> As with any currency or financial infrastructure, bad actors will try to exploit the Libra network. While the network is open and accessible to everyone with internet access, the network's main endpoints will need to follow applicable laws and regulations and collaborate with law enforcement. In addition, because transactions on the Libra Blockchain are pseudonymous, it is possible for third parties to do analysis to detect fraud and illegal activity.
reading the whitepaper , it seems everything will be managed by the swiss company. facebook is just one of the partners.
[As another user mentioned, the company that makes the wallet is US based and will enforce sanctions. But maybe that means that another of the partners can make a wallet to use in sanctioned countries?]
The better question is "Why does Facebook think that being based in Switzerland will protect them?
It's been a while since Swiss banks were last immune to U.S. government pressure. Or even pressure from other countries. I can't bother to find the links now, but there were a couple of stories during Obama's time, about the US government arresting people based on their financial transactions in Switzerland.
There's a difference between Libra (the Swiss-based association) and Calibra (the US-based FB subsidiary making the first wallet).
> "Calibra will do its part to facilitate the efficacy of international sanctions regimes. We will administer and
enforce applicable sanctions programs including, for example, U.S., EU, and U.N. sanctions programs."
Basically the Feds will crack down hard on Facebook and co enabling Iranians and others on sanction lists. It's no joke and it's one of the few things that will result with executives in jail compared to all that should but doesn't.
The oligarchic model offers considerable savings (less computational and energy waste). It's understandable why it's tempting.
But I think that the consensus protocol of Stellar looks a lot more like a sweet spot: it has different levels of participation to the network, each of which gives different incentives, requirements and use cases.
Is this really any different than your ability to buy things in-practice gated nigh exclusively by MasterCard and Visa?
It sounds less like a dystopia and more like the tech sector and payment processors have been collectively itching to escape the current banking system.
If there is one thing I learnt is that using a techno-bubble elite speech you can cover up a large number of loopholes, fraud schemes, ... Regulators and prosecutors know payment processors extremely well; once you start using another language they're partially unable to compute.
In this sense the choice of initial validators alarms me. Trust is something that must be earned: it's different because I know the evils of the system I'm using, I don't know the evils of this system and it might be worse.
...worse...
> In light of this, Facebook aims for the project to be fully “permissionless” — rather than permissioned, where membership of the Association is only granted to a select few —after five years and transition to a proof of stake network.
"me looking at the GitHub repository": there's a lot of technical debt that needs to be addressed, where is the design for this stuff? A "we'll fix it" is not enough, certain issues require a lot more work than code development.
No, the ledger is open. It's just that the transaction data is encrypted so only the recipient can decrypt it, and accompanied by a zero-knowledge proof so the money supply retains its integrity even with the encryption in place.
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 open source could help in that regard.
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 tokens at the base layer
It feels like a defeat, though, to have the word cryptocurrency co-opted by things such as this. Wouldn't it be easier to call this bullshit, and decentralized currencies cryptocurrencies? /s
i actually think the term is accurate. cryptocurrency = currency based on cryptography. we need a different term for "decentralized/trustless currency"
Facebook had already banned advertising other cryptocurrencies in the run-up to this announcement (well, back in January 2018), so the effort to prevent other cryptocurrencies from scaling is well underway.
That's unfair, there was a lot of pressure on companies to protect users from scammy crypto ads during the big bubble of Bitcoin. I think many companies banned ads for shady sites and to imply they did it only to promote their own coin isn't fair.
I totally agree that it was good move from a user perspective. It's just a happy coincidence. Or perhaps they saw how many outfits (shady or otherwise) were affected by the ban and decided it represented a good market opportunity for them to step in and fill a gap?
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.
the association could be inferred via side channels though. in any case they should separate the blockchain from facebook ids. This should not be facebook's toy.
I think Facebook will be in the best position to link identity to wallets. Doling this out to initial backers and anyone who pays later on would keep the truth of the statement.
I'm biased as I'm working on this project. But I'm super happy it's finally out there :) There's a lot of really cool cryptography and tech on this project and there's still a lot for people to discover!
Seems like it can, because the article says that one’s Facebook account won’t be linked to the wallet account and that the wallet account can remain anonymous or pseudo-anonymous to others. But I’m sure Facebook will be able to link these somehow, and so will all the partners. This will be a bigger Cambridge Analytica in the future.
There's a lot of interesting physics in building thermonuclear weapons. Doesn't mean you should do it.
Your talents could be used to help the world. Instead, they are being used to enclose common spaces and pull apart the fabric of society. Get a better job?
I'd work on nukes before I'd work at Facebook. Nuclear weapons have arguably prevented WWIII, at least so far. Conversely, if WWIII ever does come, I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook has something to do with causing it.
I doubt it. We already see that whenever somebody posts something stupid and controversial and is a public figure, they will claim they have been hacked and somebody else wrote the tweet.
Tumblr, Reddit and Twitter are community sites. They are driven by their users, with little or no overarching strategy beyond being next-generation BBS services that occasionally sell a few ads to keep the lights on.
Facebook is driven internally, from the top down, to accomplish murky, exploitative goals that are in the interests of nobody except the company and its shareholders.
That's why Facebook is worth hundreds of billions of dollars while Reddit can barely pay for their own bandwidth and Tumblr gets passed around between acquirers like it was a radioactive waste dump that runs a porn business on the side.
I don't know WTF Twitter is worth, if anything, but some people seem to think it's got a viable business model, so meh, whatever. They aren't Facebook.
I can't believe the amount of "you are a horrible human being for working at Facebook" comments I keep seeing as soon as someone says they are working there.
HN is great because you normally get comments straight from the source, but I'm worried we will inevitably shame Facebook employees into not posting here at all.
Saying "haters" makes it look like the people criticizing Facebook don't have serious concerns about the influence it has on the world. It's not being a hater of Vim, or Python. This is far bigger.
If we could indeed shame people into not doing something (focusing on actions and not people), I’d rather spend my energy on shaming people to quit Facebook en masse and shut it down. Seeing that this sounds ridiculous and unlikely to happen, I doubt any other intent of shaming would work either.
I appreciate your point of view, FWIW I believe that I'm doing net positive work for the world.
If you don't believe such projects should exist, you can at least agree that such project will inevitably happen and that it is a good thing that they have people like me onboard to influence them in the right direction.
I will write more about the things I work on and why I think these are good things on my blog www.cryptologie.net
> you can at least agree that such project will inevitably happen and that it is a good thing that they have people like me onboard to influence them in the right direction.
Sorry, what? What gives a random person a reason to think you're someone who will "influence them in the right direction"?
