I'm not sure whether geography is a significant factor in this, but I've definitely noticed a trend against such thought on HN.
For instance, whenever I mention the dangers of a single corporation owning everything, including money, and how indistinguishable it makes it from a government, it gets downvoted with no discussion.
Could you be more clear about your intended meaning. From this you might mean "I can't be sure", or you might mean "the government will step in to prevent it", or you might actually think your bank will keep your money safe, or ...
Governments keep control on people by the usage of force, but corporations have the means to control people by the use of pleasure. You might not get in jail but if you're not allowed to go where you want/do what you want/talk to who you want, if your life revolves around a single thing and that is removed from you, would you still do it ?
Of course the difference in "punishement" is huge, but the important and scary part is that corporations can have a huge control on how people behave without any threat other than "you won't be able to use our service". That was my point.
While true now, remember that companies used to own armies[1] and territories[2]. Their motives -- shareholder profit -- have not changed. They do and will strive to grow their power.
It's not a stretch from today to imagine living on company-built cities with private security, paying rent and utilities to the company, with contracts and EULAs serving as laws in all but name.
> You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
European countries such as Sweden and the Netherlands are at the forefront of submitting themselves to a cashless economy, giving control of the payments infrastructure to Visa and MasterCard. So it's certainly not obvious to all Europeans.
The same is true for Germany. We have a vast number of different systems for cashless payment, with every bank trying to push its own system. It's not like Visa and Master Card are the two major players.
It's not seen as a big deal here in Sweden, partially because of history, and partially because of banking regulations, with some of those being EU regulations.
Note that I don't believe having companies - especially large ones that isn't primarily banks - in control of payments of any kind is a good idea, I think it's a terrible idea.
Yes, us Swedes use cards a lot, and almost every card in Sweden has Visa or MasterCard stamped on it.
Most are debit cards, and the well know logos weren't there to begin with. Initially, almost all cards were debit cards issued by the various Swedish banks. Banks that people used to trust back then.
While those payment systems are technically private, they aren't perceived as such. Maybe because of the banks, maybe because they are regulated quite heavily, but people generally have confidence they won't be cut off by the bank. Personally I don't know anyone, or have heard of anyone getting denied a debit card. While that's not a useful statistic, it shows why people might perceive it the way they do.
Since 2017 the laws implementating the then new EU banking directives demands that the banks must offer any basic payment solution/product to everyone if they offer it to anyone. There are some exceptions, mostly regarding money and banking fraud, but it seems to be somewhat rare in practice, at least it doesn't seem to have garnered much attention in news.
There are however talks of introducing some kind of legal tender laws, as it is currently possible to get into a situation where you have money, but can't pay. Which is obviously terrible.
> Facebook will know the people and companies with whom its users have financially interacted, and that is likely to only be the start
As if it wasn't already the case.
People simply don't care, they wouldn't be on any of these platforms otherwise, and governments don't understand, or chose not to understand for X reasons. They'd sell their soul for more (perceived) convenience or a better way to fill their narcissistic ego trips. It's like giving chocolate to 3 years old kids, they only stops when they gets sick, and so far "users" aren't sick.
I don't think it's fair to blame users. These corporations hire some of the smartest people in the world to design their products in such a way that they maximally retain and engage users. You can't expect a normal individual to stand against billions of dollars worth of investment in a system designed to make them act against their own self-interest.
At some point you have to own up your actions. I'm not a super human, I managed to quit facebook just fine, people are not tools, they know what they're doing.
You don't have to stand against it, simply don't use it. Just like most people don't do heroin or control their sexual urges.
That's fine for any given individual, but in aggregate you should not be surprised that systems which are designed to take advantage of human psychology to achieve a result perform exactly as intended.
You bring up heroin, but heroin is a heavily regulated controlled substance precisely because it's an example of something which people in general cannot be reliably trusted to control themselves with.
In spite of the numerous problems which have manifested themselves with cryptocurrency, I find have always found the idea of a monetary system not owned by the state to be interesting. A monetary system owned by corporations is downright horrifying.
