If you keep the default settings and use it to buy anything it will spam your 'friends' just like Farmville. "Joe Wilson just used Libra to remove the ransomware from his Dell, how will you use it?".
It will be marketed a lot better, it will be slightly more efficient and function more easily as money and it will also much more evil and bring a curse across the land, making horses lame and suchlike.
Facebook Inc. has signed up more than a dozen companies
including Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc.
and Uber Technologies Inc. to back a new cryptocurrency it
plans to unveil next week and launch next year.
This means each of these companies will pay $$$ to run a "node" for this currency and have full visibility into the transactional behavior of the users of the coin.
The term "cryptocurrency" is applied a bit too liberally in the space, but what are the odds that Facebook's coin is censorship-resistant? Will Facebook help enforce US monetary imperialism, or will it thumb its nose at US sanctions? (e.g. allow a US Facebook user to send Libra to Iranian Facebook users)
Now, there could be a surprise plot twist in which these megacorps stand up for individual liberties. There have been stranger things.
I'm interested to see the how existing crypto exchanges will handle this currency, if it can be traded on them at all. The market that develops in the cryptosphere around Libra will certainly liberate any attempted sanctions on the coin itself, unless Facebook can prevent free trading of the currency on exchanges.
Zucky is trying hard to make his scam of a company, that sells spam as the only source of revenue, looks legit and respectable company that actually sells something, but instead he adds up more scams
If Facebook can pull this off they will have brought about the first universal internet currency, which would be a stunning achievement and could revolutionalize the web as we know it. Failed projects give us some idea of what their challenges will be.
Cryptocurrencies right now have a trade off between scalability and decentralization. Bitcoin is theoretically decentralized even though the reality is more complex. But theoretically anyone with a computer can randomly decide to mine the coin and participate in the network. This whole process is made possible by Proof of Work, which was the key brilliant idea that made bitcoin secure and possible. The problem right now is this algorithm doesn’t allow very many transactions per second.
Other currencies have experimented with something called Proof of Stake to solve the scaling problems but it’s not known if it can be as secure as proof of work. Facebook’s currency will probably use this method. The basic idea is that the holders of the currency vote for what happens on the network. It’s an interesting idea but it’s a very different direction than the key idea of bitcoin.
Another issue is that governments rely on setting interest rates to manage their economies. If an internet currency starts to take off that will limit their ability to do this. At that point you can expect major pushback.
And also, the cryptocurrency ecosystem is a huge target for hackers. Millions of dollars have been stolen over the last decade. Brilliant attacks have been created to exploit the tiniest flaws in code. The phone numbers of crypto enthusiasts have been hacked and their wallets drained. Hackers have even embedded malware on websites or servers to mine cryptocurrency on computers they don’t control. Facebook will need an iron clad security process if it wants to succeed.
Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.
> Facebook’s currency will probably use this method...the holders of the currency vote for what happens on the network
What are you basing this assumption on?
From everything Facebook has ever done to date, I expect Zuckcoin will use the method of "what FB says goes, and if you don't like it, you can pound sand."
Which really boils down to 'what Zuckerberg says goes" so you want to put the control of a currency, perhaps used by 1bn real users, in the hands of a single greedy individual who has already shown contempt for users and their data.
Considering that facebook has an active userbase nearing 2.5 billion people, libra could be the most widely used transactional currency in the world if it lives up to its potential.
One has to wonder how decentralized libra will be. I doubt facebook would introduce a currency without having direct control over it. After all, facebook and most social media companies are anti-dencentralization in their nature. And if they have control over the currency and obviously they have control over facebook accounts, then they could easily track users, currency and transaction.
Considering Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc are now in the "social engineering", "political engineering" and societal manipulation game, maybe it's time for the lazy politicians to regulate tech. It's not simply a matter of privacy anymore, it's a matter of power and influence.
And once again, it seems like HN's talk of facebook demise was a bit premature. But then again, HN is wrong about pretty much everything it seems.
Is it really a cryptocurrency when it's completely centralized? No. This is just Facebook-bucks. Store dollars. It's has absolutely none of the benefits of a real cryptocurrency.
It's as good as any ICO; exercising control isn't good for businesses, but Buterin has shown he can make it happen if the stakes are big enough, just like Zuck will also be able to do.
No it doesn't. ETC is worth something like 2% of the value of ETH, it's a joke in comparison. Besides, the existence of "Ethereum Classic" is not something special, it's the inevitable side effect of suddenly having the balance of your ETH wallet "cloned" in a fork, you only have to lose if you don't treat both wallets like they're real.
The existence of ETC says to me that ETH has the same problem, that is a bunch of power users can change the rules if they want to (if it is financially beneficial for them to do so). No different to a fiat currency controlled by the government.
