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Comment by cschneid | Hacker News Reader

Something I haven't seen yet: If my computer has a bit of malware land on it, do I lose my entire wallet worth of Libra irrevocably? If so, this seems pretty questionable as a mass-market money...

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Maybe we can store libra in some sort of institution that would provide some guarantees, like returning your libra if they get stolen. They could make money by investing the libra they hold and keeping the interest.

Yes, that is a novel and brilliant idea.

Since this is something similar to a old school money lenders table over which exchanges took place, we shall adopt the Old Italian word for table, banca, and call it a "bank"!

Might not be enough: what if this institution fails? It would be even better if governments could ensure deposits in such an entity (up to $100k worth or so might be sufficient) to stabilize the Libre economy in the worst-case scenario.

It's a bit early to tell but... do you lose access to FB, whatsapp or whatever when your computer/smartphone gets infected? Or are you talking about malware designed to transfer money from your account to someone else's?

Is this a problem for Paypal?

Paypal can reverse transactions, can Libra? Or is it like bitcoin, where I must protect my private key by any and all means, and then if it's lost, sucks to be me?

And yeah, I mean "lose all your money due to a 0 day in your browser".

At least in crypto, that's why things like the Ledger or Trezor are really important, at least if you're storing any non-de-minimus amount. Protects against things like 0-days, etc.

And my question was if Libra was any different. If it's like Bitcoin, there's zero chance this wont' be a hacker's paradise, and fail miserably as a way to immediately have your money stolen.

How would Libra ever work if general population using it have the normal level of computer security?

I foresee a headline like: "$20m worth of Libra stolen due to newly found security flaw. Facebook says 'sucks to be you, it's irreversible'".

(or is the protocol different, and it is reversible? How? Who controls that?)

Centralised systems like paypal can just un-transfer the money; for the other examples, you can usually get the account back through some out-of-band account recovery process.

For a decentralised system, you're on your own. It's not clear which one Libra really is.

Libra is a centralized system, sponsored by payment processors, masquerading as a decentralized system.

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