Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency: Privacy and stability concerns
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Facebook’s currency is not a successor of Bitcoin, it’s an inferior reincarnation of a failed predecessor.
So far, FB's coin looks very interesting.
>Facebook’s currency is not a successor of Bitcoin
Yeah the title is just low-quality clickbait; it's got nothing to do with Bitcoin.
This coin might look interesting, but for all of the wrong reasons.
Seriously, though... the whitepaper isn't out yet so we don't really know how this is supposed to work. It'm sure it will use some type of permissioned blockchain for convenience/ensure trust between all the partners and dissolve responsibility for all decisions the consortium takes.
In the context of Facebook being pegged to a basket of international currencies, the peg to each will need to be reevaluated frequently as the currencies fluctuate and arbitrage opportunities increasingly cost the peg-guarantor money to uphold the peg. These fluctuation can be cancelled by derivative contracts e.g. currency swaps, but those cost premiums to maintain and periods of volatility can get very expensive.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aarmstrongeconomics.co...
Assuming that Facebook is the sole issuer and redeemer of the coin, this is a nonissue. By backing the issued coin 1:1 with reserves according to the composition of the basket, Facebook can redeem any coins at face value. Hong Kong, for example, maintains a currency pegged to USD backed entirely with USD holdings.
As an aside, your source, armstrongeconomics.com, may not have the best credibility:
"In 1999, Japanese fraud investigators accused Armstrong of collecting money from Japanese investors, improperly commingling these funds with funds from other investors, and using the fresh money to cover losses he had incurred while trading. United States prosecutors called it a three-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme... Armstrong admitted to deceiving corporate investors and improperly commingling client funds—actions that according to prosecutors resulted in commodities losses of more than seven hundred million dollars—and was sentenced to five years in prison."
I personally think that Facebook's cryptocurrency will fail because today's climate is anything but trusting, but just because an idea failed in 1983 doesn't mean it'd fail today. There's also a strong possibility of it succeeding in the developing world and failing in the developed world.
Then it copied/pivoted to twitter’s timeline. And finally took off with a proper mobile app, and social apis for gaming. All while copying/buying - stories from Snapchat/Instagram, Whatsapp/messenger, live/ig to/twitch
It could work pretty well in the developed world, too, if transactions are instant and cheaper than credit cards or PayPal.
But whether it succeeds or fails as a payment system has nothing to do with any blockchain tech, or whether they call it a cryptocurrency.
This is not a competitor to Bitcoin, because it cannot be what Bitcoin is -- open, borderless, neutral, censorship-resistant, and public.
Maybe it will be better at buying coffee than Bitcoin. I couldn't care less, because buying coffee isn't the purpose of Bitcoin.
I can't use Venmo. Even if I would like to, I simply can't.
I can have a Libra wallet though and even if Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and Stripe decide that my market isn't big enough to sell me some Libra directly, I can still have that wallet and find others means to fill it.
That fit both the open and borderless nature of it.
I'm not saying it will be cheap, and surely filling it would require an intermediary (like in every single others cases), but at least that intermediary can be anyone that have a Libra wallet. That person could simply be someone that does wire transfer to someone that can purchase Libra, don't care, but it's now possible.
Sure having them behind make it not possible to be "neutral, censorship-resistant, and public", but at the end of the day, does it matters to me that just want to pay? Nope. Would it matter to me if I want to give money to Wikileak, sure most probably, but that's not why I want it. Like you said, that's not its purpose.
I wish Libra was building on an Ethereum scaling technology, like Plasma, but most likely it's a new standalone proof-of-authority blockchain where the validators are the hundred companies investing $10M each.
In terms of the sliding scale between centralized and decentralized, Ethereum v1 and Bitcoin are considered to be "pretty much impossible to change history"; Ethereum v2 is expected to be "extremely impossible to change history"; but Libra would require only that the hundred companies agree to a process by which history can be changed: Libra will be very centralized in practice and while it might and I hope help take crypto mainstream, Libra is not a substitute for Ethereum's secure base layer.
In Bitcoin, as long as you pay the fee, some miner will probably mine your transaction, based on purely economic incentive. Miners that refuse to serve certain customers based on "tainted" coins or illegal activity simply forego that revenue to miners who don't.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and conjecture that Facebook at the 100 entrenched industry players who are part of this new system will probably not consider censorship-resistance as a high-priority goal for the system. They will probably have a law-enforcement login portal that calls up Facebook's data profile of participants in a suspect transaction. There will probably be blacklists and fund freezes. There will probably be State Department liaisons to help comply with sanctions.