Okay, but he's also clearly absorbed Zuckerberg's savior complex. Politeness may help a conversation but it doesn't qualify him to make world-shaking ethical decisions.
I largely agree with the OP. I think these technologies can only be viewed in an optimistic way through a techno-libertarian lens; a perspective I don't think has any practical grounding in reality at best and at worst actively ignores why current systems exist (throwing the baby out with the bath water so to speak). And with that lens, I think it's foolish it believe that an engineer will actually be able to steer this machine once it's out in the wild. Systems without power structures still have power structures, they just not may be immediately obvious.
But I do appreciate your constructive attitude towards his comments and I'll be checking your blog a good bit to inform myself as best as I can going forward :). I would ask that you have some kind of "apologetic"/philosophical tag on the type of posts that people like me can filter for so we can read up on that kind of perspective.
I think these systems deserve more social/civic conversation and less technical ones. The tech is cool, but these technologies have the potential to have severe civic ramifications. These technologies are largely out pacing our national and global conversations around how we should use them, their pro's and con's, and the systems they're designed to replace/circumvent... and it's not a good thing.
It could be but it is not and won't be. Net positive would require actual decentralization and no PoS (rich get richer). There are other ways to solve consensus and I don't mean PoW. Net positive would be to not require AML or KYC. Net positive would be no transaction fees. The foundation members will still profit on the float on fiat. Also, this project already exists. Isn't this the whole reason Ripple was created? Why not adopt Ripple as the crypto? Oh, because it is all about control.
How is FB printing fake digital dollars any better than the US government printing fake digital dollars? Except this way, everyone gets to rent seek and take from the people they purport to want to help. Rent seeking less than Western Union doesn't count. How about a project that is actually about helping the unbanked and underrepresented without exploiting them? I'll believe that anyone on this project actually thinks it is net positive for the world when they donate their salary and RSU to a non-profit that is actually helping people.
> they have people like me onboard to influence them in the right direction.
what influence do you have? Can you tell Zuck not to steal my personal info?
Also, how much of your salary is getting paid out in Zuck Bucks? Or are you going to wait until some third world citizens with no other options test out the utility of this before you dip your toe in?
A bit of cyberstalking suggests that the commenter here has a background in crypto stuff, so i suspect that the belief predates the being paid a lot of money.
A lot of people genuinely believe that crypto bobbins is inherently positive, and might well believe that crypto bobbins with a big serious alliance backing it is more likely to succeed, and so even more positive.
And, if projects like this are going to happen, i would certianly rather that they had optimistic true believers involved!
The optimistic true believers are being exploited by dishonest business folks above them in the org chart.
They have flexible morals, they think honesty===naivety and they will tell the optimistic believer whatever he/she needs to hear in order to do what they want.
This is just another step towards corporate dystopia. How big of a step remains to be seen.
It's not that these projects shouldn't exist, it is that THIS project shouldn't exist. Facebook and co have already proved they can damage society in devastating ways - continuing on this line of thought with currency and expecting it to go any other way is naive thinking. I say this as someone who would happily work at FB (just not on this).
You don’t steer anything, you write code. Apparently you are on the “cryptography team,” so are you discussing the social implications of libra with mark Zuckerberg before you implement this and that? Have you prompted any alteration to facebooks plans ever? You have rubbed elbows with all the executives at visa and Facebook and made sure that they are good fellows? Or are you just very happy with that nice fat paycheck and also the (declining) social status that you are afforded by name dropping Facebook?
> If you don't believe such projects should exist, you can at least agree that such project will inevitably happen and that it is a good thing that they have people like me onboard to influence them in the right direction.
Unless you sabotaged the project, no. It would be a better thing if people like you refused to work for Facebook so it would have to hire someone less competent or at least someone more expensive,
Ignore all the haters, you're building something cool that has the power to transform peoples lives. The fact that you're even thinking about your impact on the world puts you above what most people would do. Keep up the good work.
When Chamath was asked about working at Facebook @Stanford.
What soul searching are you doing right now on that?
"I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds, even though we feigned this whole line of there probably aren't any really bad unintended consequences. I think in the back deep, deep recesses of our minds we kind of knew something bad could happen. But I think the way we defined it was not like this.
It literally is a point now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. That is truly where we are. And I would encourage all of you as the future leaders of the world to really internalize how important this is. If you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you.If you push back on it, we have a chance to control it and rein it in. And it is a point in time where people need to hard brake"
One of these is a guideline violation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20219023); two is already harassment. People have a right to post here regardless of who they work for. If other users hound them away, will that make HN more or less interesting? Obviously less.
Please don't do this again so we don't have to ban you!
Here's something for you to discover - cryptocoins have single-handedly wiped out and exceeded all progress we gained in Photovoltaic technology. Thanks for helping destroy the planet and undoing what we've been working so hard to achieve, all in the name of some pet project.
If it works in any way like a permissionless distributed database, you will find it running into energy problems very quickly with every node addition. this is a known issue since the 70s when we first tried this kind of technology.
It's still a permissionless distributed database and will suffer those same issues regardless. This is known since the 70s, when we first developed and tested this type of technology. To boot, the majority of power isn't in the mining of POW, but the supporting hardware to maintain the network.
I have taken a cursory look at the github repository and the whitepapers. It looks like a very high quality project and a major contribution to the space. Facebook as a commercial company did not have to release this as open source but it did. In short, excellent work.
To deploy a smart contract in production, will I need to apply to be on the appropriate whitelist? If not, how do you prevent people from creating smart contracts that permit non-KYC wallets?
There's also very cool cryptography and tech on other projects, that are actually decentralized. E.g. Algorand, where I work.
Facebook's protocol is permissioned - not so much theoretical novelty there over PBFT (or even non-Byzantine Paxos... companies are under contract anyways, why model them as Byzantine actors?) No way it will scale to 1000+ nodes, in a permissionless gossip network where you cannot directly unicast to the leader.
"As a result, one of the association's directives will be to work with the community to research and implement this transition, which will begin within five years of the public launch of the Libra Blockchain and ecosystem."
I challenge the Libra team to put their money where their PR is at. Decentralization isn't impossible. Why should it take five years? This reads more like an empty, vague promise to appease the internet.
"The challenge is that as of today we do not believe that there is a proven solution that can deliver the scale, stability, and security needed to support billions of people and transactions across the globe through a permissionless network."
Many people in the cryptographic and distributed systems community, including me, would disagree.
It’s going to be interesting.
“Unlike previous stablecoins, Libra will not be issued by a central party. Instead, Facebook has enlisted 27 fellow Silicon Valley titans—among them PayPal, Visa, Spotify, Mastercard, Uber, and eBay—to operate as preliminary “validator nodes” who will each share a transparent copy of a vast ledger of transactions reflecting all the activity on the network.”