Yeah that's just wrong. If you want to change the rules, you need to update the client software which means forking. Are you saying that a group of core devs can fork the chain and not have it be contentious?
The "community" chose to roll back a $40 million transaction that was very inconvenient for Vitalik. If he had instead said "code is law, and we stand by it" then ETC would never have existed in the first place. My point is, it was Vitalik's prerogative to reverse a million dollar transaction that he didn't like, a privilege reserved for the elite.
Beyond that, the community didn't really have a choice either way. By definition of owning ETH you are incentivized to (primarily) support whichever chain the creator says he will continue to support. What kind of choice is that? There is no "market" in the sense you speak of, ETH users are a captive audience.
It's important to keep in mind that the creators of ETH gave themselves an order of magnitude more coins to start with than will ever be mined. While it is true that some of it has been sold many times over by now, it still creates a power dynamic within the community which can hardly be ignored.
It's especially problematic for a project that was supposed to be PoS, where the coin holders are also the miners, with the privileges that brings.
there seems to be a desire, arising from confusion and encouraged by opportunism, to conflate the term cryptocurrency with conventional notions of electronic cash.
I've listened to people from the world bank, the IDB and at least one representative of a central bank explain to me with enthusiasm how their pet crypto and blockchain projects were creating new opportunities for their organizations. There's always some crypto consultant lurking in the background of these conversations.
Having done different projects both in the public and private blockchain space, I believe the majority of the confusion comes from almost no one actually understanding the point of something like Bitcoin. While it's clear for IT people to look at a Paypal like system and point to the obvious central point of failure (the company behind it, the website "paypal.com', etc), almost no one outside of IT understands decentralization and why someone would want it.
Especially after learning all the downsides you get with these kind of distributed systems (slow finality, low throughput, limited in capabilities, inefficient, open to new attack vectors).
At that point and in so many circumstances the crypto part is ultimately just a different kind of database. Databases and protocols are just boring... At least from the perspective of the person using the currency.
In general, who cares how Chase keeps track of my checking account? It might have this feature or that feature but when it is being used as it is there isn't much to be excited about. If you're Chase it might make life a little easier to choose one thing or the other but the rest of the world probably doesn't care.
Who cares? You should. Bitcoin offers a public audit trail less commonly known as triple-entry bookkeeping or momentum accounting. Chase still uses double entry.
What's more Chase charges $25 per month to keep an open checking account, keeps only a small portion of your funds on hand and may both lock you out of your account and freeze your funds on a whim whereas Bitcoin won't.
I'd rather not have the entire planet be able to audit my transactions.
I don't care what Chase does with my dollars because the promise isn't that there's a vault somewhere that a banker can point to a pile of bills and say "that's Cole's money right there." The promise is that at any time I can withdraw any amount of money, and o have no problem believing that promise.
As for locking my account on a whim, that's what I signed up for. Every time so far I have had a financial account locked it has been because someone who wasn't me was trying to use my money. As for avoiding being punished for crime well I'm not too into money laundering so I think I'll be ok. Otherwise it's balancing the risk that the bank will make a fixable mistake with the existing system which has the ability to fix errors and reverse thefts.
The public audit trail has yet to return thousands of my dollars from mtgox. I bet if there was massive fraud and or theft of the reserves at Chase that I would have had my money back immediately.
(I don't actually have a checking account at Chase)
> Chase charges $25 per month to keep an open checking account
This is just a ""feature"" of the backwards American system, plenty of countries still mostly have free current accounts. Although the very low interest rates are definitely putting pressure on banks to try to find ways to charge people.
Cash can't do those things either. It would be relatively easy to have a regulated bitcoin bank that offers such services. Coinbase is heading that way.
Presumably that wouldn't fit with any of the demands of cryptocurrency enthusiasts though, being able to freeze your funds etc. Also I'm not sure how they would tackle reversing any fraud given that bitcoin is amazingly irreversible.
If cryptocurrency is, for you, a way to get away from the abusive dominance of banks, why would you use such a service?
I can't read the article in it's entirety but decentralisation is not what makes a crypto currency a crypto currency. Visa, Master card, Joe shmoe, anyone can start a centralized ledger that uses crypto.
I would strongly disagree here. Decentralization, though a term fraught with poorly acknowledged and contradictory premises, is essentially the defining value proposition of cryptocurrency.
Take away decentralization (which I would be more comfortable calling "aspirational decentralization" to reflect actual practice) and cryptocurrency is indistinguishable from conventional electronic currency.
Is this a joke about fiat currencies and their tendency to suddenly become valueless and cryptocurrencies tendency to suddenly become valueless by making a cross language pun connecting the owner of a new cryptocurrency and the name of a currency most famously known for a hyperinflation.