Farther afield you have stuff like Chia's proof of empty disk space or of course PoS.
Monero is currently pushing back with randomx which performs well on cpu's and not much else: https://github.com/tevador/RandomX
It depends who you talk to. The only people I know who still use, or don't hold a negative view of, Facebook are my parents, grandparents, and other old people who certainly won't be purchasing Facebook's "cryptocurrency". The vast majority of the young people I talk to, as well as other engineers, have a negative view of Facebook and don't use their services (aside from maybe Instagram). The latter is the group that would potentially be interested in crypto, but they won't be buying it from Facebook. Personally, I hope Facebook fails spectacularly
I'm guessing your response will be that it wasn't Facebook's fault.
I would also note that there aren't even 10 billion people living on earth, so it sounds like you're just making stuff up.
A distinction without a difference. If Facebook's security policy permits PII to be moved into insecure systems then Facebook itself is insecure.
Here's another:
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-uploaded-1-5-millio...
Yeah. 1.5 million, who cares right? No big deal. This is clearly a pattern, not an isolated incident.
Hundreds of millions of exposed users is not "pretty good", it's objectively horrible.
> this is a privacy issue
It is a privacy issue but primarily a security issue since the scandal is that the data was unintentionally leaked, not that it was shared with a 3rd party.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
"What the f* was facebook thinking" https://medium.com/@jamesallworth/what-the-f-was-facebook-th...
They gave out users' unique global ID with the export API so it was trivial to merge PII from multiple sources. They didn't have to be hacked, they left the door open. Facebook was full of dumb 'which x-movie-character are you' because every one of those grabbed a few more profiles and at one point, private inbox messages, all to be merged back into somebody's data trove.
And if Facebook actually manages to pull off a system where they can't be compelled to freeze accounts, it might also steal the user base from those traditional payment apps.
I mean some people do, but they're a very small niche.
> communities from these tokens might flock en masse to Facebook coin
Yes, I agree, that's what I said in my OP, but this is a relatively small group of people, and they will likely only use it as an onramp into spendable money and continue to favor their preferred token.
1. Pegged to USD 2. Controlled by a central entity 3. Tied to a social media account
So it has very little to do with currencies like bitcoin (it certainly violates the spirit of them, even if it chooses to reproduce some of the morphology), but they are IMO associating it with cryptocurrencies for publicity and more importantly in the hope of avoiding regulation by confounding regulators for long enough to become established de-facto amongst consumers.
Banks and payment networks like Visa/Mastercard/Paypal should be most worried by this, as it will be designed to cut them out of transactions between users, advertisers, readers of media/news entirely - load up your account with Facebook coins (have they really called it 'Libra coin'?!?), and merchants will not have to pay mastercard, but they'll have to pay Facebook fees to accept your payment.
I don't think they're worried seeing that they're some of the biggest investors in the project https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-new-cryptocurrency-ge...
If it fails they lose lots of money, if it succeeds FB has huge leverage over them which it didn’t have before. Can’t really see an upside for these companies to this.
A $10MM investment as a hedge against that outcome makes a lot of business sense, from a risk mitigation standpoint. The size of the investment is also indicative of their relative confidence that it will succeed - if they were sure that it would succeed and supplant their core business, they'd probably be investing a lot more.
Visa is doing the smart thing and investing in this as it will probably find some traction given FB's reach, but poses almost no real threat to Visa in anyway. Personal and Commercial banks' main business isn't really payments, but rather loans. They offer payments since they already have a well established settlements network and serve as gatekeepers to the financial system.
I'd love to see where this goes, but I have a really hard time believing that this will grow beyond anything but another FB digital currency. There's a fundamental aspect of currency where it's tied to a government as well as a country and it's world dominance. There's a reason the USD is the reserve currency of the world, and yet another reason the government is the owner of the USD. Bitcoin at least tried to challenge this dominance. FB isn't even thinking like that clearly. They have another play in mind, and frankly it's not entirely clear what it is.
The goal is quite simple, to own global payments (a trillion dollar market currently owned by a cosy duopoly).