That sounds amazingly dystopian. I mean, that’s literally a money built on an oligarchy. By design.
I understand people trust these services ( to the extent they keep using them), but the playing field should be flatter in crypto. Unlike the article’s suggestions that Ripple is toast, I can imagine it’s putting such coins in a position to be very competitive, more open, and not run by the companies above.
> That sounds amazingly dystopian. I mean, that’s literally a money built on an oligarchy. By design.
IMO, it's a small step towards a better direction. The "validator" consensus (oligarchy) is a much more transparent/inclusive solution compared to the closed financial ecosystems of Wechat/Alipay/Paytm/Grab. If Libra is an oligarchy, closed financial systems are dictatorships
I would have loved to see any company besides the players mentioned here. For me, this coin almost disqualified already. Their association maybe shouldn't be judged but I nevertheless remain very skeptical.
I agree about classical closed financial services like visa and mastercard being financial dictatorships. That is why their involvement doesn't really build trust.
> If Libra is an oligarchy, closed financial systems are dictatorships
Given the global financial system is not controlled by one individual, it isn't a Dictatorship (power of one) but is more like a form of Oligarchy (power of the few). As for which form of Oligarchy each are, I'd argue that the existing financial system is more of a Technocracy (i.e. you need to know what you are doing to be one of the few) whereas Libra is a Plutocracy (you need to be wealthy to be one of the few) or even possibly a Kleptocracy depending on how they actually run it and what their true motives are.
> whereas Libra is a Plutocracy (you need to be wealthy to be one of the few)
Agreed. The same way governments require a large amount of capital to be a bank to ensure depositors of liquidity. You need to have capital to back the Libra tokens, otherwise it can get pretty scary, just like USD Tether shenanigans.
> or even possibly a Kleptocracy depending on how they actually run it and what their true motives are.
Banks, Central Banks, Governments, etc. whatever. Their motives are exactly "secret" when it comes to managing currencies. They all gear towards enriching their currency and making it more valuable. So yeah for this "oligarchy", I'd bet it's the same, Kleptocracy it is.
I think this may be conflating individuals with corporate entities. Certainly from a corporate entity perspective both have significant capital requirements. But from an individual perspective, to be an influential figure at a central bank you will have had to have undergone years of relevant training, passed regulatory exams, and typically have proved yourself in a related position over a long period of time, hence considering it more of Technocracy. However, to be an influential figure in something like Libra, you just need a shed load of cash, and can have precisely zero understanding of modern finance, hence my seeing it more of a Plutocracy, or even Kleptocracy. Broadening this out beyond Libra, if you want to be a leading figure in one of the more cult-like cryptocurrencies, you also need a lot of blind faith and be good at rousing your followers, so there is an element of Theocracy in there too. I know in the early days anyone with a bit of technical knowledge could set one up without having access to large amounts of capital, and there was talk of this "democratising money", but those days are long gone.
The main central banks usually have a monetary policy clearly defined by their governments. Typically this will include things like "target of keeping inflation at 2%"[0]. This is not exactly secret. It can however be very difficult for people without the necessary backgrounds to fully understand. But I guess we are living in an era of short attention spans and distrust of experts, which provides a fertile breeding ground for cryptocurrency conspiracy theorists to exploit for personal profit.
Yes but could be a dystopian positive for the people...
How long until someone uses this against the “oligarch“ validators?
E.g.: an AdBlock browser extension is on unless they send some microfunds to your account / transfer Libra funds to you.
If you’re not familiar with display ads it’s a literal bidding war per space per user by the advertiser. Platforms don’t care they just get a cut.
Now, I could see this: turn it around and have this “central authority” by having them bidding for you to turn on your ads based on their data’s understanding of likeliness to click.
> That sounds amazingly dystopian. I mean, that’s literally a money built on an oligarchy. By design.
Then W3C and the USB-IF are also "oligarchies" and dystopian?
A bunch of institutions working together is presumably a lot more trustworthy and less prone to abuse by anyone individually than a single institution, which maybe you would call a "monarchy"?
Really not sure what's dystopian about this at all. Do you think MasterCard and Visa networks are dystopian too, or that national currencies themselves are dystopian?
> Then W3C and the USB-IF are also "oligarchies" and dystopian?
Hm, I don't know, is the USB-IF habitually shaping political discourse of billions of people by either outright censoring or "demonetizing" [0] content creators with slightly different views?
[0] Of which this shitcoin is the logical strategy to cut off alternative income sources
> Do you think MasterCard and Visa networks are dystopian too, or that national currencies themselves are dystopian?
There is a major difference between settlement being operated by a democratic government, which will therefore handle the payments market with the public’s interest in mind…
…and it being operated by a for-profit.
Monetary policy (eg. target inflation rates) can be driven by investors, at the expense of social stability.
Exactly. What this does is create a wide open space for a "anti-establishment" crypto payments system. But one that people actually understand and trust. Fiat will likely be UOA for stage one of the transition to crypto. But as more people get educated we'll move to fully Open payments. Many will use Libra. But many will use other services. It's not binary. Multiple winners will emerge. Brand identity will be huge here. Think Patagonia v. Walmart v. Nike. How you pay for things will become part of how you present yourself to the world. It's about to get very interesting.
if governments weren't already on Facebook's back this will certainly get them there. Governments, read : politicians, already are incensed at Facebook and similar because they cannot control the message. Now Facebook wants to give people security in their funds?
This is dumb branding that masquerades control with false decentralization. The biggest opportunity it has is to become a fad amongst teens for a month, or a leech on the poor who don’t have banks. It’s going to fall on its face.
No. FB is the establishment. Now that they've "opened" the crypto door a little wider, it creates the opportunity to build crypto payments that revolt against FB. Solution will likely involve privacy, responsibility, inclusiveness and charity.
Yup, agree. A low-fee payments app with crypto rewards would be interesting. But just like how Patagonia serves certain consumers I think different payments apps will appeal to different people who have different priorities and goals when it comes to their money. It opens up the landscape to massive competition in designer currencies and payments apps. I think it will come down to trust, security and brand identity
> That sounds amazingly dystopian. I mean, that’s literally a money built on an oligarchy. By design.
What's actually far more dystopian is the power that Visa, Mastercard and Paypal already have. It's not getting worse with this new thing, it's getting better.
Nobody has to use Libra, but getting by without access to Visa/Mastercard/Paypal is a real problem for businesses.
I'm all for equalling the playing field. But Libra doesn't expand the choices on the menu: Would I rather eat curry that tastes like shit, or eat shit that tastes like curry? Sorry for my lack of enthusiasm.