Papiermark (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Papiermark) pre 1924 was the hyperinflated currency, then followed the stable Reichsmark and after World War II Deutsch Mark and East Deutsch Mark. Deutsch Mark remained until 2002 when the Euro got introduced. For Germans Mark is just a name for currency like Kronas (Sweden), Francs (France), Lira (Italy). Hyperinflation is too long ago to remember.
Germans use cash much more than the average Western European. The memory of hyperinflation and bank system collapse is one of the explanations why people prefer to store value in currency (often foreign currency) and not trust so much a bank or card issuer.
Also, in West Germany, the Deutsche Mark (1948-2002) is strongly associated with the post-war economic boom. It's still a common rhetoric among conservative populists to argue for a return to the good old times ^W Mark.
I don't think it is just a "common rhetoric", but rather a common mainstream truth that the change from the Mark to the Euro (which can be kept weaker) allows German companies to export cheaply while making people's salaries and savings worth less.
I think Hyperinflation fears are ingrained into EU policymakers DNA. They are so afraid to create demand in the macro economy via deficit spending because of the legacy of the Weimar Republic and what it led to. Looking at the WR case, they had to pay war reparations in hard currency not fiat. Because of this, you have Germany pushing for very dovish fiscal policy limits on Greece and the PIGS. And to make things worse, monetary policy, doesn't work even with negative interest rates.
When you get banned from Facebook for talking about whatever you can't buy or sell on the Internet anymore because you don't carry "the Mark". They are a private company so they can deal with whomever they want. You can still use cash. These tech companies want it so that if they ban you they can really screw up your life. Just look at people who have their whole Google existence wiped out because of some random policy violation.
It's called "cloud feudalism". Amazing how accurate that term is, during feudal times, the king was free to change their terms, and if you disagreed you could shut up or get out of the kingdom, which was a difficult process and meant cutting off ties with people and business partners (or letting them know about your change of address). And if the king said "You, you did something I disliked, out!", you could protest all you want but that would fall mostly on deaf ears.
Of course "deaf ears" is nowadays support emails being handled by copy-pasting bots.
Could you please expand? If the big Chinese miners go rogue (actually go rogue, take over a currency and actively tries to stop the larger public from taking it back), what recourse does the larger public have? Wouldn't they need more mining power, or an impractical fenced-off network that's still decentralized in some manner?
If it's a currency and is implemented using cryptographic concepts, I feel comfortable calling it a cryptocurrency. "Decentralization" is a spectrum and a highly subjective one, so I don't think it should be a requirement.
Indeed nowadays a lot of people relate the word 'crypto' with Blockchain related concepts, but being crypto only entails using some cryptographic concepts.
Cryptocommunication might be nothing but HTTPS/TLS. Cryptocurrency could very well be something similar, without involving Blockchain technology.
In that case I can say that I'm doing my groceries with a cryptocurrency, because the transaction is encrypted between the terminal and the bank. That doesn't make any sense.
Can it be exchanged in binance for bitcoin? If yes, and this gets a lot of users, then it s a huge deal, centralized or not. (And yeah it is cryptocurrency as long as it is based in Cryptography )
The only benefit I see is that it'll likely be an ERC20 token which means more gas payed to Ethereum (which is great). Also, it'll essentially be a fiat on-ramp for billions of people looking to get into real cryptocurrencies. Assuming they allow the token to be traded on crypto exchanges anyway.
I don’t think FB will use Ethereum or any other existing cryptocurrency.
They would want full control and there is no reason not to run own blockchain.
Also environmental impact of Ethereum mining is bad PR for Facebook.
Means pound in Spanish. As if it holds any weight in the real world. Alt Timeline: Zuckerberg becomes POTUS in 2018. By 2020 he becomes POTKW and conquers all countries with just the information he knows about people on Facebook.
Sorry. If I had explained, I don't think that it would have been unsubstantive. But I didn't. So anyway, to the point.
As the sign of balance, symbolized by scales, Libra is certainly relevant to money. But the name is also a riff on liberty/liberation aka freedom. And that's the sick joke, because Libre will be totally under Facebook control.
Including the British pound - until decimalisation in 1971, the abbreviations for pounds, shillings and pence were Lsd (with the L often having a single or double cross bar) from the Latin libra, solidus and denarius respectively.
Facebook has done horrible things, but bad business is not one of them. They already have 2 billion+ people on their platform(s) and if Facebook enables a virtual currency to exchange goods (real or virtual) it may be a hit. Just like mobile wallets have taken off pretty well, this could too. Again, I am not a facebook fan, but they know how to make money. This could be the next billion dollar idea.
