Is this just PR or are they genuinely so clueless? If the former I wonder if they missed the shift this year where cryptocoins stopped being the coolest kid in the town anymore.
If a centralized company wants to roll out electronic payments through its services it can just, you know, do that. They don't need blockchain or cryptocurrency to become, well, Facebank.
Not it can't. There's a world outside of the US where whole businesses run on WhatsApp. There is no solution, simply none today that exists to allow anyone from any country to register and start making and receiving payments. Not Stripe, not Paypal, none. If Facebook can deliver something that can then be exchanged for real dollars, that could be huge. If a person in a small village in Peru can just start receiving money from another person in another country and that the only barrier of entry is having WhatsApp installed on your phone, this could get ridiculously successful overnight.
At least that’s my guess..
If it were merely an account one used to pay for things then they just get to take a small percentage in transaction fees but with a blockchain they can create a bunch of FaceCoins, sell them on the open market and if things go south with their cryptocurrency laugh all the way to the bank counting their billions.
(Remember that in order to prevent double-spend attacks, you need to ensure that nobody—and no potential mining pool—is sitting on more computing power than your network has. That's feasible for a single proof-of-work currency; it's technically impossble with even two unless one outcompetes and kills the other, and certainly practically impossible for a new one at this point. And if you're not using proof-of-work, what stability does the coin have once the corporate backer is gone?)
And if the answer is: they do a transaction with someone else who wants to trade their money for WhatsApp coins then again, why do you need the blockchain versus a centralized WhatsApp currency.
Blockchain is a solution when there cannot be trust. If I trust WhatsApp, and you trust WhatsApp, and WhatsApp has a money exchange feature, we don't need the blockchain.
There's absolutely zero reason for that something to be blockchain-based. They can just release Facebucks, a private fiat currency that's just backed by ... drumroll please... a relational database.
It’s almost like none of these middle-brow dismissals have ever actually experienced a payment problem in another country.
In particular, if it could be done, why isn't WeChat doing it? And if WeChat can't do it, why can WhatsApp do it?
Since I said no even to an interview, it's hard to say what the parameters are for their thing, but I hope they fail.
Why would it be buzzword bingo if its an informative article that stays in context 100% of the time, include for what you consider buzzwords.
The actual criticism is that Stablecoins are just secured bearer bonds that anybody can issue inexpensively so you could see this happening for a long time.
From an investors standpoint, yes.
From a technological and application standpoint, there is some cool new stuff happening.