Even if a large corporation was the one to design a non-state currency, it doesn't imply they would have to possess ultimate control over it. At least several thriving and established cryptocurrencies have been created without a single corporation having control over them, regardless of how you count them.
The Bitcoin project is a great example of the potential for something like this. To this day the creator or creators have never been identified. Key word potential.
It used to be common. It was called "company scrip". You got paid in Wonka Wooden Dollars, nominally the same as regular dollars, and then could only spend them at a Wonka grocery store. No matter what you did, the company clawed back a bit more and a bit more, because they had a controlling hand in the entire ecosystem.
Wouldn't be the first time. For people who carve out their livelihood on these platforms (or TRY to), the consequences of getting blacklisted ruins them, and things can become quite desperate.
Getting your PayPal account hacked and drained is pretty bad. Getting blacklisted on Patreon is possibly worse.
States conquered each other and fight for currency supremacy, withness US dollars and oil. Crypto would end a lot of wars. It would however introduce a lot of instability for some time as people adjusted to the freedom.
If they don't like it, governments could block the use of that currency, make it illegal, or force people to exchange it for a state-backed crypto currency. There's no reason to think crypto currencies will make people freer or end any war. Eventually governments and corporations find ways to control all these tools that are supposed to give people freedom.
This is incredibly naive. Using cryptocurrency changes none of the incentives nor the power structure. The very network and electricity supplies that cryptocurrency relies on are ultimately controlled by governments. If cryptocurrency becomes an actual important source of power, then governments will fight to control it. There is no freedom in money that relies on the Internet to exist and freely operate.
How would this help if the companies behind this can be controlled by US, if you are from country X and US decides that from tomorrow we do not do business with X then you are fucked. So you would have to keep a very amount of value and crypto and transform it in real money , gold or something material ASAP.
Were there any wars fought for money and not for something more material like resources,lands, strategical territories, ideology ? If you are referring that weapon makers need wars to make money then crypto won't fix that anyway
The petrodollar conspiracy gets causation backwards.
People don’t use dollars because oil is mostly dollar denominated. International trade is priced in dollars because American consumers put lots of dollars in exporters’ pockets. That drives demand for dollar financial products which powers a varied financial services system. (Oil is regularly traded in pounds sterling and Euros with limited fanfare.)
I wonder would it make any better if Apple is the one which creates their own currency. As we know, the track record of Apple respecting privacy of its users is significantly better than Facebook/Google.
Not required. All Apple needs to do is allow the purchase of said item through your "Apple account". The retailer won't know who exactly bought what, neither will your bank. (In the Netherlands the banks are going to sell the 'who-bought-what-from-who'. The bank will simply receive your monthly list of purchases without the data). The question is: would that work?
You do a one time exchange of your Government issued currency for Libra. Then you start exchanging Libra for goods and services in a p2p way == which means Governments can't tax these goods and services == which means Governments will no longer have the power == which means they will not allow it.
(I have not read the Libra papers fully. Im doing a far speculation here.)
> You’re forgetting that governments regulate the companies behind Libra, and can and will regulate it.
Well... let's say you're a politician wanting to regulate Facebook, and let's say you have an affair with whom you communicate on Facebook or in Instagram DMs. If I were Facebook, I'd simply let an investigation team check if any dirt can be mined out of the troves of data - anything, even the dataset of GPS or other location pinpoints, can be enough to get a first hint. And now I discretely contact you and advise that there may be information around and that it would be a pity if that information were to get public.
This is the ultimate problem with the size and capabilities that companies such as Facebook have.
Which is why FB tried to pretend that they aren't involved by creating a fictional offshore "foundation" (Calibra). But that won't help them anyway. Offshore "foundations" are not get out of jail card.
> which means Governments can't tax these goods and services
That's not true at all. Cash has the same problem of undeclared transactions, but the tax mostly still manages to get collected. If anything, the fact that Libra transactions will leave an electronic record makes it more likely that tax will get paid.
