Facebook Cryptocurrency Plan Faces Opposition in France • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Cryptocurrency Plan Faces Opposition in France

#91

Post by raxxorrax » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 7:41 AM UTC

kumarvvr wrote: post #72

Facebook has already wreaked havoc with it's power, it has shown how deceptive it is, it has resisted regulation, it's chief executives have refused to testify to governments. Now them having a cryptocurrency is alarming. Why does it really need to do this? There is nothing anonymous about facebook. Whatever transaction is done, will be linked to your account. This is dangerous. Whether they start or not is irrelevan…

> Now them having a cryptocurrency is alarming

I am genuinely surprised people would allow a company collecting data to be their financial provider.

This is mostly contrary to the idea behind bitcoin to have a decentralized currency beyond anyone's control. The unholy alliance between facebook, ebay, visa and mastercard is certainly no advantage to the user.

But I am afraid convenience will bite us in the ass again.

Re: Facebook Cryptocurrency Plan Faces Opposition in France

#92

Post by koonsolo » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 7:44 AM UTC

huis wrote: post #42

js4ever wrote: post #28

What France really want is to tax it (even before it exist)

Yes ofcourse they will. When a county doesn't receive tax it will be a very big problem. So countries need to be in control of the flow of money. It is also a very big problem is an outsider can change the value of your own currency. So you don't want US companies taking over your money flow.

It's my money, so also my flow of control, not that of the country I live in.

I know this is open ups the whole discussion about cryptocurrenies all over again, but maybe some people don't want government to have the monopoly on storing and transferring 'money'.

Re: Facebook Cryptocurrency Plan Faces Opposition in France

#93

Post by frenchy » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 7:47 AM UTC

Bakary wrote: post #29

_bxg1 wrote: post #17

Adding further support to my view that in today's world, (mainland) Europe is civilization's last hope.

What about Canada? As the ice thaws, it will be a perfect place to restart after the Collapse.

I wouldn't be that hopeful. We have quite a number of wackos for the same reason that the US does (escaping religious "persecution" in Europe). Sorry.

Edit: also, much of the thawing land is the Canadian Shield, which is pretty useless for farming.

Re: Facebook Cryptocurrency Plan Faces Opposition in France

#94

Post by CaptainZapp » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 8:02 AM UTC

marco_salvatori wrote: post #69

wmf wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's clearly the goal, after seeing the massive success of WePay in China.

People who are unfamiliar with WeChat Pay in China, are underestimating the potential for the FB cryptocurrency. The integration of social media and payments by WeChat strongly facilitated consumer adoption of their payment service. Everyone already had phones, everyone had WeChat installed on their phones. When payment services later became available through WeChat, there was a minuscule barrier for customer adoptio…

There is one huge difference between WeChat Pay and what Facebook plans. Namely, that the People's Bank of China[1] has an iron grip on all such systems used in China.

Facebook plans a global currency undermining any control of the national central banks and subverting national monetary policy. I don't think that any central bank will allow this to happen.

Add all potential KYC and AML issues and I'm not sure if the "move fast and break things" mantra is applicable in this case.

Money is not just a method of exchange in which the markets decide. The well being of countries is directly linked to monetary policy. I don't think that they really factored that in in their libertarian fever dreams.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Bank_of_China [1]

Re: Facebook Cryptocurrency Plan Faces Opposition in France

#95

Post by TimJRobinson » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 8:09 AM UTC

elcomet wrote: post #87

orbifold wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is likely that this is backed by a substantial set of US political interests. People that want to experiment with UBI might want to see a Facebook sanctioned UBI. This is basically any libertarians pipe dream. On the other hand I think you are right. I expect any US based opposition to move swiftly. Regulations should probably be the least of their concern given how the US has treated entire Nation States…

> This is basically any libertarians pipe dream. Are you sure about this? I thought libertarians were against all institutions such as the state with power over people. UBI is a socialist policy. It seems in total contradiction with libertarian principles to me. How is that possible?

Libertarians believe in the government staying out of your business and letting free markets do their thing.

With UBI everyone gets an automatic safety net and the ideal is that if all markets were free of government intervention people would buy what they want, and competition would down the costs of healthcare / education / food etc. So that those with UBI can have the basic necessities of life, without the government needing to do anything (other than dealing with tragedy of the commons type problems.)