The intended method is to do an end run around regulation as they have done with privacy regulation (hence the bitcoinish cover).
I disagree it is smart for visa to invest unless they have a majority interest.
Using the term "innovation" might be a bit too generous here. Not that combining two things that already exist can't be innovative. When the boomers combined "white music" with "black music" they got rock and roll. But this is Facebook + crypto, two things that suck. (Apologies.)
1. Hype
2. It gives "credibility" to their currency
3. they can be regulated as a crypto-currency that way.
4. It enables faster transactions and reactions to the transaction states than regular currency.
5. It locks the users in to their partners because it's more friction to get money.
6. Easier to obtain the data on how users spend their money.
7. Easier to introduce new models based upon transactions/currency.
8. It can be given away for free easily.
Lets say you have 7 permissioned nodes that are running a BFT protocol to establish a shared DB. I'd be interested to hear why?
Are the resources guarding those seven nodes equally proportioned? How hard is it for a bad actor to potentially subvert one and cause it to pass bad-but-trusted data? Can these nodes be switched with other, potentially less-secure or hostile nodes? How are additional nodes added to the network; is there a credentialing process that could potentially be attacked? Who maintains each node, what is their level of sophistication, resourcing, and control?
>Are the resources guarding those seven nodes equally proportioned? How hard is it for a bad actor to potentially subvert one and cause it to pass bad-but-trusted data? Can these nodes be switched with other, potentially less-secure or hostile nodes? How are additional nodes added to the network; is there a credentialing process that could potentially be attacked?
These are good questions. I believe in Libra human beings decide which organizations are allowed to run a node and they build a fixed list of say 100 or so nodes one from each organization.
>Who maintains each node, what is their level of sophistication, resourcing, and control?
You don't want amateurs running nodes. This is normally where such proposals fail because if you don't have enough clout early on you won't get good node operators and this poisons the security argument. From my perspective Libra is the first team which has overcome this hurdle.
Then again hopefully everyone doesn't just run these nodes on AWS.
This is only true in the US, where the inter-bank financial system runs on mainframes and 40 year old code.
The British banking system decided a while ago that they were going to update their bank communication system, and now they can send sums between bank accounts at different banks within 10 seconds.
I think where is messing up is by not allowing more nodes. The brave project is dispensing enough money for people in third world countries to pay for their internet connection.
The true value of crypto currencies is exchanging computational abilities into social mobility, and I don't see where facebook coin does that. Telegram's coin won't, either, but payment/messaging system is big business right now.
A centralized system should be limited only by RTT and there are ways to overcome even that via caching layers or cryptographic techniques. You want something sub 250ms.
'Zero fraud risk': you cannot prevent people from finding loopholes. Every system breaks. Instead, you use the same techniques that have been used for centuries in finance: keep audit logs, make it possible to fix things later, and maybe try to catch the majority of possible attacks by adding more rules.
If you're processing tens of millions of transactions a second, you do not have a single point of truth. You have at least a cluster, ie. a distributed system. Fortunately finance grew up before automatic computing and telecoms even existed, so its algorithms and systems run just fine (FSpecificVO) at less than 1 FLOP/S with communication latencies measured in weeks.
So you might as well just collect transactions locally, then sort them out as a batch job in the evening, with a percent or two price hike to cover liabilities due to fraud.
Last time I went anywhere near London, they had the instant payment system working down there in the Tube.
It's not centralised and none of the important stuff is necessarily low-latency, but it seems to work fine anyway.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2018/html/ecb.pr1811...
Irrelevant, but this is not a thing that happened. More accurately, when white people started playing black rock and roll, they also continued to develop rock and roll, alongside and in combination with black people (and other people.) Also, this is pre-boomer.
How about this: Two races whose artists had theretofore not collaborated much artistically due to an artificial separation (segregation), started to come into closer contact, in the context of the civil rights movement, new sound recording/reproduction technology, and a burgeoning youth population, and began to influence and imitate each other; and like a boulder rolling down from an unstable perch, managed to release a lot of energy. I know I know... no such thing happened!
https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/11394299139229573...
Isn't it strange that the Chinese copied facebook, but now facebook copys WeChat
"U.S. Banks Are Terrified of Chinese Payment Apps" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJh_Uir5EMI
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/technology/facebook-zucke...