Ugh. This will pass too. The value of Bitcoin is in the fact that nobody can control and censor it. It's black market money. If it didn't have this quality, it'd be useless. Nobody (meaning customers) cares about Facebook launching a coin. Facebook will not be the champion of freedom. How do I know? Ask yourself, if Facebook Coin is going to be available in Crimea (currently under sanctions) or Iran (currently under sanctions) or China (where facebook is banned). The answer is of course not. Bitcoin is available in all of those places and not a single government was able to do anything about it yet.
You're forgetting how much credit card transaction suck. As I see it this is the main problem facebook could solve through sheer volume of use: microtransactions.
Granted this is about the worst way this future could come about....
Isn't this a lot like asking why Tyson invested in Beyond Meat when BYND is a threat to Tyson? Maybe you could call this defensively "investing in the future" of your industry (if this turns out to be anything at all).
if your company were under threat and you had the option to invest in your competitor at an early stage, wouldn't you? I don't think I agree that this is a threat to credit cards, but even if I did I think I would understand the investment.
I'm just going to add to this: it's been 10 years. Hacker News is still hoping very hard this so called libertarian wet dream cryptocurrency called Bitcoin will soon be out of the picture, replaced by something proper, that is fair and doesn't make you feel angry. And yet, it's still here, angering a whole bunch of people who didn't buy early and think the distribution is unfair & the political ideas behind it are awful and yet, Bitcoin is still #1 and widely used. "Blockchain not Bitcoin" hype is gone (remember how big banks invested millions blockchain projects?). Ethereum scammy ICOs hype is gone. This big-corp-coin thing will soon be gone too.
And all the issues people talk about here - like solving micropayments - are already being successfully solved by Lightning Network. Quietly.
Except next to no one is using Bitcoin, not to mention Ethereum or Lightning Network.
It's very much like the Linux Desktop - it exists, some people love it, it's never going to disappear, but it is very much a niche interest that will never be mainstream, for a multitude of reasons.
Well, sure, but then the 4 year chart of returns on my high school summer lawn moving business went up 13,500%, from $5 net my first week, to $675 on my last. Behold my 15 year old financial genius. /s
Any asset that doesn't crash back to a penny likewise goes up astronomically from the day trackable value is first created. Bitcoin's chart appears to have outperformed the market so dramatically, percentage-wise, because its chart tracks price from effectively zero (depending on how you would price a 1/10000th slice of pizza) or a dozen or so pennies (if you're starting from the first BTC-E numbers). But this is really not any different from what happens to shares in a private company, which also start at effectively zero as well.
Publicly-traded share values aren't visible to the public until they have already risen a hundredfold or more from their inception (in terms of percentage gains). Sure, Bitcoin was visible to "the public" but only if you happened to be in the right place at the right time and knew the right people - which in practice are opportune circumstances no different than those available to people who happen to be close to the founders of a privately owned company.
IMO this is it, the last best chance for a cryptocurrency to take off and actually be used as a currency and not a speculative vehicle. If Libra fails, even with all of Facebook’s resources at its disposal, then there is unlikely to be any viable cryptocurrency for at least another generation.
Disclaimer: I hold a lot of stock in FB and no positions in other crypto.
and many people are compensated in highly volatile stocks that are subject to speculation, you paying someone in bitcoin doesn't change anything about its speculative nature, it just means your employees are willing to receive compensation in a volatile currency.
I’m curious. Is their salary paid as X BTC per month, regardless of the movement of BTC? Or are they paid the BTC equivalent of Y USD (or similar currency) per month?
As mentioned in the top comment, FB currency is not a cryptocurrency in the sense "decentralized trustless public cryptography based ledger", so its adoption or lack thereof has little to no consequences on Bitcoin and Ethereum.
That's exactly the issue. How is this any advantageous compared to say putting fiat USD on my Apple account and then spending that on iTunes/Appstore/In-App etc?
The biggest hurdle to Bitcoin adoption are on-ramps / off-ramps. Businesses and individuals dealing with Bitcoin frequently get de-risked by banks and suppressed by regulators (e.g: China & India).
Libra if (a) can be interacted with via API, (b) can itself be acquired via bank transfers / credit cards & (c) not geo-fenced, will eventually be adapted into one of the many exchanges and will contribute greatly to solving Bitcoin's on-ramping issues.
Whether consumers want Bitcoin once they've tasted Libra, well that's an ideological choice. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
Why would anyone want a facebook coin that is completely controlled by Facebook which can be controlled by the government when with Bitcoin you get complete sovereignty?
Because not everyone cares about "complete sovereignty"? There's a reason why all these companies are still successful, most people don't care that much about their privacy or other dignities if it means convenience.
Facebook is trying to create a common currency accessible to a global userbase whose transmission bypasses traditional banking rails. It'll be super convenient, even the USD can't do that.