"That sounds amazingly dystopian. I mean, that’s literally a money built on an oligarchy. By design."
To be fair, the Fed is kind of that.
It's a cabal of bankers who decided that the USA would be better of if they did the central banking.
In practice, it's not too-too far off how other central banks works, but technically it is a private entity, owned by the banks.
FB's new coin doesn't really have any real use other than basically dropping all of the ugly limitations of the regular financial system.
Though there are a lot of regulations there 'for our safety' - in reality, the flow of consumer money is just a huge pile of tangled cobwebs of stupidity.
This is will be a really great opportunity to do '21st century currency'. If it works, there's going to be a whole new way of doing money. The banks, in a way, should be afraid.
That said, there are huge privacy concerns as well which might very well kill the ostensible improvements to be had just by doing things in a new, clean, way.
That's more decentralized than Bitcoin is - there you have 6 pools in control. Global financial systems are expensive and high-reward (not to mention technically challenging since there is not a single proven cryptocurrency that could handle Visa's current TPS - AFAIK). Decentralization makes very little economic sense (at least all the models I've heard so far).
True believers forget that normal people have zero interest in spending energy thinking about their financial system. Just give me a card backed by a company whose name I've heard of and who I can sue if I have to and then let me focus on my life.
A mining pool is a group of people coming together to share resources and share rewards. Just like a public corporation. And just like a public corporation, decision making/power is concentrated. Who controls the pay-in/pay-out system? Who decides who can join the pool? Who sets prices? Who gets the pool fees?
Many mining pools have models extremely similar to Uber's business model. Others (including one of the major players) are completely private.
Pools are very fluid, large numbers of miners move from one to another to avoid centralization. And it's not like they can decide one day that transactions from address X are banned. That doesn't happen, there's not even a mechanism. And if some pool were to implement it, they would lose most miners very quickly.
Corporate censorship, on the other hand, is abundant and is widely accepted. Lots of left-leaning people even proudly support it these days (for obvious reasons).
So no, pools are not like corporations, and generally crypto currencies have attracted more libertarian crowds.
Transaction acceleration exists and was built by the largest pools in cooperation with 'several leading Bitcoin pools'. This is literally a mechanism to tell a mining pool what transactions to focus on (and therefore which transactions are low priority^). And yet BTC.com is still the largest pool and Antpool the second largest. I mention both because they are both operated by the Bitmain company (33% of all Bitcoin compute is in those two pools), which also sells the ASIC.
Bitcoin is decentralized in theory alone. Fundamentally Bitcoin has structural flaws due to its design that create a self-reinforcing cycle of centralization. The corporation with the deepest pockets can survive the sparse rewards. They can reinvest in hardware, reducing the value of everyone's hardware. This runs people out of business (or forces them to join the largest company). Once they have enough market share they can set transaction prices as they like.
Transaction prices have grown 20x in the last 3 years. Even more than that considering you need to pay for accelerated transactions to have a good chance of the payment going through within an hour (a requirement for most real currency use-cases).
I'd be happy if you could explain how this is wrong, but in years of asking this to crypto enthusiasts, I still haven't found a convincing argument of how cryptocurrencies can truly be decentralized while serving real-world use-cases.
^Corporations don't generally censor by banning - that would be stupid because they'd lose the lawsuit. They prioritize some things and allow unprioritized things to be buried (ask Yelp).
>That sounds amazingly dystopian. I mean, that’s literally a money built on an oligarchy. By design.
You can already kind of do that with other crypto currencies. For e.g. > 70% of bitcoin mining happens inside China, and the currency is susceptible to a 51% attack (in theory anyway). This site calculates the cost of executing such an attack.
You're right, the fact that they're in China might be irrelevant. I should have mentioned that a very large percentage of mining happens on a handful of pools.
> saying that 70+% of mining happens in China doesn't support the statement
I think the implication is that since China does not have meaningful rule of law, that 70% of mining could in practice controlled by one entity: the Chinese state.
It's hilarious that they say they want to setup a payment network that omits rent-seeking middlemen.... and proceed to immediately recruit PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard, which are the biggest rent-seeking middlemen that exist. Seriously, those 3 companies alone have more control over the US economy than the US Federal Reserve does. I've just been waiting for the day when the Federal Reserve says 'we need more liquidity in the market' and prints more money, and the 'payment processor' mafia respond with 'we disagree' and jack up their per-transaction fees.
I only really have 1 question about this payment system they're setting up. Will transaction fees be flat rate, or will they be percentage-based? I have never understood why society tolerates percent-based charges on payment processing. It does not cost more in any way to transfer a larger number over a wire. If the costs to provide the service don't scale, then the price to use it shouldn't either. I find it hard to believe that Visa and Mastercard would sign on unless they got to maintain their ability to levy taxes on the majority of the economy.... but there's a chance they might. They've been very scared of WePay and AliPay in the East. The idea of that kind of payment system terrifies them in their bones. This cryptocurrency might be seen for them as last-ditch insurance from getting cut out of the picture entirely. Or... they'll just drive things such that they can maintain the same profit level while acting as an oligarchical 'reseller'.
I'm just wondering at what point does the whole 'only the federal reserve is legally permitted to mint currency' thing kick in. With Bitcoin you can make an argument that it's too different... but with this, they're literally setting up a reserve banking system but putting gigacorps in the place of Congress in terms of deciding fiscal policy.
As someone who is currently invested in XRP, I would appreciate if you could elaborate on this flawed design instead of just posting a vague comment. I've done my research and thought the design was genius so I'm curious why you wouldn't like it.
Large premine, excessive centralization, supply of XRP far outpaces demand for consumptive use. The most interesting use cases only need small amounts of XRP, so it's unclear to what extent XRP value will remain correlated to Ripple Network usage growth.
Ripple I think would be more appropriately called a "centrally-managed cryptocurrency" rather than "decentralized". This is not to say it's doomed, but rather just that many XRP proponents misunderstand the technology and claim it shares technical properties with Bitcoin which it actually lacks. A known team controlling any cryptocurrency to this extent puts the entire currency at risk of rubber-hose and insider attacks.
> supply of XRP far outpaces demand for consumptive use.
This is a laughably meaningless statement in the context of a cryptocurrency. For which currency could someone possibly say that the supply does not outpace demand? What would that even mean? The precise amounts of supply or demand are irrelevant since the market will naturally find an equilibrium at wherever the current market price is.
What's laughable is your inability to understand. Outpace means go "faster". It means that The level of supply rises up faster than demand so that you will observe a price change. If demand and supply rose at an equal rate, you will observe no price change.