I would hypothesize that cash transactions -- at least peer to peer transactions -- in general do not get taxed.
It's axiomatic that cryptocurrency transactions are rarely taxed, most people have not paid taxes on those transactions. The IRS is certainly trying to tax them, and the electronic ledger function of (some) cryptocurrencies will make it easier to track them under some circumstances than cash. That may change as time goes on -- I'm not sure enough how libra is implemented to have an opinion on that yet.
Even that opens another avenue of enforcement -- Al Capone was brought down on tax evasion charges, since all his earnings were from cash-only "transactions".
The idea of a corporate currency is pretty unpalatable.
The idea of a pegged cryptocurrency is interesting though, potentially. We really need a lot more/bigger/better institutions that aren't companies or governments.
You've posted a lot of unsubstantive and even inflammatory (like this one) comments to HN. We ban accounts that do that. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using this site as intended? We'd be grateful.
I'm not proposing anything. But I suppose churches are existence-proof of a thing which isn't a company. It's notable we're now in a time where that's something which requires an existence proof.
Incidentally... "things that make currency shouldn't be companies" is not necessarily a rare or new idea.
Money is well trodden ground. I expect we can find analogues to nearly any money-related ideas. But, context and specifics can count for a lot. 2019, bitcoin has recent proved all sorts of technical and other aspects in the wild, at scale. No reason to think the idea well is dry.
What do you have in mind though, co ops? Pretty much everything that wasn't has become, or is now run by a profit oriented company in the last 40 years, with little sign of pushback or attempts to create better. Though the need has been clearly there for 30 of those 40.
Mysterious unknown founder who manages to remain anonymous for a decade? Who might turn out to be Visa or Exxon, and just make bitcoin as unpalatable...
Why though? Most of the good things I use in life are made by corporations. And governments have a long track record of mismanaging their currencies, whilst simultaneously preventing people from creating their own - something that can have horrific outcomes. See any country that experienced hyperinflation.
Most of the things, good and bad, are corporation related.. more so than ever. The example isn't clean though. There have been plenty of examples of corporate money creation, many also with disastrous results. Hyperinflation has been a problem for both. Recently though, inflation control is something central banks have done reasonably well, at least relative to those narrow goals.
In any case, that's neither here nor there. There are things which are neither governments corporations. These days, those two aren't always all that different
The only big example I know of is Air Miles. That seems pretty well run for a currency.
Central banks don't have inflation under control, they've just pushed it to places where it's not measured as part of the definition of inflation - primarily house prices, bonds and equities. That's what you'd expect given the way printed money is inserted into the economy.
Imagine this situation: you sell online courses. FB says hey, users can pay directly via Libra thus streamlining checkout to a few clicks. Now Facebook takes a cut of every transaction. If I were PayPal I’d be very scared.
Paypal is also part of the libra foundation and they operate nodes - so they might also take a cut.
FB has done something clever by coopting most of the bigincumbents - Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, PayU and even stripe!
Exactly. I cannot recall the CNBC video right now. But one of the top guys of Libra was there and he said although the fee structure hasn't been worked out yet. Taking a cut on the partners side would be where fees are taken.
So imagine the current status quo is that either paypal or visa/mastercard are the principle payment methods and they charge the current rates.
But with libra, you still pay with paypal or visa/mastercard but using libra coin instead of fiat coin and % of the fee also goes to facebook.
What I can't wait for. Is the raft of people who will be denied creating wallets. How many people have had their accounts frozen by Paypal, kicked off using Visa/Mastercard and even Stripe! Quite a few I can tell you.
Think the situation will be different from Libra? Doubtful...
This current trend of of "disrupting" the market by flouting or circumventing regulations may have worked for Uber, AirBnB and so on, but Libra might just be a step too bold.
Unless Libra aims to uphold the same regulations that banks must, then at some point, I predict that there is a huge amount of trouble coming for them. Financial services can be both used and abused, and regulators have forced banks to address the abuse (eg: AML/KYC practices) to protect participants. Circumventing these regulations is equivalent to rolling back these protections.