This combined with Whatsapp for Business is going to be game changing for SMEs in developing markets.
Do I want to keep my savings in it? Probably not...
It might be a great project, it just has very little to do with actual cryptocurrencies. It's great to be excited about it, the issue many people in this thread have the project being called a cryptocurrency.
If your national government cares at all about sovereignty, it will force you to use bitcoin by rule of law / force. Countries like Venezuela, Turkey, and Argentina with struggling currencies are under the mercy of the US petrodollar. A move to BTC would end their hyper inflation.
Most people are too self centered to realize the political/ economical implications of BTC. The most likely case will be that nothing changes in our day to day, except that our currency is now backed by BTC instead of US debt.
I don't see Facebook allowing that. This is going to be a locked-down, siloed currency that can only be purchased with a Facebook account and real currency, with the consortium members taking a cut.
Can't read the article. What is it backed by? Where's this information coming from? I can't find any press release or sources that aren't publishers themselves—this smells like insubstantial technology and bought hype (not that it won't work...).
Its backed by some large companies and a bunch of money:
"The financial and e-commerce companies, venture capitalists and telecommunications firms will invest around $10 million each in a consortium that will govern the digital coin, called Libra, according to people familiar with the matter. The money would be used to fund the creation of the coin, which will be pegged to a basket of government-issued currencies to avoid the wild swings that have dogged other cryptocurrencies, they said."
I've met a hell of a lot of authoritarians in the crypto scene over the past decade. Blockchain technology is a centralized datastore so of course it's a tool for global authoritarianism; think IBM in the 1930s selling slow databases to the Nazi's so they can keep a universal ledger of the Jews.
P2P distributed architectures such as Holochain which actually decentralize data and control are far more positive paradigms for humanity.
That's not what anyone in the space calls centralized. It's actually called "decentralized" by everyone because the way this consensus is kept and changed happens decentralized (to some degree).
Right now it seems: If you don't have central consensus you can't have digital currency. Since everybody needs to be on the same line regards to who owns what. This is different from cash in the current world. Where nobody needs to agree to how much I have because I can physically store it and it's impossible to copy my dollars.
I agree that "global" would be a better word than "central", but that doesn't really affect treelovinhippie's point.
> If you don't have central consensus you can't have digital currency.
From what I can tell, the Holochain developers agree with this: you can't have a single global currency without global consensus. Their approach seems to be: rather than having a single global currency, have a network of IOUs, trusted and enforced locally: https://medium.com/holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalab...
Personally, I have no opinion on their approach, other than welcoming experiments, since that's what I find interesting in Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto space (and frankly wish it hadn't passed that stage yet).
I started reading with that article but it doesn't really seem to answer the questions it's claiming to answer. It's talking about how Bitcoin et al. have a shared consensus that's updated once every 10 minutes, and how everyone needs to validate everything which is inefficient (I agree). But while trying to explain how holochain does it different I don't read how except for insect analogies, for example:
> ## Order of Operation Matters
> It turns out when you focus on distributing process first you end up with even more greatly distributed data. This is because each participant holds only their own data. In contrast, blockchains store everybody’s transactions in a single database that every node verifies and copies. The underlying foundation of distributed process enables deeper distribution of data and parallel architectures. Ethereum and smart contracts, are doing this the other way around — layering processes on top of a global ledger.
> By distributing process at the foundation, and leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity, our approach results in massive improvements in throughput (from parallel simultaneous independent processing), speed, latency, efficiency, and cost of hardware. There is no need to wait 10 minutes to see if your transaction gets committed. This architecture can facilitate huge volumes of even extremely “low value” transactions permitting creative uses for coordinating shared activities that wouldn’t merit the cost or energy of implementing on a blockchain. You also don’t need to incent people to hold their own record — they already want it.
This is all true but the section heading "order of operation matters" - and how holochain deals with this - is simply not addressed. Given HN is a technical community feel free to link to actual research papers or more technical content that actually explains how Holochain solves the problems. This piece looks like a PR piece to me, one that doesn't really have any answers.
I think their point is that the Order of Operation matters for global currencies, but not for mutual credit systems like theirs. But don't quote me on that.
They are calling it decentralised but it really isn't. Transactions with physical cash are fully decentralised, anonymous (save for finger prints etc.) and asynchronous. In terms of convenience credit cards, apple pay and PayPal are hard to beat. I do not know of a single use case for consumer facing crypto currencies that is compelling to me.
Visa MasterCard and PayPal are just there to ensure that they don't get left behind if the FB coin succeeds, payments are their bread and butter, so if they can hop on the train they can be partially insulated. Otherwise they don't care.
