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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

I'm biased as I'm working on this project. But I'm super happy it's finally out there :) There's a lot of really cool cryptography and tech on this project and there's still a lot for people to discover!

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I have taken a cursory look at the github repository and the whitepapers. It looks like a very high quality project and a major contribution to the space. Facebook as a commercial company did not have to release this as open source but it did. In short, excellent work.

Apart from the cool crypto and tech, can you tell a bit what you're ethical viewpoints are on what your work is going to do to the world?

Let me guess:

"We try to stay away from such pesky questions but are convinced that the amount of good that Facebook can do is unlimited"

Yeaah.

Or my favorite - which OP has already stated - "Well someone would do it, so why not me, I'm a good person!"

One of these is a guideline violation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20219023); two is already harassment. People have a right to post here regardless of who they work for. If other users hound them away, will that make HN more or less interesting? Obviously less.

Please don't do this again so we don't have to ban you!

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There's also very cool cryptography and tech on other projects, that are actually decentralized. E.g. Algorand, where I work.

Facebook's protocol is permissioned - not so much theoretical novelty there over PBFT (or even non-Byzantine Paxos... companies are under contract anyways, why model them as Byzantine actors?) No way it will scale to 1000+ nodes, in a permissionless gossip network where you cannot directly unicast to the leader.

Vervious I invite you to read the paper, we actually do plan to go full permissionless.

BTW I'm a huge fan of Algorand as well. You guys are doing really good work.

"As a result, one of the association's directives will be to work with the community to research and implement this transition, which will begin within five years of the public launch of the Libra Blockchain and ecosystem."

I challenge the Libra team to put their money where their PR is at. Decentralization isn't impossible. Why should it take five years? This reads more like an empty, vague promise to appease the internet.

"The challenge is that as of today we do not believe that there is a proven solution that can deliver the scale, stability, and security needed to support billions of people and transactions across the globe through a permissionless network."

Many people in the cryptographic and distributed systems community, including me, would disagree.

Thanks for the cynicism! We'll need some of that :)

IMO there weren't much legit solutions before Algorand. We are all very interested to see your progress.

Can it be used without a Facebook account?

Seems like it can, because the article says that one’s Facebook account won’t be linked to the wallet account and that the wallet account can remain anonymous or pseudo-anonymous to others. But I’m sure Facebook will be able to link these somehow, and so will all the partners. This will be a bigger Cambridge Analytica in the future.

Considering the track record to date why would anyone want to handover financial transaction data to Facebook?

I may as well cut out the middleman, save time and punch myself in the face.

To deploy a smart contract in production, will I need to apply to be on the appropriate whitelist? If not, how do you prevent people from creating smart contracts that permit non-KYC wallets?

I've always wondered, the people who work on this project do they understand what cryptocurrencies and are they secretly embarrassed?

Apparently you're not embarrassed...

There's a lot of interesting physics in building thermonuclear weapons. Doesn't mean you should do it.

Your talents could be used to help the world. Instead, they are being used to enclose common spaces and pull apart the fabric of society. Get a better job?

I'd work on nukes before I'd work at Facebook. Nuclear weapons have arguably prevented WWIII, at least so far. Conversely, if WWIII ever does come, I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook has something to do with causing it.

My bet is on Twitter starting WWIII. This is the app politicians prefer use, after all. We’ll have “the tweet heard around the world”.

I doubt it. We already see that whenever somebody posts something stupid and controversial and is a public figure, they will claim they have been hacked and somebody else wrote the tweet.

Yeah it's weird to me the amount of hate Facebook gets when Twitter, reddit, and tumblr all seem worse.

Tumblr, Reddit and Twitter are community sites. They are driven by their users, with little or no overarching strategy beyond being next-generation BBS services that occasionally sell a few ads to keep the lights on.

Facebook is driven internally, from the top down, to accomplish murky, exploitative goals that are in the interests of nobody except the company and its shareholders.

That's why Facebook is worth hundreds of billions of dollars while Reddit can barely pay for their own bandwidth and Tumblr gets passed around between acquirers like it was a radioactive waste dump that runs a porn business on the side.

I don't know WTF Twitter is worth, if anything, but some people seem to think it's got a viable business model, so meh, whatever. They aren't Facebook.

I can't believe the amount of "you are a horrible human being for working at Facebook" comments I keep seeing as soon as someone says they are working there.

HN is great because you normally get comments straight from the source, but I'm worried we will inevitably shame Facebook employees into not posting here at all.

To be clear, I don't think parent commenter is a horrible person. I think they are misapplying their talents and hurting society.

I do understand your concern. Dialog is critical. But dialog only seems worthwhile if it is honest and open.

So do you think most big tech companies are evil? Google must be evil as well correct?

Especially Google, more so than FB.

Its not surprising, there are many people who are fb haters in this forum.

Saying "haters" makes it look like the people criticizing Facebook don't have serious concerns about the influence it has on the world. It's not being a hater of Vim, or Python. This is far bigger.

At least for me, Haters also include people who doesn't like the influence fb has on the world.

If we could indeed shame people into not doing something (focusing on actions and not people), I’d rather spend my energy on shaming people to quit Facebook en masse and shut it down. Seeing that this sounds ridiculous and unlikely to happen, I doubt any other intent of shaming would work either.

"pull apart the fabric of society” The fact that you made yourself believe this doesn’t make it true.

The fact that you made an internet comment saying it doesn't make it true, doesn't make it not true.

So hire her/him.

I appreciate your point of view, FWIW I believe that I'm doing net positive work for the world.

If you don't believe such projects should exist, you can at least agree that such project will inevitably happen and that it is a good thing that they have people like me onboard to influence them in the right direction.

