actual useful things) on shifting around bits that they then claim are very valuable.
You could make a similar claim about fiat money except that actually makes commerce easier. Bitcoin is not a good way to transfer value since like you said it's too volatile for a currency.
So it's built on nothing, it does nothing and underpins nothing, it wastes huge amounts of otherwise useful energy and that makes it a good investment?
Maybe I'm just too dumb to see the genius of it.
Their next efforts will probably be lobby like crazy to ban any other coin that is not "Approved".
“Moreover, Marcus insisted that the $10 million buy in would not grant validators exclusive access to users’ transactional data.“ So they don’t get exclusive data. That’s an odd statement, it just means that data can be sold to others as well.
If the blockchain is public, the transactions themselves are public, so can't really be sold. The association between user data and transactions, might be valuable though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes a cryptocurrency “real”?
decentralization and trustlessness I would say are the big two. With Libra its pretty clearly controlled by large tech companies so validating on the network isnt open to anyone. This means it not decentralized in my book. You also have to trust that the dollars or dollar equivalents are behind every token on the Libra network, this isnt the case in bitcoin/ethereum since there isnt an attempt to use dollar backed to…
It was already tried. It was called Bitcoin. It failed spectacularly. At least this looks like it could work. I trust my government more than I trust these companies so I will keep using fiat, but this may be an option for other people.
Could you elaborate on what Bitcoin failed at?
Bitcoin as a penny-stock investment opportunity still seems successful, but as a viable currency it seems to have failed. And now cue the people saying that bitcoin was never actually intended to be used like a digital coin...