The same could be said about any other industry that might profit from using Libra, be it investment advisors to casinos to who knows what else.
> there is a huge amount of trouble coming for them
Apparently neither the House Financial Services committee nor Senate Banking Committee were given a heads up on this launch. From a government relations perspective, this is a whiff of fresh breeze for those of us advocating for a break-up.
Thinking about your comment, I've started to become skeptical of my own position:
Sure, financial regulators are probably extremely upset about this, and are probably going to fight it. However, the data Facebook would be collecting here would extremely valuable to other regulators; data they cannot currently access precisely because it is protected by financial regulation.
If Facebook were to offer access to this data (on National Security grounds, or 'think of the children' grounds, etc.), agencies could have immediate access to immense amounts of data from potentially every user, whereas currently, they'd probably need a court order (or National Security Letter, etc.) to access the data of just one.
Would any of the committees you listed prevail against these interests?
I sometimes wonder if Zuck, at some point realized he didn't have the charisma to become president, but then realized he didn't need it. Facebook could start using its ability to mint currency as a way to bring in the government policies not otherwise viable in today's world. Maybe they start a basic income. It could boost the currency's use... but also be a path to be a world government without checks and balances. As our government falters, there's an opportunity for someone else to pick up the responsiblity. Which is frightening. The unbanked just happen to have less functional governments than our own, so it's a good test bed.
How crazy is it that we allow companies to take a percentage cut of EVERY transaction we make? How often do you NOT use a credit card or some other payment system with a middleman? It's become so commonplace that the idea of replacing cash entirely seems normal to people. And yet this normal state of things involves a middleman taking a cut of EVERY transaction!
Jurisdictions literally have to enact laws today to prevent businesses from going completely cashless, which essentially means jurisdictions have to enact laws to prevent middlemen from taking a cut of EVERY transaction made.
The cash system does not require middlemen in order to transact. And people have historically not been denied the ability to handle cash, as they are denied credit cards or bank accounts today (yes, a sizable number of people are denied even bank accounts and/or are forced into bank accounts with high monthly fees in order to just get a debit card, which is arguably the most basic requirement for purchasing most things today). With cash, people who had some financial difficulty do not get extorted even more (in the form of having to pay for "subprime" services) on top of an already existing percentage cut of every transaction that the middlemen already take.
Unless a new platform can reliably offer a no-fee or at least an absolutely ridiculously low fee transaction platform that absolutely does not deny anyone access nor extort anyone for the ability to gain access, AND we can be reasonably assured that no central organization is using it as a tool to load people onto its platform for later extortion....essentially unless we can get almost exactly the same open access as cash...unless we can get that, I don't support it, and probably neither should you.
(Disclaimer: I admittedly haven't looked into the details of Libra yet)
Or, rather, it cannot collect additional legal penalties for nonpayment of debt for the time period after a tender of payment in legal tender is made. A business may refuse payment offered in exchange for goods and services that have not yet been provided.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadFor instance, whenever I mention the dangers of a single corporation owning everything, including money, and how indistinguishable it makes it from a government, it gets downvoted with no discussion.
A ban by facebook could literally be lifethreatening?
Same way I can be "sure" my bank is going to keep my money safe and give it to me when I need it?
This comic about Orwell's and Huxley's vision of things really lays it in simple terms (https://twistedsifter.com/2010/06/the-saturday-strip-week-13...). The source is, of course, very interesting to read.
Between "do it" and "don't do it"? Well obviously no. But compared to getting thrown in jail? Obviously it's better?
It's not a stretch from today to imagine living on company-built cities with private security, paying rent and utilities to the company, with contracts and EULAs serving as laws in all but name.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_rule_in_India
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
—- From the movie Network, 1976
The network is owned by the Dutch banks, which also provide the online payment platform iDeal.
