Calibra – Digital Wallet for Libra • Hacker News Board

Been there, in China, with Alipay. Absolutely no way for an EU person to pay with it: doesn't accept European phone number for sign up and since the end of 2018 one can not get a proper Chinese SIM with a passport.

Don't touch cash. That's the only fallback we have for outages, when someone is without data connection (ghasp!) or for scenarios where politics or decisions make it impossible for foreigners to use it, like above.

EDIT one additional thought. One of my technical issues with Alipay is that it requires data connection from both sides. With POS terminals it's only the seller who needs to have some kind of a phone line. In a foreign country, with the current state of roaming charges, this is a serious problem. I don't know if FB plans to address this issue.

EDIT2 responding to some comments - even if a foreigner could/can get a full Chinese SIM, for spending 2 weeks there the need for a second, dedicated SIM is an overkill and an additional, tricky round, especially if you're not going to a Tier 1 city. Even if you succeed adding foreign bank accounts and debit cards could get tricky if I understand correctly, but I never actually got to test it.

Re: Calibra – Digital Wallet for Libra

#10

Post by yorwba » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 9:23 AM UTC

pmlnr wrote: post #9

> Imagine if cash became digital. Been there, in China, with Alipay. Absolutely no way for an EU person to pay with it: doesn't accept European phone number for sign up and since the end of 2018 one can not get a proper Chinese SIM with a passport. Don't touch cash. That's the only fallback we have for outages, when someone is without data connection (ghasp!) or for scenarios where politics or decisions make it impos…

Being Facebook, they probably don't have to worry about the China market, but other countries also want to have some degree of control over money crossing their borders. It will be interesting to see how Calibra plans to handle that.