Not really, Facebook is lacking in originality and sees how much money can be made (Wechat is doing it).
They also see how they can harvest huge amounts of data on what people buy with a high degree of preciseness.
Heck plenty of start ups pivot to existing ideas.
And in Japan pay with your phone has been around for ages.
You've clearly never used WeChat if you're under the impression they copied Facebook. This "___ of the West" is just a simplified trope to help readers make a comparison. Western companies/apps fail in the East and Eastern apps often fail in the West as the market is completely different that you can't just port something over and hope to replicate its success.
https://hbr.org/2018/08/why-western-digital-firms-have-faile...
The idea behind bitcoin is that you don't need to rely on the US government for storing value. There are 21,000,000 BTC ever ever, you can't print more.
That article did not address this at all. This is the most compelling reason to buy bitcoin.
You mean that it is as good as cash. Bitcoin become a failed project, a big internet casino. Some people want to use digital money to make payments and get paid, you know?
The success of the facebook coins depends by the ways to redeem the tokens(i.e do other shops accept it, can they be cashed out at atm, can you use it with 3rd party wallets etc)
Alice: A gift certificate is completely different from cash.
Dilbert: No, it's not. They're both pieces of paper you can exchange for goods and services.
Alice: You're missing the point.
Dilbert: Actually, a gift certificate is worse than cash, because you can only use it in one place.
Wally: And it expires.
Alice: At least it shows some thought.
Dilbert: It shows defective thought. You're trading perfectly good money for something that does the same thing, only not as well.
Facebook’s currency may not expire or be limited to one place, but it does seem to me that “it does the same thing [as money], only not as well.”
I don't know but each time I try to show my cash into the computer... nothing happen.
Libra does the same thing as "Paypal" would be more fitting, but then you forget that not everyone can use Paypal and that's where your logic fail.
Venmo is always my best example for that, because I do have a Visa card, I do have a Paypal account. I'm in a developed country, thus I don't have issues to do transactions online. I still wouldn't be able to use Venmo though. If you were to only accept my transaction from Venmo, because you didn't like Visa and Paypal (yeah I know Venmo is owned by Paypal but you understands the point). Now imagine this world, but without any of theses.
- Anyone can own a Libra wallet, me, you, someone in the middle of a third world country.
- Anyone can transfer from a Libra wallet, to another, me, you, someone in the middle of a third world country included.
That means that anyone can arbitrage values of Libra, anywhere in the world, whether Visa, Mastercard or Paypal decide that market worth it or not.
Thus, anyone can pay using Libra, which make Paypal, "the same thing [as Libra], only not as well."
That's the whole issue. You forget about everyone else that don't have access to Paypal or Western Union, or even wire transfer.
This "facebook coin" likely has none of these properties.
By your logic if I exchange dollars for euros to spend on a vacation somewhere that means the dollar has failed ?
Now imagine you get paid in bitcoin, save every month for a holiday or a high value purchase. When the time comes to make the purchase you find out that your savings are worth less than 10%. How does it feel using bitcoin?
I tried to use bitcoin(as a merchant) but due its volatility it makes no sense to use it(as merchant or buyer).
Furthermore, good currency should encourage investment (into things) which means it needs to be (slightly) deflationary (to introduce a cost to not investing into production). Otherwise you get into a paradoxical/toxic situation where NOT producing useful things becomes financially advantageous.
This is not true. Forks exist, and anyone can make 21 million bitcoin at a time. It’s still a question of if people will accept the forks, but it is an option
Here’s my point. Is it theoretically possible for some group of people in the physical world to take actions so that what we generally call Bitcoin has 1 more coin? I strongly believe yes. So the world isn’t as black and white as some people like to say it is.
This is the bait-and-switch of crypto. People act like it’s all code and messy humans aren’t involved and this just isn’t true.
The original comment I replied to said there will only ever ever be 21,000,000 Bitcoin. I believe this is not fundamentally true because “Bitcoin” is whatever people say it is. If we all agreed to accept a fork with 22mil and call it Bitcoin, then that’s what it is. Sure, that old fork only has 21mil, but who cares? Old forks get dropped all the time.
This all isn’t entirely theoretical. This already happened with the other major part of cryptocurrencies, the immutable blockchain. What we all call ETH has a rollback in it!
