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Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

There's a bunch of problems in current banking system, and unfriendly user interfaces, obscure rules with many gotchas and transaction times are some of them. However, to think that I will trust Facebook more with my money than I trust my bank is, on the current stage, I think plain insane.

Also, does using Facebook currency for paying your bills means if you get in trouble with Facebook (which anybody now could by posting a wrong joke, having wrong political ideas or upsetting wrong people) you can not pay them anymore? Would Facebook control the transaction processing (i.e. via Messenger or otherwise)? If yes, then definitely not with a ten foot pole.

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It's not just Facebook but it's also backed by Visa.

These are the sworn enemies of cryptocurrency and privacy.

They are trying to cash in on the hype and supplant real cryptocurrency with their own mechanism of control and profit.

In Sweden I think the bank system have really stepped up with their apps and our transfer times are pretty fast. We also have things like Swish, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment) , which is great as well.

Honestly, I'm pretty confident that the sec teams at Facebook are better staffed and more skilled than at my bank.

It's not so much the security teams as it is the society-destroying beliefs of Facebook's upper management. Doesn't matter how good your security team is when they take marching orders from people who aren't aligned with improving society's health.

And why should we trust random Internet commenters to know anything about the beliefs of Facebook managers?

No one asks or expects that of you. The amount of negative press FB has managed to generate over the last few years, however, is more than enough to question the beliefs of FB managers.

No, it's not. You're basically just saying this is common knowledge, and as far as I can tell, common knowledge of how Facebook works internally is pretty poor.

And why would it be otherwise? People have read a lot of different articles of varying accuracy and there are also a lot of myth-making. There's no reason to believe average knowledge of Facebook is any more accurate than average knowledge of global warming or nutrition.

The details of internal Facebook procedures may be not known (though honestly, how secret can they be if most of the people in SV, for example, either know somebody who works for Facebook or somebody who used to work there?) but the public pronouncements and public actions of Facebook management can be readily observed. Nothing in these actions suggests Facebook as an organization values privacy, freedom of speech, thought diversity or robust public discourse.

> does using Facebook currency for paying your bills means if you get in trouble with Facebook (which anybody now could by posting a wrong joke

Their official site says Libra has been set up as a subsidiary of Facebook and that it has it's own privacy policy, ToS, etc so I think there is some degree of separation there (not that I'd necessarily take FB at their word when it comes to this kind of thing).

That would really be tested when Al Qaeda opens the account there (and why won't they?) and start using it for money transfers. Imagine the press and the political pressure.

And once they have the solution to stop Al Qaeda, the same solution also works for stopping people from donating to a politician that Facebook doesn't like.

It's still a legitimate concern. If a person or entity does something that flagrantly violates Visa's terms of service, Visa can refuse to process payments to them. If that same entity gets 86'd by 2/3rds of the Libra Alliance, they could be blocked from participating in transactions, which would make their Libra balance essentially worthless.

A really fascinating scenario is this:

Let's say something like Libra gets adopted worldwide. Let's say there's a huge financial crash at some point in the future, with lots of currencies, including some in the Libra basket (the stuff pegging it to the real world), going off the rails.

What would Libra's powers-that-be do then? They can tweak the parameters of their system any way they like. They could throw any currency out of the basket. Or do whatever they like.

Throwing a failed currency out of a currency basket is like the proverbial tree falling in the proverbial forest. It would not change the value of the Libra at all. The value would already be gone as the value of each stablecoin is computed roughly by taking the entire value of the currency reserves, and dividing it by the number of coins. A good analogy is what happens to the value of a mutual fund when an underlying security becomes valueless.

Let's say all meatspace currencies in their basket go off the rails. What would Libra do?

You are positing a catastrophe of such magnitude that "well, the value of my Libra has gone to shit" is the least of your worries. More appropriate concerns in such a scenario include "How can I acquire enough BDSM gear to wear and skulls with which to adorn my car to survive in the forthcoming Mad Max apocalypse."

Many of the gotchas and pain points are caused by regulatory factors (which I would add may be heavy handed or painfully implemented but are usually there for good and important reasons). Facebook or any alternative payment system will hit these same pain points once they reach a scale that matters.

There is something better than your bank. My bank sir sure. I’ve been using Revolut to transfer some money between borders and I did save couple of £k thanks to it. It’s really not difficult to be cheaper than “your bank”.

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