Why does this centralized stablecoin need to be crypto? It's not like they need to raise funding for this.
They could have made their own boring but extremely well positioned WePay / Paypal alternative ages ago, and instead they waited until cryptocurrencies are past peak hype to launch this. Puzzling.
I guess the only thing they have to sell here is the privacy aspect of crypto, but I doubt you'll get effective privacy from Facebook on any Facebook platform, crypto or not.
because FB already rapes user privacy to the max and knows everything about the foolish follower it is a perfect match to attach a payment system to that data pool!
We can not let China lead the BigBrother revolution!
Yes. The biggest fans of Bitcoin have been all about the privacy and freedom of the coin but unless you have perpetually perfect opsec what actually happens is total information awareness. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing.
How is this different from the "digital coins" e.g. gems in pay to win games then? They don't give me a bank account, but it's still digital money, but not a cryptocurrency.
Many businesses exclusively accept WeChat and Alipay. So there is a mechanism for paying rent, utilities and tax. Otherwise they would run out of cash.
To replicate that level of success, Facebook must create a mechanism to convert tokens back to cash.
So the tokens are basically just used to get past regulations. Facebook will then gather some hard numbers to show that crime is negligible. Sensible governments will tolerate the tokens because it's replacing physical cash where crimes like tax evasion are rampant.
They will not be able to get around know your customer laws. I don't know why people insist on thinking that they can get away with money laundering if they rub a little crypto on their financial transactions.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadDo you think he’d start a currency he wouldn’t be able to use to spy on every user?
My interest is in who controls issuance of the currency itself and if that control is decentralized or controlled by a central entity, like Facebook.
The term "cryptocurrency" is applied a bit too liberally in the space, but what are the odds that Facebook's coin is censorship-resistant? Will Facebook help enforce US monetary imperialism, or will it thumb its nose at US sanctions? (e.g. allow a US Facebook user to send Libra to Iranian Facebook users)
Now, there could be a surprise plot twist in which these megacorps stand up for individual liberties. There have been stranger things.
Cryptocurrencies right now have a trade off between scalability and decentralization. Bitcoin is theoretically decentralized even though the reality is more complex. But theoretically anyone with a computer can randomly decide to mine the coin and participate in the network. This whole process is made possible by Proof of Work, which was the key brilliant idea that made bitcoin secure and possible. The problem right now is this algorithm doesn’t allow very many transactions per second.
Other currencies have experimented with something called Proof of Stake to solve the scaling problems but it’s not known if it can be as secure as proof of work. Facebook’s currency will probably use this method. The basic idea is that the holders of the currency vote for what happens on the network. It’s an interesting idea but it’s a very different direction than the key idea of bitcoin.
Another issue is that governments rely on setting interest rates to manage their economies. If an internet currency starts to take off that will limit their ability to do this. At that point you can expect major pushback.
And also, the cryptocurrency ecosystem is a huge target for hackers. Millions of dollars have been stolen over the last decade. Brilliant attacks have been created to exploit the tiniest flaws in code. The phone numbers of crypto enthusiasts have been hacked and their wallets drained. Hackers have even embedded malware on websites or servers to mine cryptocurrency on computers they don’t control. Facebook will need an iron clad security process if it wants to succeed.
Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.
or
Mark
on second thought, no it doesn't
What are you basing this assumption on?
From everything Facebook has ever done to date, I expect Zuckcoin will use the method of "what FB says goes, and if you don't like it, you can pound sand."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-announces-a-ban-on-cry...
Clever girl.
Considering that facebook has an active userbase nearing 2.5 billion people, libra could be the most widely used transactional currency in the world if it lives up to its potential.
One has to wonder how decentralized libra will be. I doubt facebook would introduce a currency without having direct control over it. After all, facebook and most social media companies are anti-dencentralization in their nature. And if they have control over the currency and obviously they have control over facebook accounts, then they could easily track users, currency and transaction.
Considering Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc are now in the "social engineering", "political engineering" and societal manipulation game, maybe it's time for the lazy politicians to regulate tech. It's not simply a matter of privacy anymore, it's a matter of power and influence.
And once again, it seems like HN's talk of facebook demise was a bit premature. But then again, HN is wrong about pretty much everything it seems.
Just like with the OpenOffice, LibreOffice fork. Everyone was free to use one or the other. The community chose.
The "community" chose to roll back a $40 million transaction that was very inconvenient for Vitalik. If he had instead said "code is law, and we stand by it" then ETC would never have existed in the first place. My point is, it was Vitalik's prerogative to reverse a million dollar transaction that he didn't like, a privilege reserved for the elite.
Beyond that, the community didn't really have a choice either way. By definition of owning ETH you are incentivized to (primarily) support whichever chain the creator says he will continue to support. What kind of choice is that? There is no "market" in the sense you speak of, ETH users are a captive audience.