No, this hasn’t happened with BTC but there’s no reason it can’t. Every second that the Bitcoin blockchain doesn’t get rolled back, every second that there are only 21 mil possible Bitcoin is because we all collectively agree that’s the case.
However, at least in the US, a company is not allowed to choose a stock ticker already in use by a company publicly traded on a US exchange.
I argue that they’re about the same. A corporation is largely numbers in computers and how people feel about them. A cryptocurrency is numbers in computers and how people feel about therm.
Typing this out makes me appreciate gold a bit more. Gold is gold, whether we give it a different name or not. It’s not pure thought-stuff like a corporation. The problem is it only has whatever value we give it, so I’m certainly not arguing it has inherent value or is a better currency.
I would also bet good money that most corporations in the world do not map directly to a business-process-in-action. Most corporations are a layer of abstraction of ownership. There are many more of these than real businesses in the physical world.
Untrue. More could easily be printed if that is what the leadership/community wanted.
There is too much argument over which chain will win, imo, its like asking which nation will win- it doesn't have an answer. We are humans, we excel at patchworked cooperation, which is why we have so many nation states and governing systems. There will be more than enough room for users to have many choices when it comes to blockchains for the foreseeable future.
A subjective opinion that is also irrelevant to the point. It doesn't matter how likely you think a fork is to succeed, the argument that computer software is impossible to change because "nobody would ever agree to those changes" is incorrect.
Who votes to increase the 21M cap, devaluing your own holdings?
Sir, it appears the nays have it..
Also I'm fairly certain a majority of hashpower, not just users would need to be on board with the change.
You could argue that as the primary beneficiaries of such a change (increase cap => increased distribution to miners) they would be for it, but I think most rational actors see the catch 22 of trying to profit by removing one of the core attributes that makes bitcoin valuable (it's scarcity)
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...
thank you for sharing I didn't know something this critical had been found in recent years
True, but irrelevant. It doesn't matter either way. The point is that it can be done if that is what conventionial wisdom dictates is desirable at the time.
Again, it's an argument from ignorance and gross oversimplification to claim "the future wisdom of the community" will solve problems for bitcoin.
The technical properties of bitcoin can be modified, saying that it is impossible to change them is wrong.
Except something as simple as increasing the block size to allow Bitcoin to process more than 7 transactions a second (Visa handles 42,000 tx/s comparatively). Theoretically it is possible, but the way Bitcoin is designed puts changes in control of people who stand to profit from preventing certain changes (i.e. Tragedy of the commons) like block size increases - and they are blocking it. The point is that Bitcoin isn't some piece of software that you can magically push any necessary changes to.
Just that the network known as Bitcoin can't do that. The block mined just 10 minutes ago was capped at 0.904 MB.
Anyone can mine a gigabyte sized block on their own computer, but that doesn't make it Bitcoin (even when branded as Bitcoin SV).
So you just pulling facts out of your ass? Read the white paper then come back
Is the full context.
Cherry picking the sentence to be patronizing doesn't work very well when the context is actually your own example...
Tether became (at least for a time) a favored method for cryptocurrency investors to shift their positions to USD. I think Facebook has a good chance of doing the job better with Libra than Tether has done. This might put Facebook into an advantaged position in future payments services and cryptocurrency.
(One thing that just occurred to me: would it be possible to alter the operation of a stablecoin, such that parties who are trying to corner the market will automatically expose themselves to other parties who would exploit them?)
What if Facebook also came out with a stablecoin to the Yuan, the Pound, and the Euro, as well as their own non-stablecoin cryptocurrency? I suspect that this would give Facebook the same kind of information advantage currently enjoyed by petroleum multinationals in the petroleum market.
(EDIT: Euro)
Surely this is Satoshi's design goal.
Also don't worry about the exchanges operating out of obscure off shore islands, they probably arn't operating fractional reserves.
The largest brokerage is US-based (coinbase) and the largest exchange is Binance, which has most of its funds auditable on various blockchains.
Also just hold your own keys if you're worried about it. The ability to opt-out of custodianship is kind of the point.
No, they don't. They just have to sell a notation in their database that a coin is owed to someone. This is what MtGox did, and it's what Coinbase still does. The trick is to maintain just enough coin to be able to transfer out coins on request (as MtGox tried to do), or to just claim that it will take a few days to process the transaction (as Coinbase does).