I hope this educated your mind. The education system in many parts of this country has huge problems and I'm glad that uneducated people from deficient areas that lack basic math programs for people with special needs come to Hacker news too learn more. I applaud you for taking the initiative to learn!
Other than that, what I really didn't like about your response is your insulting tone. The parent poster did nothing to deserve such a response. "laughably meaningless statement" is a vile and disgusting statement in itself. There are other ways to critique someone's statement. The way you did it is highly immature.
The Libra Association also serves as the entity through which the Libra Reserve
is managed, and hence the stability and growth of the Libra economy are
achieved. The association is the only party able to create (mint) and destroy
(burn) Libra. Coins are only minted when authorized resellers have purchased
those coins from the association with fiat assets to fully back the new coins.
Coins are only burned when the authorized resellers sell Libra coin to the
association in exchange for the underlying assets. Since authorized resellers
will always be able to sell Libra coins to the reserve at a price equal to the
value of the basket, the Libra Reserve acts as a “buyer of last resort.” These
activities of the association are governed and constrained by a Reserve
Management Policy that can only be changed by a supermajority of the association
members.
> All decisions are brought to the council, and major policy or technical decisions require the consent of two-thirds of the votes, the same supermajority of the network required in the BFT consensus protocol.
I'm trying to understand how your statement isn't just a flippant nonsense remark.
How can I, me, one person, make something that is 'better' (how do you even define that) and will get more adoption than something that is being rolled out by one of the largest and already most popular platforms?
What a ridiculous statement you've made. Just a useless statement to make yourself feel superior, is what it looks like.
No it wasn't, certainly not beyond the basic PHP web app version in 2004. Plenty of Fish is more or less than only major app that had 2 employees at the time they were pulling in millions in ad revenue.
Facebook's ads business didn't even get off the ground until they had already begun to hire massively. Zuck's prototype and marketing might have brought in the users, but FB would be nowhere without its billions in ad revenue.
I didn’t have Facebook,the social network way back, in my mind when trying to make my argument (I definitely should have made this clearer).
Remove the history behind Facebook and just look at the numbers of the LibraCoin consortium and you’re not dealing with just one person. That’s the lens someone wanting to make a competitor should be looking through, not that LibraCoin has a long thread tying back to “just” Zuck. That catalyst has little to do with the challenge of competing with LibraCoin as it has started today.
Considering that multiple companies have access to the data to find illegal transactions, no way. However it will probably be easily exchanged with other coins
Neither Bitcoin or this should really be used to buy drugs with.
On the other hand you have an immutable public record of all your transactions (Bitcoin) and on the other hand you have bastions of privacy (Facebook) who is guaranteed to sell your info.
Bitcoin is still better... Known drug transactions will probably be blocked here outright, while in Bitcoin you might just get caught after the fact.
"He added that users would be able to remain anonymous or pseudonymous, at their own discretion—including the ability to keep their digital wallets separate from their Facebook profiles."
Imperial march plays in background, dark patterns flood through every interface.
"Indeed, that’s why Calibra, the wallet software that will hold Libra Coins, was made a subsidiary of Facebook—“to ensure appropriate separation between social and financial data and to build and operate services on its behalf on top of the Libra network,” as the white paper explains."
Is this some cruel joke? 'See! We made it a subsidiary! Can't get more arms length than that!' Being a subsidiary generally means that Calibra will take and toe the dictates of Facebook. There is no separation here.
It honestly feels like this is a last chance to pull away from the enlightenment value killing death spiral that is surveillance capitalism.
I'm very concerned this will give Facebook even greater control. I think it is likely Facebook will push Libra towards people in countries where their currency is volatile, such that it becomes the standard. I do see the positives, that they can now rely on a currency to be stable. But what do you think, could this be an issue and if so, do you think this can be overall beneficial for people from these places?
Not only they built it in Rust, but they also built Move - language clearly derived from Rust, which uses ownership as a way to manage monetary resources. Regardless of trust issues with different companies involved, that's just beautiful engineering.
I really wonder whether cryptocurrency would have been better received if it were named differently. From inception, I’ve only heard it pitched as a currency replacement. This immediately marred it with all of the currency “counterculture”/conspiracy theories. But it seems better suited as a way to trustless-ly track and verify transactions in an actual, traditional currency. That there are ultimately finite amounts of crypto coins available for transaction better serves this purpose.
It certainly didn’t help that the crypto community was choke-full of conspiracy theorists, libertarians that never read anything else after falling in love with Ayn Rand as teenagers, and get-rich-quick schemers.
The idea was fascinating, and Bitcoin has held up marvelously considering it was essentially a prototype with high barriers to change after becoming popular. There’s a Nobel Prize waiting if the rightful owner ever wants to come forward to claim it.
But, at least for me, it was the culture, especially around Ethereum, that ultimately stopped me from wanting to have anything to do with it. Which is ironic, because a large part of that culture was the denial that anything like “culture” exists, that “trust” and “institution” are terms with meaning, etc.
> It certainly didn’t help that the crypto community was choke-full of conspiracy theorists, libertarians that never read anything else after falling in love with Ayn Rand as teenagers, and get-rich-quick schemers.
I agree. Because of the nature of cryptocurrency, the industry has always just been wrought with fraud.
It has something to do with Telegram chats, the "wild west" feeling, semi-anonymous currency transactions, and the feeling most people have that there is (or was) a real possibility that they could gamble and win big with little effort.
The entire industry can almost be seen as a giant, anonymous slot machine.
It’s funny how one of the core believes of cryptocurrencies has always been that (a) government will fear and attempt to ban it, and (b) that the technology would make such attempts impossible.
Yet what we have seen over the years is really more of a bemused interest from existing institutions, with targeted and rather effective interventions only where actual harm was done, such as ICOs.
It’s almost as if these conspiracy theories about the FED or Credit Card companies’ lobbying power, or the “International Banking Elite” weren’t exactly right.
You're looking at the wrong timescale. Institutions and founders of powerful corporations have life long time scales to subtly tweak and manipulate their messaging and approach.
Look back in 10 years to see whether the conspiracy theorist were wrong. I have no doubt the lobbying to exclude and put "regulations" in place is coming.
But the way many things are implemented, especially when there's lobbying behind it, creates an environment where the only people who can navigate it are the people lobbying for it. As much as we need regulations for pollution, I'm of the opinion we need less regulation for many other things.
Banks are a great example. Banks should be regulated. If I put my money into a bank I want it guaranteed there.
But the industry has successfully lobbied itself extensions in their charters and ventured into financial and investment territory, which I don't believe should be coupled with banks.