It's especially problematic for a project that was supposed to be PoS, where the coin holders are also the miners, with the privileges that brings.
I've listened to people from the world bank, the IDB and at least one representative of a central bank explain to me with enthusiasm how their pet crypto and blockchain projects were creating new opportunities for their organizations. There's always some crypto consultant lurking in the background of these conversations.
Especially after learning all the downsides you get with these kind of distributed systems (slow finality, low throughput, limited in capabilities, inefficient, open to new attack vectors).
I've talked to economist and political scientist that understood the implications of trading without central banks very well.
In general, who cares how Chase keeps track of my checking account? It might have this feature or that feature but when it is being used as it is there isn't much to be excited about. If you're Chase it might make life a little easier to choose one thing or the other but the rest of the world probably doesn't care.
What's more Chase charges $25 per month to keep an open checking account, keeps only a small portion of your funds on hand and may both lock you out of your account and freeze your funds on a whim whereas Bitcoin won't.
I don't care what Chase does with my dollars because the promise isn't that there's a vault somewhere that a banker can point to a pile of bills and say "that's Cole's money right there." The promise is that at any time I can withdraw any amount of money, and o have no problem believing that promise.
As for locking my account on a whim, that's what I signed up for. Every time so far I have had a financial account locked it has been because someone who wasn't me was trying to use my money. As for avoiding being punished for crime well I'm not too into money laundering so I think I'll be ok. Otherwise it's balancing the risk that the bank will make a fixable mistake with the existing system which has the ability to fix errors and reverse thefts.
The public audit trail has yet to return thousands of my dollars from mtgox. I bet if there was massive fraud and or theft of the reserves at Chase that I would have had my money back immediately.
(I don't actually have a checking account at Chase)
This is just a ""feature"" of the backwards American system, plenty of countries still mostly have free current accounts. Although the very low interest rates are definitely putting pressure on banks to try to find ways to charge people.
If cryptocurrency is, for you, a way to get away from the abusive dominance of banks, why would you use such a service?
If you want to use a bitcoin bank you can. If you don't then you don't have to and can self custody.
You have the choice to do either. Which is not the case with electronic claims on fiat money, as they require a bank counterparty.
Then try looking at the post I responded to?
Your responses to me seem kinda pointless here.
"Crypto is great because banks suck" "I'm ok with banks, therefore this isn't a need I have"
Then you come along and tell me crypto can maybe act like a bank. So what?
Take away decentralization (which I would be more comfortable calling "aspirational decentralization" to reflect actual practice) and cryptocurrency is indistinguishable from conventional electronic currency.
Missed opportunity to call them "Marks", although maybe only German speakers will get the joke.
Germans use cash much more than the average Western European. The memory of hyperinflation and bank system collapse is one of the explanations why people prefer to store value in currency (often foreign currency) and not trust so much a bank or card issuer.
Bingo! Social credit system with verified ID.
The crypto part is just to make sound hip.
Of course "deaf ears" is nowadays support emails being handled by copy-pasting bots.
What is decentralized about a handful of Chinese miners controlling all supply?
Same for open source software, the best pieces are generally run by a no-nonsense autocrats.
Cryptocommunication might be nothing but HTTPS/TLS. Cryptocurrency could very well be something similar, without involving Blockchain technology.
It's a sick joke.
As the sign of balance, symbolized by scales, Libra is certainly relevant to money. But the name is also a riff on liberty/liberation aka freedom. And that's the sick joke, because Libre will be totally under Facebook control.
Granted this is about the worst way this future could come about....
And all the issues people talk about here - like solving micropayments - are already being successfully solved by Lightning Network. Quietly.
It's very much like the Linux Desktop - it exists, some people love it, it's never going to disappear, but it is very much a niche interest that will never be mainstream, for a multitude of reasons.
Also it hasn't gone up consistently, it's still at around 50% of its peak almost two years ago.
No, it hasn't, unless you've got some sort of alternative definition of "consistently".
Any asset that doesn't crash back to a penny likewise goes up astronomically from the day trackable value is first created. Bitcoin's chart appears to have outperformed the market so dramatically, percentage-wise, because its chart tracks price from effectively zero (depending on how you would price a 1/10000th slice of pizza) or a dozen or so pennies (if you're starting from the first BTC-E numbers). But this is really not any different from what happens to shares in a private company, which also start at effectively zero as well.
Publicly-traded share values aren't visible to the public until they have already risen a hundredfold or more from their inception (in terms of percentage gains). Sure, Bitcoin was visible to "the public" but only if you happened to be in the right place at the right time and knew the right people - which in practice are opportune circumstances no different than those available to people who happen to be close to the founders of a privately owned company.
