Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra

Post by Abishek_Muthian » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 9:37 AM UTC

hjk05 wrote: post #928

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook's hold in developing economies is true. But developing economy's hold on their Fiat currency is true as well. So much so that, India is planning to jail anyone who is holding cryptocurrency for 10 years[1]! If this legislation passes, any computer scientist, mathematician, programmer who is working with crypto tokens & block chain can technically be held liable for possessing a crypto currency when they run…

> Yes, the plan to jail those who hold cryptocurrency in a democratic country is preposterous No it isn’t. We jail people who hold child pornography in democratic countries as well. The core of a democratic country is that it’s governed by democratically elected representatives, not that it’s citizens be allowed access to whatever they want independent of criminal consequences. I get you and others are calling to the…

Post by randomvectors » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 9:51 AM UTC

rdm_blackhole wrote: post #748

randomvectors wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point, I think I'd honestly rather put my money with Facebook than many of those actual banks out there. This is so ridiculous that I don't even know how to argue with it.

Is it because you trust the banks to keep your money safe? Have a look at what happened in 2013 in Cyprus where they did a bail-in with their customer's money to "save" a bank that was too big to fail. I am with parent on this one.

Post by seymore_12 » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 10:03 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #918

mekoka wrote: post #853

Let's play a game of predictions. Regardless of HN's opinion of Facebook (and regardless of my own for that matter) I predict that this thing will work. This is only one thing my crystal ball showed me. Facebook's presence in developing economies is massive. To the point of being synonymous with "The Internet" in a number of places. But they've had a nagging problem. People in these economies consume contents, but do…

I predict that Libra will work for a while, but will eventually be overshadowed either by competitors or by the new markets that it enables. There's this pattern I've noticed where every major tech company, once initial traction has been established, gets three pivots. You can think of them as adolescence, mid-life, and rebirth. The first pivot happens when the company is 5-8 years old (since the 1970s at least; olde…

Post by tomp » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 10:22 AM UTC

vivekd wrote: post #557

This is an interesting story and I would like to learn more about libra-coin. Unfortunately I think hackernews has a strong anti-facebook bias that is making the opinions here nearly universally one sided. I think we can say three things fairly uncontroversially in favor of this 1. The world could use an online independent currency 2. Adding stability to blockchain currencies and having that work on a large scale is…

Post by tomp » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 10:29 AM UTC

floe wrote: post #851

rdm_blackhole wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It could completely block you any time it wants to for any reason it wants to As opposed to what banks did in Cyprus in 2013 when they seized the money on the savings account of their own customers and basically stopped people from withdrawing their money from their own bank accounts? And said customers had no recourse at all against the banks helping themselves to their money?

In theory, the recourse is that the people can exert power over the banks by electing different politicians. Obviously, sometimes that doesn't work as well as we'd like, but there's not even such a possibility of recourse when Facebook fucks you over.