The fees are low and fixed. Offline, between 15cts and a couple of cents ( I don't know how low for the big retailers, 5cts ? )
The online fees are a bit higher, starting at 29cts.
There are no variable fees. There is no 'refund' or 'insurance'. Lots of shops do not accept creditcards ( I know of no big retailer which does ).
Note that I don't believe having companies - especially large ones that isn't primarily banks - in control of payments of any kind is a good idea, I think it's a terrible idea.
Yes, us Swedes use cards a lot, and almost every card in Sweden has Visa or MasterCard stamped on it. Most are debit cards, and the well know logos weren't there to begin with. Initially, almost all cards were debit cards issued by the various Swedish banks. Banks that people used to trust back then.
While those payment systems are technically private, they aren't perceived as such. Maybe because of the banks, maybe because they are regulated quite heavily, but people generally have confidence they won't be cut off by the bank. Personally I don't know anyone, or have heard of anyone getting denied a debit card. While that's not a useful statistic, it shows why people might perceive it the way they do.
Since 2017 the laws implementating the then new EU banking directives demands that the banks must offer any basic payment solution/product to everyone if they offer it to anyone. There are some exceptions, mostly regarding money and banking fraud, but it seems to be somewhat rare in practice, at least it doesn't seem to have garnered much attention in news.
There are however talks of introducing some kind of legal tender laws, as it is currently possible to get into a situation where you have money, but can't pay. Which is obviously terrible.
As if it wasn't already the case.
People simply don't care, they wouldn't be on any of these platforms otherwise, and governments don't understand, or chose not to understand for X reasons. They'd sell their soul for more (perceived) convenience or a better way to fill their narcissistic ego trips. It's like giving chocolate to 3 years old kids, they only stops when they gets sick, and so far "users" aren't sick.
You don't have to stand against it, simply don't use it. Just like most people don't do heroin or control their sexual urges.
You bring up heroin, but heroin is a heavily regulated controlled substance precisely because it's an example of something which people in general cannot be reliably trusted to control themselves with.
Though I suspect the current US president would like to revoke those and I am not sure that Boris wouldn't
Or, you’re attempting to purchase from an unapproved vendor. This vendor was suspended for donating to a candidate who voted for breaking up Facebook.
You used unapproved language, that incurs an automatic deduction of $X from your account.
The only hope is it will not become popular enough to become too big to fail.
Getting your PayPal account hacked and drained is pretty bad. Getting blacklisted on Patreon is possibly worse.
Were there any wars fought for money and not for something more material like resources,lands, strategical territories, ideology ? If you are referring that weapon makers need wars to make money then crypto won't fix that anyway
The petrodollar conspiracy gets causation backwards.
People don’t use dollars because oil is mostly dollar denominated. International trade is priced in dollars because American consumers put lots of dollars in exporters’ pockets. That drives demand for dollar financial products which powers a varied financial services system. (Oil is regularly traded in pounds sterling and Euros with limited fanfare.)
$1.333820449136241002 = 1.333739068902037589 PentiumSX837$
1. Nobody (decentralized), like Bitcoin.
2. USD cryptocurrency, created by the US government.
(I have not read the Libra papers fully. Im doing a far speculation here.)
Well... let's say you're a politician wanting to regulate Facebook, and let's say you have an affair with whom you communicate on Facebook or in Instagram DMs. If I were Facebook, I'd simply let an investigation team check if any dirt can be mined out of the troves of data - anything, even the dataset of GPS or other location pinpoints, can be enough to get a first hint. And now I discretely contact you and advise that there may be information around and that it would be a pity if that information were to get public.
This is the ultimate problem with the size and capabilities that companies such as Facebook have.
That's Dark and Illegal
Is this really a threat any longer? I mean, Stormy Daniels, $130k payoff pre-election, etc and all...
That's not true at all. Cash has the same problem of undeclared transactions, but the tax mostly still manages to get collected. If anything, the fact that Libra transactions will leave an electronic record makes it more likely that tax will get paid.
