Facebook is reportedly planning its own stablecoin | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is reportedly planning its own stablecoin

techcrunch.com

29 pointsSupermighty12 comments

This is a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18730778

Am I wrong in being suspicious this is a plan for economic colonialism by Facebook? Can they use the custody assets as capital for lending?

Like if they have (e.g.) $100mil to back Zuckcoin, would it make any sense (or even be legal in the US) for them to start using this to start issuing, for example, microloans to rural farmers in India? I hope not but I'm interested in the answer.

Am I wrong in being suspicious this is a plan for economic colonialism by Facebook

Personally, my brain went in the direction of "is Facebook taking the Google approach to developing products?" i.e. they have a huge engineering team that needs to work on something, so you end up with a lot of products coming out of their dev organization, thrown at a wall, some stick and become popular in their own right (Messenger), some don't and die, and some are extensions of acquisitions (instagram).

Pure speculation and supposition, but that's the sensation I get, specifically reading this headline. shrug

“Engineer driven product development”?

Yeah something like that. I'm sure lots of teams do it, seems like a worthy practice to help build a culture of continuous learning when you're at the scale that you can just build "extracurricular"[1] features on your platform, provided you have product managers who can balance that with meeting core product objectives.

[1] there may be a better phrase for this which eludes me right now

This is how blockchain nerds report about Facebook cloning PayPal.

Presumably there's a reason they have a few dozen blockchain engineers working on this beyond just Venmo/Paypal functionality, such as this stablecoin actually being an ERC-20 token that can be transferred to your own wallet.

If this is an ERC 20 token I will eat my hat.

Wondering why a centralized authority for a stablecoin needs to use a blockchain at all.

This is classic company scrip / money transfer business: keep a ledger of transactions, publish your fees, register as an EFT company, follow the regulations.

Facebucks.

Perhaps because the plan is that, once the cryptocurrency is actually used for cash with a stable value, they won't prop it up?

That's basically what happened when the USD was no longer backed by gold.

Controlled by Facebook? Why not just throw a ledger onto a relational database. Surely they trust their own servers.

Meh. If a single organization is controlling the block chain, they might as well make it a surprise surprise relational database.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com