Ask HN: Would you use new Facebook cryptocurrency Libra?

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10 comments

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I'm pretty unsure. I mean there are a lot's of trust issues with Facebook and even if the promise to keep there hands out of this, i don't believe them. On the other hand, a fast border less money transaction with good integration sounds promising. And Facebook has the resources for it.
Or call for a yearly Facebank run to stress the system!
No, but I would push for central banks/politicians to wake up and establish usable digital currencies and payment as part of the general market infrastructure of the 21st century.
Unlikely. For non-trivial spending there are already multiple companies doing money transfers and my airline payment card doesn't carry extra fees. I don't do any small value transfers, so there's just no use case for me.

But I'm happy that they will motivate existing banks / cc providers to give better conditions. Kind of like Uber is a globally a bad idea, but they did force many taxi companies to raise quality.

> Kind of like Uber is a globally a bad idea, but they did force many taxi companies to raise quality.

What do you mean by this? Are you saying Uber is bad because it's disruptive to Taxi companies or because they're terrible to drivers?

The claim that Uber is a bad idea globally, especially somewhere like Brazil or Mexico, is laughable. Catching a cab in Buenos Aires was an actual risk to your life. Catching an Uber is many times safer (not to mention cleaner and more convenient).

I guess I'm just missing the obviousness of Uber being a bad idea. What do you mean exactly?

Uber has investors' cash which it will throw at the business to keep the price low for customers while paying drivers just enough to not quit. This will change once they need to be profitable and/or once competition is gone. Then it's going to be worse for both the drivers and riders.

Other cabs were terrible though as you noted. I don't know about LA regions, but in some countries in Europe a better service from Uber actually forced the local taxi companies to raise the service quality - which is a welcome result.

No, definitely not going to be using these new 'zuck bucks'.

I think services like venmo or cashapp are fine, and also i dont particularly see a need for it to be a cyrptocurrency.

tbh, i think all of this could be a publicity / marketing effort at its core. Especially considering that Reps from congress asking facebook to "pause" development on it. It should be pretty obvious that Fed regulators arent gonna be super into the idea of facebook creating its own trans-national currency, and not difficult to imagine the hammer falling hard on facebook.

Also, the whole thing feels oddly.... post-peak-cyrptocurrency-hype... Like it would make way more sense if Fb came out with this in 2016/17, right after that big bitcoin peak, and right before FB started getting a lot of shit for all the 2016 election / fake news / "russiagate" stuff.

But no, hell no, I won't be using zuck bucks.

No, don't trust Facebook after all the on going privacy news. Certainly wouldn't trust them with my money.
I'd be interested to hear responses from among the 1.X billion unbanked people in developing countries.

I think the goal of Libra is to turn this population into sticky Facebook users. Facebook has saturated the developed world. Meanwhile, developing countries are too busy surviving to mess around on social media.

Libra gives them a way to transact in a stable currency, and Facebook starts to discover the currently grassroots social graph of small time farmers and craftsmen selling goods to their neighbors in villages with slow internet access.