I will write more about the things I work on and why I think these are good things on my blog www.cryptologie.net

Hope we can have some civilized discussions :)

> you can at least agree that such project will inevitably happen and that it is a good thing that they have people like me onboard to influence them in the right direction.

Sorry, what? What gives a random person a reason to think you're someone who will "influence them in the right direction"?

Probably because he's at least willing to have a discussion about it? Instead of going "fuck you, you are just jealous of my lambo collection"?

Okay, but he's also clearly absorbed Zuckerberg's savior complex. Politeness may help a conversation but it doesn't qualify him to make world-shaking ethical decisions.

I largely agree with the OP. I think these technologies can only be viewed in an optimistic way through a techno-libertarian lens; a perspective I don't think has any practical grounding in reality at best and at worst actively ignores why current systems exist (throwing the baby out with the bath water so to speak). And with that lens, I think it's foolish it believe that an engineer will actually be able to steer this machine once it's out in the wild. Systems without power structures still have power structures, they just not may be immediately obvious.

But I do appreciate your constructive attitude towards his comments and I'll be checking your blog a good bit to inform myself as best as I can going forward :). I would ask that you have some kind of "apologetic"/philosophical tag on the type of posts that people like me can filter for so we can read up on that kind of perspective.

I think these systems deserve more social/civic conversation and less technical ones. The tech is cool, but these technologies have the potential to have severe civic ramifications. These technologies are largely out pacing our national and global conversations around how we should use them, their pro's and con's, and the systems they're designed to replace/circumvent... and it's not a good thing.

Thanks for the link!

It could be but it is not and won't be. Net positive would require actual decentralization and no PoS (rich get richer). There are other ways to solve consensus and I don't mean PoW. Net positive would be to not require AML or KYC. Net positive would be no transaction fees. The foundation members will still profit on the float on fiat. Also, this project already exists. Isn't this the whole reason Ripple was created? Why not adopt Ripple as the crypto? Oh, because it is all about control.

How is FB printing fake digital dollars any better than the US government printing fake digital dollars? Except this way, everyone gets to rent seek and take from the people they purport to want to help. Rent seeking less than Western Union doesn't count. How about a project that is actually about helping the unbanked and underrepresented without exploiting them? I'll believe that anyone on this project actually thinks it is net positive for the world when they donate their salary and RSU to a non-profit that is actually helping people.

> FWIW I believe that I'm doing net positive work for the world.

I'm sure most Facebook employees have a similar opinion on their jobs.

> they have people like me onboard to influence them in the right direction.

what influence do you have? Can you tell Zuck not to steal my personal info?

Also, how much of your salary is getting paid out in Zuck Bucks? Or are you going to wait until some third world citizens with no other options test out the utility of this before you dip your toe in?

"I appreciate your point of view, FWIW I believe that I'm doing net positive work for the world."

Well, you're wrong. You believe this because you're getting paid a lot of money to.

A bit of cyberstalking suggests that the commenter here has a background in crypto stuff, so i suspect that the belief predates the being paid a lot of money.

A lot of people genuinely believe that crypto bobbins is inherently positive, and might well believe that crypto bobbins with a big serious alliance backing it is more likely to succeed, and so even more positive.

And, if projects like this are going to happen, i would certianly rather that they had optimistic true believers involved!

The optimistic true believers are being exploited by dishonest business folks above them in the org chart.

They have flexible morals, they think honesty===naivety and they will tell the optimistic believer whatever he/she needs to hear in order to do what they want.

This is just another step towards corporate dystopia. How big of a step remains to be seen.

It's not that these projects shouldn't exist, it is that THIS project shouldn't exist. Facebook and co have already proved they can damage society in devastating ways - continuing on this line of thought with currency and expecting it to go any other way is naive thinking. I say this as someone who would happily work at FB (just not on this).

> I appreciate your point of view, FWIW I believe that I'm doing net positive work for the world.

Everybody does so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxUgei-WKfY

> If you don't believe such projects should exist, you can at least agree that such project will inevitably happen and that it is a good thing that they have people like me onboard to influence them in the right direction.

Unless you sabotaged the project, no. It would be a better thing if people like you refused to work for Facebook so it would have to hire someone less competent or at least someone more expensive,

Ignore all the haters, you're building something cool that has the power to transform peoples lives. The fact that you're even thinking about your impact on the world puts you above what most people would do. Keep up the good work.

When Chamath was asked about working at Facebook @Stanford. What soul searching are you doing right now on that? "I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds, even though we feigned this whole line of there probably aren't any really bad unintended consequences. I think in the back deep, deep recesses of our minds we kind of knew something bad could happen. But I think the way we defined it was not like this. It literally is a point now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. That is truly where we are. And I would encourage all of you as the future leaders of the world to really internalize how important this is. If you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you.If you push back on it, we have a chance to control it and rein it in. And it is a point in time where people need to hard brake"

I understand there's a lot of hate on FB on HN, but I think there's a gap between thermonuclear weapons and crypto currency project.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - U.S.

Here's something for you to discover - cryptocoins have single-handedly wiped out and exceeded all progress we gained in Photovoltaic technology. Thanks for helping destroy the planet and undoing what we've been working so hard to achieve, all in the name of some pet project.

Note that Libra doesn't use energy-sucking PoW.

If it works in any way like a permissionless distributed database, you will find it running into energy problems very quickly with every node addition. this is a known issue since the 70s when we first tried this kind of technology.

You know that Libra is a POA coin and does not require mining, correct?

It's still a permissionless distributed database and will suffer those same issues regardless. This is known since the 70s, when we first developed and tested this type of technology. To boot, the majority of power isn't in the mining of POW, but the supporting hardware to maintain the network.

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