Disclaimer: I hold a lot of stock in FB and no positions in other crypto.
now i too am unsure what the advantage is.
The biggest hurdle to Bitcoin adoption are on-ramps / off-ramps. Businesses and individuals dealing with Bitcoin frequently get de-risked by banks and suppressed by regulators (e.g: China & India).
Libra if (a) can be interacted with via API, (b) can itself be acquired via bank transfers / credit cards & (c) not geo-fenced, will eventually be adapted into one of the many exchanges and will contribute greatly to solving Bitcoin's on-ramping issues.
Whether consumers want Bitcoin once they've tasted Libra, well that's an ideological choice. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
This combined with Whatsapp for Business is going to be game changing for SMEs in developing markets.
Do I want to keep my savings in it? Probably not...
It might be a great project, it just has very little to do with actual cryptocurrencies. It's great to be excited about it, the issue many people in this thread have the project being called a cryptocurrency.
If your national government cares at all about sovereignty, it will force you to use bitcoin by rule of law / force. Countries like Venezuela, Turkey, and Argentina with struggling currencies are under the mercy of the US petrodollar. A move to BTC would end their hyper inflation.
Most people are too self centered to realize the political/ economical implications of BTC. The most likely case will be that nothing changes in our day to day, except that our currency is now backed by BTC instead of US debt.
What's the rationale?
"The financial and e-commerce companies, venture capitalists and telecommunications firms will invest around $10 million each in a consortium that will govern the digital coin, called Libra, according to people familiar with the matter. The money would be used to fund the creation of the coin, which will be pegged to a basket of government-issued currencies to avoid the wild swings that have dogged other cryptocurrencies, they said."
P2P distributed architectures such as Holochain which actually decentralize data and control are far more positive paradigms for humanity.
Right now it seems: If you don't have central consensus you can't have digital currency. Since everybody needs to be on the same line regards to who owns what. This is different from cash in the current world. Where nobody needs to agree to how much I have because I can physically store it and it's impossible to copy my dollars.
> If you don't have central consensus you can't have digital currency.
From what I can tell, the Holochain developers agree with this: you can't have a single global currency without global consensus. Their approach seems to be: rather than having a single global currency, have a network of IOUs, trusted and enforced locally: https://medium.com/holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalab...
Personally, I have no opinion on their approach, other than welcoming experiments, since that's what I find interesting in Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto space (and frankly wish it hadn't passed that stage yet).
> ## Order of Operation Matters
> It turns out when you focus on distributing process first you end up with even more greatly distributed data. This is because each participant holds only their own data. In contrast, blockchains store everybody’s transactions in a single database that every node verifies and copies. The underlying foundation of distributed process enables deeper distribution of data and parallel architectures. Ethereum and smart contracts, are doing this the other way around — layering processes on top of a global ledger.
> By distributing process at the foundation, and leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity, our approach results in massive improvements in throughput (from parallel simultaneous independent processing), speed, latency, efficiency, and cost of hardware. There is no need to wait 10 minutes to see if your transaction gets committed. This architecture can facilitate huge volumes of even extremely “low value” transactions permitting creative uses for coordinating shared activities that wouldn’t merit the cost or energy of implementing on a blockchain. You also don’t need to incent people to hold their own record — they already want it.
This is all true but the section heading "order of operation matters" - and how holochain deals with this - is simply not addressed. Given HN is a technical community feel free to link to actual research papers or more technical content that actually explains how Holochain solves the problems. This piece looks like a PR piece to me, one that doesn't really have any answers.
https://github.com/holochain/holochain-rust/blob/develop/doc...
https://github.com/holochain/holochain-proto/blob/whitepaper...
Try buying something you are not allowed to buy. Personally I use it a lot while traveling abroad.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin
And like any good crypto "expert", he spent his time sharing opinions and copying other peoples source code versus building anything real.
They could have made their own boring but extremely well positioned WePay / Paypal alternative ages ago, and instead they waited until cryptocurrencies are past peak hype to launch this. Puzzling.
I guess the only thing they have to sell here is the privacy aspect of crypto, but I doubt you'll get effective privacy from Facebook on any Facebook platform, crypto or not.
because FB already rapes user privacy to the max and knows everything about the foolish follower it is a perfect match to attach a payment system to that data pool!
We can not let China lead the BigBrother revolution!
A block chain will make it easier to build trust because (some) third parties can audit it.
To replicate that level of success, Facebook must create a mechanism to convert tokens back to cash.
So the tokens are basically just used to get past regulations. Facebook will then gather some hard numbers to show that crime is negligible. Sensible governments will tolerate the tokens because it's replacing physical cash where crimes like tax evasion are rampant.