Investing and securities (like cryptocurrencies) have an inherent downside - it can go up OR down. I don't need a short sighted politician to put laws in place to protect me from having my investments go down. That's part of the game. If you don't know what you're getting into, you shouldn't get into it.
But thanks to regulations, it's essentially impossible to open a bank or have competitive services, while they get to abuse their positions to leech money from the general population.
There's no reason that banks (safely storing money) and investment companies should be a single entity.
And before you mention inflation, realize that your savings account makes 0% interest, for any useful purpose.
If I want to start or invest in crypto under my own accord, there's no reason I shouldn't.
Don't want to lose your money on cryptocurrency? Don't put your money into it. We don't need regulations for that. We need common sense.
This idea that you deserve a risk free ROI is a moral hazard for society.
Disclaimer: I haven't ever bought cryptocurrencies, because I don't understand it and I'm not an idiot. It's gambling, pure and simple, and the people who lost their money deserved it.
1,344 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 515 ms ] threadthis doesn't really answer my question: https://libra.org/en-US/security-privacy/#overview
> Working with Law Enforcement
> As with any currency or financial infrastructure, bad actors will try to exploit the Libra network. While the network is open and accessible to everyone with internet access, the network's main endpoints will need to follow applicable laws and regulations and collaborate with law enforcement. In addition, because transactions on the Libra Blockchain are pseudonymous, it is possible for third parties to do analysis to detect fraud and illegal activity.
Does US law not apply to Libra?
Can Facebook still be associated with it then?
[As another user mentioned, the company that makes the wallet is US based and will enforce sanctions. But maybe that means that another of the partners can make a wallet to use in sanctioned countries?]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Weil
It's been a while since Swiss banks were last immune to U.S. government pressure. Or even pressure from other countries. I can't bother to find the links now, but there were a couple of stories during Obama's time, about the US government arresting people based on their financial transactions in Switzerland.
> "Calibra will do its part to facilitate the efficacy of international sanctions regimes. We will administer and enforce applicable sanctions programs including, for example, U.S., EU, and U.N. sanctions programs."
https://scontent.fbhx3-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.2365-6/65083631...
If somebody writes an open-source wallet they can circumvent the rules?
I don't get it.
Oh well.
What could possibly go wrong?
But I think that the consensus protocol of Stellar looks a lot more like a sweet spot: it has different levels of participation to the network, each of which gives different incentives, requirements and use cases.
> https://www.stellar.org/developers/stellar-core/software/adm...
My criticism is specific to this particular implementation (and management).
It sounds less like a dystopia and more like the tech sector and payment processors have been collectively itching to escape the current banking system.
In this sense the choice of initial validators alarms me. Trust is something that must be earned: it's different because I know the evils of the system I'm using, I don't know the evils of this system and it might be worse.
...worse...
> In light of this, Facebook aims for the project to be fully “permissionless” — rather than permissioned, where membership of the Association is only granted to a select few —after five years and transition to a proof of stake network.
"me looking at the GitHub repository": there's a lot of technical debt that needs to be addressed, where is the design for this stuff? A "we'll fix it" is not enough, certain issues require a lot more work than code development.
Details on the Move programming language [PDF]: https://developers.libra.org/docs/assets/papers/libra-move-a...
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 open source could help in that regard.
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
https://developers.libra.org/docs/welcome-to-libra
So they don’t get exclusive data. That’s an odd statement, it just means that data can be sold to others as well.
I may as well cut out the middleman, save time and punch myself in the face.
Your talents could be used to help the world. Instead, they are being used to enclose common spaces and pull apart the fabric of society. Get a better job?
Facebook is driven internally, from the top down, to accomplish murky, exploitative goals that are in the interests of nobody except the company and its shareholders.
That's why Facebook is worth hundreds of billions of dollars while Reddit can barely pay for their own bandwidth and Tumblr gets passed around between acquirers like it was a radioactive waste dump that runs a porn business on the side.
I don't know WTF Twitter is worth, if anything, but some people seem to think it's got a viable business model, so meh, whatever. They aren't Facebook.
HN is great because you normally get comments straight from the source, but I'm worried we will inevitably shame Facebook employees into not posting here at all.
I do understand your concern. Dialog is critical. But dialog only seems worthwhile if it is honest and open.
If you don't believe such projects should exist, you can at least agree that such project will inevitably happen and that it is a good thing that they have people like me onboard to influence them in the right direction.
I will write more about the things I work on and why I think these are good things on my blog www.cryptologie.net
Hope we can have some civilized discussions :)
Sorry, what? What gives a random person a reason to think you're someone who will "influence them in the right direction"?
But I do appreciate your constructive attitude towards his comments and I'll be checking your blog a good bit to inform myself as best as I can going forward :). I would ask that you have some kind of "apologetic"/philosophical tag on the type of posts that people like me can filter for so we can read up on that kind of perspective.
I think these systems deserve more social/civic conversation and less technical ones. The tech is cool, but these technologies have the potential to have severe civic ramifications. These technologies are largely out pacing our national and global conversations around how we should use them, their pro's and con's, and the systems they're designed to replace/circumvent... and it's not a good thing.
Thanks for the link!
How is FB printing fake digital dollars any better than the US government printing fake digital dollars? Except this way, everyone gets to rent seek and take from the people they purport to want to help. Rent seeking less than Western Union doesn't count. How about a project that is actually about helping the unbanked and underrepresented without exploiting them? I'll believe that anyone on this project actually thinks it is net positive for the world when they donate their salary and RSU to a non-profit that is actually helping people.
I'm sure most Facebook employees have a similar opinion on their jobs.
what influence do you have? Can you tell Zuck not to steal my personal info?
Also, how much of your salary is getting paid out in Zuck Bucks? Or are you going to wait until some third world citizens with no other options test out the utility of this before you dip your toe in?
Well, you're wrong. You believe this because you're getting paid a lot of money to.
A lot of people genuinely believe that crypto bobbins is inherently positive, and might well believe that crypto bobbins with a big serious alliance backing it is more likely to succeed, and so even more positive.
And, if projects like this are going to happen, i would certianly rather that they had optimistic true believers involved!
They have flexible morals, they think honesty===naivety and they will tell the optimistic believer whatever he/she needs to hear in order to do what they want.
This is just another step towards corporate dystopia. How big of a step remains to be seen.
Everybody does so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxUgei-WKfY
Unless you sabotaged the project, no. It would be a better thing if people like you refused to work for Facebook so it would have to hire someone less competent or at least someone more expensive,
Apparently you're not embarrassed...
"We try to stay away from such pesky questions but are convinced that the amount of good that Facebook can do is unlimited"
Yeaah.
