You don't have the rebellious notions of sticking it to traditional banks, not do you have (completely imagined) anonymity crypto fans have gravitated to. You don't have any of the intangibles crypto fans like.
It just seems like Facebook wants a central bank. Who's asking for that?
All of that will be tied to a real identity, but I am not sure Libra will also be completely free of these ties. There must be a point where to use your wallet you’ll have to justify your identity (i.e. above some amount or some kind of purchases you hit KYC requirements)
And while Libra definitely isn't perfect I think the set of trade-offs they chose are pretty reasonable. Another advantage over Venmo, Western Union, etc. is that the Libra will be run by a multiple independent companies, instead of locking you into a single company which is the case with the currently existing solutions (with the exception of SEPA).
At least in France, people actually use apps like Venmo for person to person transfers (or cash, or cheques, but they're on their way out).
We mostly use SEPA for either automatic bill payment authorization, or big transfers. No one will start a bank transfer and ask for their friends IBAN to pay back two beers.
They are mainly trying to catch up with WeChat Pay etc. But they figured it would be good to pretend it is a cryptocurrency because that makes it seem like an alternative to real cryptocurrency which it is not.
>The payment processors can't profit from real cryptocurrency and governments can't control it
I think you're underestimating the power of the tax man but I agree otherwise.
Which makes me wonder, why haven't there been in-game tokens made universal yet? I don't do Facebook but didn't they once have a large Zynga game thing on the go, very much tied into the platform?
A monopoly on a virtual currency should have happened by now, one that only buys stuff in games, unlocking features etc., transferable to mates.
If this had happened then it would not be that much of a leap to make the virtual token be handy for real world things. Crypto-nonsense would not be needed, it could just be like a classic in-game token.
If the tokens can be cashed out to hard currency great. But some people might never need to do that. They could buy music and apps with mummy and daddy doing the top ups.
That would be a big no no and would ring money laundering alarms
> If the tokens can be cashed out to hard currency great.
Again, regulators, that's why Libra has the association and needs to back up each transaction.
In reality the payment processors take so big a cut that a virtual coin would not be very profitable. Plus you have to manage everyone's complaints and chargebacks. Facebook had FB credits but they scrapped it, presumably because it was not good business. There are some smaller companies who manage virtual coins on behalf of games, like superrewards.com . They take a big cut, but also save developers a lot of trouble.
As soon as (for example) Zynga claims that tokens can be cashed out for hard currency or used to buy arbitrary real-world things outside of that game, that would mean that all kinds of money-related regulations would start to apply for them. For example, many game mechanics that include these tokens and randomness would fall under gambling laws; and money laundering/KYC laws would start to be relevant. That's why pretty much every company offering such tokens will pinky-swear that they're not redeemable for cash and real world things, and take at least some visible action to combat any black market for such sales lest they'd be considered aiding money laundering.
In essence, you can't really have your cake and eat it too - there can be a cryptopunk-ideal digital currency but pretty much every legitimate business selling real world things would be prohibited from touching it (at least in nontrivial amounts, if they don't do their own deanonymization of customers like all the legitimate Bitcoin exchanges do); or you can have a digital currency that's usable on a scale (like Libra) but it can be that way only by implementing KYC (i.e. anti-anonymity) and AML (i.e. possibility for censoring payments).