Re: Facebook Cryptocurrency Plan Faces Opposition in France

#96

Post by john_minsk » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 8:43 AM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #66

I cannot understand why you would want to use Facebook's "currency". I'd just use what we currently have.

Biggest bank in Russia (Sberbank) introduced a simple feature: if you know a phone number of a person, you can enter it on their website and if the owner of the phone number has any account with Sberbank you can send him money. The convenience of such feature was so big that it caused people move from other banks to Sberbank just to use it. Eventually leading to government regulation making this feature bank-agnostic.

The point here is: people who are used to Internet and the way things work here can't understand the old-fashioned companies.

Why sending money overseas cost such enormous amounts of money? Why bank fees are so difficult to understand? Why there is fee when moving money within the same bank, when we all know that it is simple transaction in the database?

Re: Facebook Cryptocurrency Plan Faces Opposition in France

#97

Post by GoblinSlayer » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 8:57 AM UTC

kumarvvr wrote: post #72

Facebook has already wreaked havoc with it's power, it has shown how deceptive it is, it has resisted regulation, it's chief executives have refused to testify to governments. Now them having a cryptocurrency is alarming. Why does it really need to do this? There is nothing anonymous about facebook. Whatever transaction is done, will be linked to your account. This is dangerous. Whether they start or not is irrelevan…

Sure, it's cancer compared to other cryptocurrencies, but what can possibly go wrong if it competes with fiat? People in the article started to speak about better money transfer technology. Why only now? Because they stagnated as a monopoly.

Re: Facebook Cryptocurrency Plan Faces Opposition in France

#98

Post by feanaro » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 8:58 AM UTC

orbifold wrote: post #89

elcomet wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is basically any libertarians pipe dream. Are you sure about this? I thought libertarians were against all institutions such as the state with power over people. UBI is a socialist policy. It seems in total contradiction with libertarian principles to me. How is that possible?

Well I am not a libertarian myself but as far as I understood people pushing for UBI are also pushing for a drastically smaller administration which is currently administering social benefits. This would be achieved by basically eliminating most other form of benefits, similar to how they propose to hand out vouchers for services like education instead of operating schools.

This is a drastic oversimplification. From my experience, libertarians are usually against UBI. There is certainly a large enough current that you can't make this generalization.

Re: Facebook Cryptocurrency Plan Faces Opposition in France

#99

Post by antisemiotic » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 8:59 AM UTC

elcomet wrote: post #87

orbifold wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is likely that this is backed by a substantial set of US political interests. People that want to experiment with UBI might want to see a Facebook sanctioned UBI. This is basically any libertarians pipe dream. On the other hand I think you are right. I expect any US based opposition to move swiftly. Regulations should probably be the least of their concern given how the US has treated entire Nation States…

> This is basically any libertarians pipe dream. Are you sure about this? I thought libertarians were against all institutions such as the state with power over people. UBI is a socialist policy. It seems in total contradiction with libertarian principles to me. How is that possible?

UBI is similar to negative income tax, which was proposed by (among others) Friedman.

Re: Facebook Cryptocurrency Plan Faces Opposition in France

#100

Post by vinay_ys » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 9:08 AM UTC

cwkoss wrote: post #41

dmitrygr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

statistically, so few people use bitcoin, that one might as well round to zero, so governments do not need to care. FB has 2.5B users whom they can easily manipulate, hence governments care.

I don't think governments 'dont care' but rather they are powerless to act effectively against Bitcoin. A ban would legitimize its utility to people skeptical of central banking. Because Satoshi is anonymous, there is no person or team to attack with legal or extralegal coercion. Only way to effectively take down bitcoin is to spend ~$1B building a huge mining operation with the purpose of launching a 51% attack, but…

There's a simple way to ban bitcoin. Govts already regulate the banking and payment companies. Govt can compel them to not allow/facilitate exchange of bitcoin for fiat currency or vice-versa. Without banking/payments infra supporting such a conversion (only hand to hand cash transfer and exchange conversion by person to person transfers would be possible) which will be very small and network will be dead soon. But obviously govts didn't do that and hence bitcoin has so much usage and hence such high value.