Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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>Libra is Facebook Credits [1] rebooted. All that changed is the meme it’s attaching to, “cryptocurrency”

My posting history will show I'm skeptical of Facebook but setting my biases aside, I think there's still a real technical difference here.

I believe the old Facebook Credits required the transactions to go through Facebook's centralized servers. (The programming api for processing Facebook Credits communicated with Facebook's servers.) This would be similar to a customer holding Marriott Hotel points and she wants to give them to a friend; she would have to call up Marriott customer service and have them transfer the credits/points from her account to someone else's. The transactions can't happen without Facebook and Marriott getting involved. That's fundamentally different from Libra since its transactions are validated by external partner nodes.

Therefore, the Libra isn't a cryptocurrency in just a "meme" bandwagon sense; it's actually designed for decentralized transactions that don't require centralized Facebook servers.

Whether the public (and merchants accepting payments) finds that technical difference of any value and massively adopts it, I don't know.

>Initially, the association (and validators) will consist of a geographically distributed and diverse set of Founding Members. These members are organizations chosen according to objective participation criteria, including that they have a stake in bootstrapping the Libra ecosystem and investing resources toward its success. Over time, membership eligibility will shift to become completely open and based only on the member’s holdings of Libra.

So it's not going to be Facebook's centralized servers, but Facebook + their friend's centralized servers. There are some vague promises, but this will start out just as centralized as Facebook Credits.

It's secured via BFT PoS, which means if more than 1/3 of the validators are malicious, then the network halts until there's a supermajority (2/3). With BFT PoS blocks have finality, which means you need a supermajority of the validator set to "fork" the chain and rewrite the history.

It does seem life is imitating art here [1]

[1] https://www.e-coin.com/

[2] https://mrrobot.fandom.com/wiki/E_Corp

"Can't wait for a cryptocurrency with the ethics of Uber, the censorship resistance of Paypal, and the decentralization of Visa, all tied together with the proven privacy of Facebook."

https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/11394299139229573...

so that we aren't cherry picking here, from the White paper:

> To ensure that Libra is truly open and always operates in the best interest of its users, our ambition is for the Libra network to become permissionless. 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. 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.

> different from Libra since its transactions are validated by external partner nodes

“Facebook is expected to maintain a leadership role [in the Association] through 2019.” The Association (“an independent, not-for-profit membership organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland”) holds title to the reserves, has a monopoly on coin minting and destruction, and has sole determination over new Association members (who each get one vote).

It’s Facebook Credits with co-branding.

Speaking of that branding, it was pointed out in a different thread somewhere that FB/Zuckerberg have opted to name this currency "Libra," which is quite the coincidence given that the Winklevoss twins' Bitcoin exchange is named Gemini (and touts "regulated" as its value prop no less - what a circus the crypto world is).

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