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Comment by adwww | Hacker News Reader

It is amusing watching big US tech giants trying to launch payment platforms to solve problems the rest of the world has forgotten about.

> “In time, we hope to offer additional services for people and businesses, such as paying bills with the push of a button, buying a cup of coffee with the scan of a code or riding your local public transit without needing to carry cash or a metro pass,”

You can instantly and securely send up to £100,000 for free between any UK banks, and contactless payments are EVERYWHERE here - I've even seen a begger with a chip and pin machine - let alone paying for coffee or a bus fare without cash.

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You do know that most of the world isn’t like the UK.

Money transfers between countries in particular poorer ones is absolutely not a solved problem. Neither is accepting money for products/services in countries where not everyone has a bank account or a credit card. And there is rampant corruption in many places as well.

Even a handful of these are enough to make the effort a success.

Neither is accepting money for products/services in countries where not everyone has a bank account or a credit card.

Check out M-Pesa or EcoCash. These are largely solved problems from a technical point of view.

International money transfers between entities not on the SWIFT network is still not a solved problem, or more specifically, the solutions that do exists are expensive and slow (and SWIFT transfers can be quite expensive)

Ah yes, let's put the developing world in the caring hands of Facebook. What could go wrong?

Didn't they already do that with internet.org?

Still not "the world", but we've had next day transfers on SEPA in EU for the last 10 years and EU banks are now scrambling to comply with instant transfers. Even before that they were not as trivial but easy enough. We've had pin-and-chip for more than 20 years in France. The domestic US transfer and payment situation looks ludicrously outdated when viewed from over here.

> Money transfers between countries in particular poorer ones is absolutely not a solved problem.

It may come out wrong (that is, there are some people that legitimately and desperately need this in these countries) but I fear this will mostly enable more extortion and scam schemes. And of course, one more way for Facebook to gather data.

>Money transfers between countries in particular poorer ones is absolutely not a solved problem.

Money transfers in some poorer countries are done successfully via sms messaging and have been for years. You are basically trying to sell people a payment service on their phone, when they already have a payment service on their phone that is backed by the phone company, which would seem less risky to the average user than having the same thing but backed by a marketing scheme.

Have you been to any of countries in the world with dysfunctional banking systems?

India immediately comes to mind, many African nations likely would find this incredibly useful. Just because it isn't useful to YOU doesn't mean its useless.

I thought India had any form of crypto currency banned?

It is however true what you are saying. But I can easily believe that these companies would exploit those countries even more than "traditional" banking systems ever could.

I visited a few African countries in April, they call it "mobile money" Mpesa, MTN mobile money, and then there's Wave, Xoom, etc.

To my knowledge you don't even need an internet connection for mobile money.

How is India’s system broken?

For consumers India's banking system has seen a large number of fast online payment systems. Yes, they have problems especially in rural areas but for the people that would be target group of Libra they are well served in India. In fact, India and (as far as I know) many African countries have far more advanced digital payments systems for consumers than many European countries.

International transfers are still an issue (at least from India to abroad) but this is largely a regulatory issue on foreign remittance than a technological one.

I heard commentators make the same argument when Facebook was trying to push a Facebook-preferring free "basic internet" in India, which India rejected. It turns out the terms of these ostensibly beneficial deals generally only benefit the western corporation pushing them and aren't great for the people of the recipient country. Yet then too there was this sentiment of "Poor people in India should be grateful they're getting any kind of internet at all!"

Judging from the photos used on the libra.org website they're targeting a very different audience.

Yep, they're going after Wave. Not a bad idea; Africa has decent growth potential, and it's not clear what wave's penetration is (most Africans I've met use it).

Like you said, this is all about exploiting the unbanked and the migrants/illegals that send cross border payments home. This is why Visa and PayPal are involved too, they want a piece of that pie as well.

Yep - bank transfers are free and fast, all my bill payments are automated, contactless is everywhere - it's great.

Since when are bank transfers fast? If I happen to need to send money over the weekend it takes an entire day for it to show up in that person's account.

In the UK they actually are fast (as in: often almost instantaneous, and almost always on a same-day basis). In the rest of the world, not so much.

I live in London dude

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