It's axiomatic that cryptocurrency transactions are rarely taxed, most people have not paid taxes on those transactions. The IRS is certainly trying to tax them, and the electronic ledger function of (some) cryptocurrencies will make it easier to track them under some circumstances than cash. That may change as time goes on -- I'm not sure enough how libra is implemented to have an opinion on that yet.
The idea of a pegged cryptocurrency is interesting though, potentially. We really need a lot more/bigger/better institutions that aren't companies or governments.
So...churches? What are you proposing?
Incidentally... "things that make currency shouldn't be companies" is not necessarily a rare or new idea.
Mysterious unknown founder who manages to remain anonymous for a decade? Who might turn out to be Visa or Exxon, and just make bitcoin as unpalatable...
In any case, that's neither here nor there. There are things which are neither governments corporations. These days, those two aren't always all that different
The only big example I know of is Air Miles. That seems pretty well run for a currency.
Central banks don't have inflation under control, they've just pushed it to places where it's not measured as part of the definition of inflation - primarily house prices, bonds and equities. That's what you'd expect given the way printed money is inserted into the economy.
edit: corrected typo
So imagine the current status quo is that either paypal or visa/mastercard are the principle payment methods and they charge the current rates.
But with libra, you still pay with paypal or visa/mastercard but using libra coin instead of fiat coin and % of the fee also goes to facebook.
What I can't wait for. Is the raft of people who will be denied creating wallets. How many people have had their accounts frozen by Paypal, kicked off using Visa/Mastercard and even Stripe! Quite a few I can tell you.
Think the situation will be different from Libra? Doubtful...
Unless Libra aims to uphold the same regulations that banks must, then at some point, I predict that there is a huge amount of trouble coming for them. Financial services can be both used and abused, and regulators have forced banks to address the abuse (eg: AML/KYC practices) to protect participants. Circumventing these regulations is equivalent to rolling back these protections.
The same could be said about any other industry that might profit from using Libra, be it investment advisors to casinos to who knows what else.
Apparently neither the House Financial Services committee nor Senate Banking Committee were given a heads up on this launch. From a government relations perspective, this is a whiff of fresh breeze for those of us advocating for a break-up.
Sure, financial regulators are probably extremely upset about this, and are probably going to fight it. However, the data Facebook would be collecting here would extremely valuable to other regulators; data they cannot currently access precisely because it is protected by financial regulation.
If Facebook were to offer access to this data (on National Security grounds, or 'think of the children' grounds, etc.), agencies could have immediate access to immense amounts of data from potentially every user, whereas currently, they'd probably need a court order (or National Security Letter, etc.) to access the data of just one.
Would any of the committees you listed prevail against these interests?
Jurisdictions literally have to enact laws today to prevent businesses from going completely cashless, which essentially means jurisdictions have to enact laws to prevent middlemen from taking a cut of EVERY transaction made.
The cash system does not require middlemen in order to transact. And people have historically not been denied the ability to handle cash, as they are denied credit cards or bank accounts today (yes, a sizable number of people are denied even bank accounts and/or are forced into bank accounts with high monthly fees in order to just get a debit card, which is arguably the most basic requirement for purchasing most things today). With cash, people who had some financial difficulty do not get extorted even more (in the form of having to pay for "subprime" services) on top of an already existing percentage cut of every transaction that the middlemen already take.
Unless a new platform can reliably offer a no-fee or at least an absolutely ridiculously low fee transaction platform that absolutely does not deny anyone access nor extort anyone for the ability to gain access, AND we can be reasonably assured that no central organization is using it as a tool to load people onto its platform for later extortion....essentially unless we can get almost exactly the same open access as cash...unless we can get that, I don't support it, and probably neither should you.
(Disclaimer: I admittedly haven't looked into the details of Libra yet)
True.
> a business cannot refuse cash as payment.
Or, rather, it cannot collect additional legal penalties for nonpayment of debt for the time period after a tender of payment in legal tender is made. A business may refuse payment offered in exchange for goods and services that have not yet been provided.