Binance, which has most of its funds auditable on various blockchains.
A company owned by Binance audited Binance's books. And posted the results of the audit online...but not the underlying data. This is useful from the POV of conducting a third-party audit...
Miners do not custody funds. Large miners that control a farm can't run on empty, they need to pay for space, hardware, and electricity - they need to sell through crypto through a brokerage to end users to make a profit. The brokerage (e.g. Coinbase) may then custody those funds on behalf of brokerage users, but the miner no longer has it.
Mining pools directly pay out the pool contributors in crypto who then themselves decide to either save or spend.
There are some "cloud mining" services but they don't account for a lot of power and most end users play with them at a loss.
A brokerage does not own or generate new coin, it simply holds it on behalf of users and enables exchanges between users via the market.
"[Coinbase] claim that it will take a few days to process the transaction" -> This is very vague. When you withdraw crypto it generally happens near instantly. If you're talking about a purchase which involves processing a fiat withdrawal from a bank, that's not the same thing.
Re: Binance, you can audit it yourself at addresses like this: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/34xp4vRoCGJym3xR7yCVP...
There are plenty of exchanges in reliable jurisdictions (Coinbase, Bitstamp, etc.), why do a few shady ones matter?
"The decentralized design that Bitcoin uses needs people to do lots of processing work"
The Proof of Work "algorithm" is completely unnecessary for processing transactions, and it's actually quite simple. To the point, PoW simply asks for a random number for the purpose of creating a lottery. If you want Bitcoins, you need to waste more real world energy and capital on hardware to print more lottery tickets (nonces).
The Bitcoin network and all the transactions on the network could easily be run on cheap hardware, a raspberry pi even. The PoW filter is a psychological tool for "governance" (write access) to the database, granted now exclusively to wealthy capital holders. Effectively granting the Bitcoin / PoW network to the wealthiest speculators who can devote resources to be sacrificed in return for digital lottery printers, which in turn give a chance to generate numbers in the cryptocoin database.
Curious why someone would design a currency system in objection to the financial plutocracy, when the design inevitably restricts control of the entire network only to existing capital?
It's no mistake Satoshi owns at least 1,148,800 BTC.
The Distributed Systems community awaits your proposal for a solution to Byzantine Fault Tolerance in open, decentralized, adversarial networks. Why would you withhold an alternative solution to PoW?
>The PoW filter is a psychological tool for "governance" (write access) to the database, granted now exclusively to wealthy capital holders.
No amount of PoW allows a block producer to write data to a node that a node operator hasn't consented to accept by their choice of consensus rules. Your argument is "capital holders" can force consumers to purchase whatever they produce. Consumers induce producers. Producers cannot induce consumers. Producers can /speculate/ that latent consumption may exist but without purchasing consumers, production will eventually end.
>why someone would design a currency system in objection to banks, that inevitably restricts control of the entire network only to existing capital?
Money warehouses and credit creators (banks) are not capital. Capital is the product of work / R&D / creation.
If someone can devise a way to perform the notary service without proof-of-work, I'm pretty sure Bitcoin will move to it. Right now, no other system has been shown to actually work. Proof-of-stake systems are in the works but, as far as I know, none of them are considered trustworthy at this point.
Edit: I would like to also say that I'm sympathetic to the opinion that Bitcoin mining is too wasteful of resources (i.e. electricity). I think the system is perhaps flawed in terms of the connection between Bitcoin price and the economic drivers of difficulty. When the price is high, the mining rewards are such that there is huge pressure to increase mining costs. Do we actually need that level of security? OTOH, hard to blame Satoshi for the design since it is hard to foresee how quickly the system gets adopted.
I see you're unfamiliar with Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin 2, Bitcoin Segwit...
It'd be like if counterfeit designer clothes were actually indistinguishable from the "real" ones, and arguably better made in some cases.
Your analogy is more like getting the Facebook database and spinning up 100 clones of it, all with 3 billion users. Now "Facebook" has 300 billion users. It could have a trillion or a quintillion right? Or an infinite amount. But what does that even mean if the actual 3 billion people only use the original network? It means Facebook is still Facebook, and forking it, in terms of how it affects the network it its value, is relatively pointless.
You're not making a real point.
Also a better analogy would be that you can make 1000 copies of the Mona Lisa in whatever way you want, they will still be just copies and they will be worthless.