Please don't do this again so we don't have to ban you!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Facebook's protocol is permissioned - not so much theoretical novelty there over PBFT (or even non-Byzantine Paxos... companies are under contract anyways, why model them as Byzantine actors?) No way it will scale to 1000+ nodes, in a permissionless gossip network where you cannot directly unicast to the leader.
BTW I'm a huge fan of Algorand as well. You guys are doing really good work.
I challenge the Libra team to put their money where their PR is at. Decentralization isn't impossible. Why should it take five years? This reads more like an empty, vague promise to appease the internet.
"The challenge is that as of today we do not believe that there is a proven solution that can deliver the scale, stability, and security needed to support billions of people and transactions across the globe through a permissionless network."
Many people in the cryptographic and distributed systems community, including me, would disagree.
IMO there weren't much legit solutions before Algorand. We are all very interested to see your progress.
That sounds amazingly dystopian. I mean, that’s literally a money built on an oligarchy. By design.
I understand people trust these services ( to the extent they keep using them), but the playing field should be flatter in crypto. Unlike the article’s suggestions that Ripple is toast, I can imagine it’s putting such coins in a position to be very competitive, more open, and not run by the companies above.
IMO, it's a small step towards a better direction. The "validator" consensus (oligarchy) is a much more transparent/inclusive solution compared to the closed financial ecosystems of Wechat/Alipay/Paytm/Grab. If Libra is an oligarchy, closed financial systems are dictatorships
I agree about classical closed financial services like visa and mastercard being financial dictatorships. That is why their involvement doesn't really build trust.
Given the global financial system is not controlled by one individual, it isn't a Dictatorship (power of one) but is more like a form of Oligarchy (power of the few). As for which form of Oligarchy each are, I'd argue that the existing financial system is more of a Technocracy (i.e. you need to know what you are doing to be one of the few) whereas Libra is a Plutocracy (you need to be wealthy to be one of the few) or even possibly a Kleptocracy depending on how they actually run it and what their true motives are.
Agreed. The same way governments require a large amount of capital to be a bank to ensure depositors of liquidity. You need to have capital to back the Libra tokens, otherwise it can get pretty scary, just like USD Tether shenanigans.
> or even possibly a Kleptocracy depending on how they actually run it and what their true motives are.
Banks, Central Banks, Governments, etc. whatever. Their motives are exactly "secret" when it comes to managing currencies. They all gear towards enriching their currency and making it more valuable. So yeah for this "oligarchy", I'd bet it's the same, Kleptocracy it is.
The main central banks usually have a monetary policy clearly defined by their governments. Typically this will include things like "target of keeping inflation at 2%"[0]. This is not exactly secret. It can however be very difficult for people without the necessary backgrounds to fully understand. But I guess we are living in an era of short attention spans and distrust of experts, which provides a fertile breeding ground for cryptocurrency conspiracy theorists to exploit for personal profit.
[0] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy
Sixteen Tons is applicable.
You are on the right path, don't stop there :-)
How long until someone uses this against the “oligarch“ validators?
E.g.: an AdBlock browser extension is on unless they send some microfunds to your account / transfer Libra funds to you.
If you’re not familiar with display ads it’s a literal bidding war per space per user by the advertiser. Platforms don’t care they just get a cut.
Now, I could see this: turn it around and have this “central authority” by having them bidding for you to turn on your ads based on their data’s understanding of likeliness to click.
Then W3C and the USB-IF are also "oligarchies" and dystopian?
A bunch of institutions working together is presumably a lot more trustworthy and less prone to abuse by anyone individually than a single institution, which maybe you would call a "monarchy"?
Really not sure what's dystopian about this at all. Do you think MasterCard and Visa networks are dystopian too, or that national currencies themselves are dystopian?
Hm, I don't know, is the USB-IF habitually shaping political discourse of billions of people by either outright censoring or "demonetizing" [0] content creators with slightly different views?
[0] Of which this shitcoin is the logical strategy to cut off alternative income sources
There is a major difference between settlement being operated by a democratic government, which will therefore handle the payments market with the public’s interest in mind…
…and it being operated by a for-profit.
Monetary policy (eg. target inflation rates) can be driven by investors, at the expense of social stability.
What's actually far more dystopian is the power that Visa, Mastercard and Paypal already have. It's not getting worse with this new thing, it's getting better.
Nobody has to use Libra, but getting by without access to Visa/Mastercard/Paypal is a real problem for businesses.
The one that uses a coin backed with violence is the State. How can you even begin to compare that?
To be fair, the Fed is kind of that.
It's a cabal of bankers who decided that the USA would be better of if they did the central banking.
In practice, it's not too-too far off how other central banks works, but technically it is a private entity, owned by the banks.
FB's new coin doesn't really have any real use other than basically dropping all of the ugly limitations of the regular financial system.
Though there are a lot of regulations there 'for our safety' - in reality, the flow of consumer money is just a huge pile of tangled cobwebs of stupidity.
This is will be a really great opportunity to do '21st century currency'. If it works, there's going to be a whole new way of doing money. The banks, in a way, should be afraid.
That said, there are huge privacy concerns as well which might very well kill the ostensible improvements to be had just by doing things in a new, clean, way.
True believers forget that normal people have zero interest in spending energy thinking about their financial system. Just give me a card backed by a company whose name I've heard of and who I can sue if I have to and then let me focus on my life.
Many mining pools have models extremely similar to Uber's business model. Others (including one of the major players) are completely private.
Corporate censorship, on the other hand, is abundant and is widely accepted. Lots of left-leaning people even proudly support it these days (for obvious reasons).
So no, pools are not like corporations, and generally crypto currencies have attracted more libertarian crowds.
Bitcoin is decentralized in theory alone. Fundamentally Bitcoin has structural flaws due to its design that create a self-reinforcing cycle of centralization. The corporation with the deepest pockets can survive the sparse rewards. They can reinvest in hardware, reducing the value of everyone's hardware. This runs people out of business (or forces them to join the largest company). Once they have enough market share they can set transaction prices as they like.
Transaction prices have grown 20x in the last 3 years. Even more than that considering you need to pay for accelerated transactions to have a good chance of the payment going through within an hour (a requirement for most real currency use-cases).
I'd be happy if you could explain how this is wrong, but in years of asking this to crypto enthusiasts, I still haven't found a convincing argument of how cryptocurrencies can truly be decentralized while serving real-world use-cases.
^Corporations don't generally censor by banning - that would be stupid because they'd lose the lawsuit. They prioritize some things and allow unprioritized things to be buried (ask Yelp).
You can already kind of do that with other crypto currencies. For e.g. > 70% of bitcoin mining happens inside China, and the currency is susceptible to a 51% attack (in theory anyway). This site calculates the cost of executing such an attack.
https://www.crypto51.app/
Nor is susceptibility to a 51% attack relevant to that point.