If a clone of Bitcoin is identical to Bitcoin then why does Bitcoin trade 25x the price of a clone? Your argument would cary weight if the protocol and price facets were similar. The market says otherwise.
Because humans are stupid, faddish creatures.
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
An appreciating asset is the exact opposite of a currency. You want your currency to be stable, or slight inflation/devaluation over time, or the consequences are it will never be used to transact.
I don't want to invest in money. I want to exchange my money for goods and / or services. It seems that bitcoin is great for the former and not so great at the latter :P
https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/5.9.19%20Facebo...
3-5 days is actually a feature of ACH. This delay includes the ability to reverse a transaction, a built-in risk management. For example, here is a quote from an article on the front page of HN right now (#5, SIM swap horror story):
> After a couple of days, our bank reversed the $25,000 charge and told us that the fraud department caught the ACH withdrawal before it was fully processed so that neither my family nor the bank lost this money forever.
Google will give you lots of good information on the difference between wire and ACH.
It's a mainframe batch-processing system built in the 1970s, and it's mostly worked just fine for 40 years. That's pretty efficient!
It's sort of a constructive proof that you don't need crypto currency, if that's the justification for its existence.
I'm not sure that's an automatic yes from most users.
We'll see what their fee structure looks like.
If Facebook has fees that are less than industry standard I would be highly suspect of that payment method.
It would definitely be a big shift from the "support" they offer now, admittedly, but if they can break the Visa/MC duopoly at scale, I think you could make a business case for it.
Again, I would be highly suspect of Facebook if they charged less than the industry standard, especially if they don't explain how they cut costs for risk management.
I think this is really just Facebook payments that will be controlled by Facebook.
- people may finally be able to "sell" their personal data
- it may help to remunerate artists and content creators on Instagram
Any stable coins are just payment network without a license.
(nobody from facebook here?)
Many of us live in places where we can rely on our regional currencies to remain stable. Maybe the pound will flounder under Brexit, the Euro under the debt crisis or the dollar under whatever the trade war is supposed to be doing, but there's little or no public will to divest from national currencies, and the main reason anyone would dip into cryptocurrencies is speculation. Also we're hackers and distrust Facebook. Fine - we're not the target demographic.
I think the general population of Argentina, India, Venezuela, etc etc, _are_ the target demographic. The idea would be to make savings, payments, and digital purchases for people in developing or unstable economies reliable, inflation resistant, and low-fee - particularly vs forex. As a bonus for us hackers, I'm sure every Orwellian data scraping fever dream you can imagine is rolled in too - but most people aren't hackers, so whether this is a showstopper remains to be seen.
I'm not just spitballing here - Facebook claim this to be so.[2] Thiel and Altman's Reserve Currency works basically the same way, with the same ambitions[3]. The implications are _much_ bigger than Johnny-come-latelies from Menlo Park stumbling into the blockchain hype - which seems to be the prevailing take here. What we're seeing is tech giants betting big on having total ownership over banking and purchases in much of the world's population.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-argentina-economy-oecd/ar...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/6/18655366/facebook-cryptocu...
[3] https://reserve.org/about. Pedantic technical note: Reserve is moving in a three phase sequence from USD collateralization (like Tether / Coinbase's token) to algorithmic stabilization against a basket of goods (not currencies), whereas Facebook is skipping to phase three and using a basket of currencies as the peg. (It's an open question how this will be accomplished, since Libra's whitepaper won't be released until tomorrow.)
Yeah now it's called Libra. I can totally see my daughter wanting to think about her girl products every time she uses this coin.
They better consider how their marketing will look if they want to enter the Australian market. Especially with this day and age of memes. Usually what the teens find "cool" is what the older generations adopt.
The iPad didn't really suffer much from the same naming "problem".
Libra is pretty much just the latin name for "Pound". It's a pretty damn good name for the currency.
It's not really the same thing. Pad can often refer to things like "pads of paper", or be a slang name for an apartment.
> Libra is pretty much just the latin name for "Pound". It's a pretty damn good name for the currency.
A lot of teenagers probably aren't going to know that.
Whereas there is literally a brand called "Libra" that makes tampons, pads and those sorts of products. That is what people think of here when they hear that, either that or the star sign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libresse#International_brandin...
Yes and you're on HN like me. This site caters for a certain audience.