I think the implication is that since China does not have meaningful rule of law, that 70% of mining could in practice controlled by one entity: the Chinese state.
You won't even need to vote, they will already know how you feel about the candidates.
I'm just wondering at what point does the whole 'only the federal reserve is legally permitted to mint currency' thing kick in. With Bitcoin you can make an argument that it's too different... but with this, they're literally setting up a reserve banking system but putting gigacorps in the place of Congress in terms of deciding fiscal policy.
Ripple can freeze accounts, and has done this before to prevent an early founder from selling their XRP, which I think exemplifies the level of control the team has over the network. [https://insidebitcoins.com/news/not-so-decentralized-ripple-...]
Ripple I think would be more appropriately called a "centrally-managed cryptocurrency" rather than "decentralized". This is not to say it's doomed, but rather just that many XRP proponents misunderstand the technology and claim it shares technical properties with Bitcoin which it actually lacks. A known team controlling any cryptocurrency to this extent puts the entire currency at risk of rubber-hose and insider attacks.
This is a laughably meaningless statement in the context of a cryptocurrency. For which currency could someone possibly say that the supply does not outpace demand? What would that even mean? The precise amounts of supply or demand are irrelevant since the market will naturally find an equilibrium at wherever the current market price is.
Bitcoin: $0.30 per transaction
XRP: $0.43 per 100,000 transactions
I hope this educated your mind. The education system in many parts of this country has huge problems and I'm glad that uneducated people from deficient areas that lack basic math programs for people with special needs come to Hacker news too learn more. I applaud you for taking the initiative to learn!
Other than that, what I really didn't like about your response is your insulting tone. The parent poster did nothing to deserve such a response. "laughably meaningless statement" is a vile and disgusting statement in itself. There are other ways to critique someone's statement. The way you did it is highly immature.
From https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/#the-libra-association:
> All decisions are brought to the council, and major policy or technical decisions require the consent of two-thirds of the votes, the same supermajority of the network required in the BFT consensus protocol.
Nice try Zuc. But BSV can do 10k tx/s already AND it supports tokens as well
How can I, me, one person, make something that is 'better' (how do you even define that) and will get more adoption than something that is being rolled out by one of the largest and already most popular platforms?
What a ridiculous statement you've made. Just a useless statement to make yourself feel superior, is what it looks like.
Facebook's ads business didn't even get off the ground until they had already begun to hire massively. Zuck's prototype and marketing might have brought in the users, but FB would be nowhere without its billions in ad revenue.
It may not be impossible, but in this case it should be sane to assume it would be a waste of energy for a single person to attempt it.
Remove the history behind Facebook and just look at the numbers of the LibraCoin consortium and you’re not dealing with just one person. That’s the lens someone wanting to make a competitor should be looking through, not that LibraCoin has a long thread tying back to “just” Zuck. That catalyst has little to do with the challenge of competing with LibraCoin as it has started today.
Any changes start from one person trying to do so. I'm arguing that’s the lens you should have in mind.
On the other hand you have an immutable public record of all your transactions (Bitcoin) and on the other hand you have bastions of privacy (Facebook) who is guaranteed to sell your info.
Bitcoin is still better... Known drug transactions will probably be blocked here outright, while in Bitcoin you might just get caught after the fact.
Imperial march plays in background, dark patterns flood through every interface.
"Indeed, that’s why Calibra, the wallet software that will hold Libra Coins, was made a subsidiary of Facebook—“to ensure appropriate separation between social and financial data and to build and operate services on its behalf on top of the Libra network,” as the white paper explains."
Is this some cruel joke? 'See! We made it a subsidiary! Can't get more arms length than that!' Being a subsidiary generally means that Calibra will take and toe the dictates of Facebook. There is no separation here.
It honestly feels like this is a last chance to pull away from the enlightenment value killing death spiral that is surveillance capitalism.
The idea was fascinating, and Bitcoin has held up marvelously considering it was essentially a prototype with high barriers to change after becoming popular. There’s a Nobel Prize waiting if the rightful owner ever wants to come forward to claim it.
But, at least for me, it was the culture, especially around Ethereum, that ultimately stopped me from wanting to have anything to do with it. Which is ironic, because a large part of that culture was the denial that anything like “culture” exists, that “trust” and “institution” are terms with meaning, etc.
I agree. Because of the nature of cryptocurrency, the industry has always just been wrought with fraud.
It has something to do with Telegram chats, the "wild west" feeling, semi-anonymous currency transactions, and the feeling most people have that there is (or was) a real possibility that they could gamble and win big with little effort.
The entire industry can almost be seen as a giant, anonymous slot machine.
Yet what we have seen over the years is really more of a bemused interest from existing institutions, with targeted and rather effective interventions only where actual harm was done, such as ICOs.
It’s almost as if these conspiracy theories about the FED or Credit Card companies’ lobbying power, or the “International Banking Elite” weren’t exactly right.
Look back in 10 years to see whether the conspiracy theorist were wrong. I have no doubt the lobbying to exclude and put "regulations" in place is coming.
I have no doubt that you're right. But not because of some evil conspiracy by a cabal of bankers, but in order to protect society as a whole.
Also, care to explain why you put regulations is scare quotes? In my book that disqualifies your comment pretty much.
But the way many things are implemented, especially when there's lobbying behind it, creates an environment where the only people who can navigate it are the people lobbying for it. As much as we need regulations for pollution, I'm of the opinion we need less regulation for many other things.
Banks are a great example. Banks should be regulated. If I put my money into a bank I want it guaranteed there.
But the industry has successfully lobbied itself extensions in their charters and ventured into financial and investment territory, which I don't believe should be coupled with banks.
Investing and securities (like cryptocurrencies) have an inherent downside - it can go up OR down. I don't need a short sighted politician to put laws in place to protect me from having my investments go down. That's part of the game. If you don't know what you're getting into, you shouldn't get into it.
But thanks to regulations, it's essentially impossible to open a bank or have competitive services, while they get to abuse their positions to leech money from the general population.
There's no reason that banks (safely storing money) and investment companies should be a single entity.
And before you mention inflation, realize that your savings account makes 0% interest, for any useful purpose.
If I want to start or invest in crypto under my own accord, there's no reason I shouldn't.
Don't want to lose your money on cryptocurrency? Don't put your money into it. We don't need regulations for that. We need common sense.
This idea that you deserve a risk free ROI is a moral hazard for society.
Disclaimer: I haven't ever bought cryptocurrencies, because I don't understand it and I'm not an idiot. It's gambling, pure and simple, and the people who lost their money deserved it.