> Novi Financial, a regulated financial company, is a subsidiary of Facebook, Inc. and is headquartered in Menlo Park, California.
That's gonna be a big fat NOPE for me.
Those two companies are having absolutely no trust from my side, they have abused the trust so often, that they no loger know what the term means. I dont care what they do, I dont care how usefull their "gifts" are. Just NO.
They have seriously flawed internet and human society as it was (is) and there is just no way I will let them into my finance. One is goverment, something completely different is survailance capitalism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw and there is a book that I would put in schools for mandatory reading: https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...)
"Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes." ("Beware of Danaans bringing the gift", reference to Trojan horse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeo_Danaos_et_dona_ferentes)
p.s.: people downvoting, you just dont understand what you are against with. Educate yourself, please, this is no longer the time of cheering for your favorite coorporation, the things have gone over the edge.
If anyone seriously thinks this sounds like a good idea I’m truly curious to hear your reasoning.
In my view this was always a cynical ploy by Zuckerberg. He would love to control a huge piece of the world economy, but I believe he knows that the outcry from real governments would never allow that - so he could hedge by trying to have his project regulated out of existence and taking decentralized tech with it. Decentralized tech is the greatest long term competitive threat to Facebook. Zuckerberg knows it and would love to see it incidentally banned as a casualty of taking down Libra, but his mistake was overplaying his hand too early.
I think another point is that if you want a truly decentralized, no government involved, cryptocurrency, those still exist, go buy and use some bitcoin.
I don't know if it is a good idea, but I don not share the view that being a private entity makes it lesser than government entities.
I see governments and private entities as being built by people, and those are flawed just the same, governments even more so, since they are the perpetrators of the greatest evils of modern times.
I generally feel positive about something like Libra and I'm not in favour of decentralised currency. Decentralised currency is hard to tax, threatens the sovereignty of nation states, the ability to enact sanctions, enables crime and I'm not really on board with that.
Libra (or something like it) looks like a way to built a cheap, frictionless payment that in any practical sense mostly seems to illemininate costs of transaction if it scales up well enough, and I think that's where most utility comes from in a currency. I don't see the value in some slow network that changes its value twenty times per month for the average person just so that you can stick it to the man or whatever.
As to 'controlling the world economy'. I've never really understood how this is supposed to be the result of Libra. At the end of the day it's basically a Paypal without the middleman. The Libra owners will at some point earn some money on interest but otherwise I don't really see how this confers any monstrous powers to them. As far as that goes I'm more concerned about the Facebook platform itself.
The point is that the world's largest privacy abuser can now directly tie all of your online habits to your government issued ID.
The implications here are staggering.
And guess what Facebook etc. are requiring at login. Phone numbers. For security they claim, yet they send spam messages to the number.
Id be pretty shocked if anybody here had a FB account, under a pseudonym, and they actually believed they were keeping their true identity hidden from FB. If you have an account, they know who you are. Verifying your ID is a due diligence on their part to CYA.
How many people, saying they would never give info over to FB, willingly hand it over to the fintechs like Robinhood?
I think you could have gotten your point across without the rudeness. Talking to people like that creates a toxic environment.
I fully agree that there is no way I'm giving that info to FB. I noped out of running ads with them because they wanted my ID. My privacy is invaded enough by them, no thanks.
Thank you for calling this out. To some, this may seem like over-reaction, but only by calling even minimally rude statements out can we ensure that HN doesn't become Reddit.
My country (Serbia) that's not in the EU had quite a bit of drama due to sending personally identifiable private citizen data (i.e. first and last name, specific personal info, ID card number, unique personal identifier) over Cloudflare which does not currently have a legal representative according to the Serbian Data Protection Regulation, which makes it illegal for the government or any other data processor to send ANYTHING to Cloudflare because Serbia is not in the EU and even though GDPR and ZZPL (our version) are literally identical (to prepare for EU-integrations), GDPR only applies to citizens of countries that are right now in the EU.
So, I don't think some people or [all] governments will like this. At all.
edit: And yes, SHARE Foundation did sue Google, Facebook, and all other tech giants (including infrastructure providers) in Serbia for ZZPL but apparently only Google appointed a legal representative in Belgrade, and even that seems like a "PR stunt", given how weakly GDPR is being enforced, and it is backed by the whole of EU. No other company replied or appeared in court.
So the main goal of the blockchain part is to have friends (the Libra association) between which the responsibility is shared. It dilutes concerns and deflects issues: the headlines won’t be “Facebook faces regulatory sanctions” but “The Libra association (Facebook, Uber, Spotify, …) faces regulatory sanctions”.
Or at least that was their hope initially. The press, or the regulator, may have pushed scrutiny on Mastercard had they stayed involved, but I doubt they will assume that Spotify is responsible if something wrong happens in the Libra association.
But fundamentally, the creation of consensus on transactional history merely elects a leader, and other companies’ servers only record the leader’s blockchain.
Additionally, the assets backing the payment system are the real meat behind enabling this technology. And unlike traditional banking, Facebook & cie maintain control over those assets regardless of which company handles the Libra account.
Banks can handle your payments because they have ownership of your deposits, but funds do leave the bank when performing a transfer (ACH, SWIFT, etc.) to another bank.
In Libra, the assets remain controlled by the Libra association even when making a transfer from one Libra app to another, eg. from Novi to Spotify.
You can, today, do high margin longs and shorts (dYdX), collatoralized loans (Maker, Compound), buy and sell derivatives (Synthetix), and buy into funds run by fund managers (Set Protocol) without any KYC. Even as an American, though these services will be more important to South Americans, Africans, and Southeast Asians.
KYC will still be used by old firms in rich countries, but it's not a given for the future of finance and most people will likely opt out as it's more trouble than it's worth and exposes you to identity theft when one of those firms is hacked and your personal data is stolen by criminals. It's just easier, faster, and safer to not use KYC.
Source - work with Asian and American banks on KYC.
These people always have the option of using the services I listed. Anyone can. They are free and unstoppable for anyone who needs them regardless of nationality, race, status, etc.
Turns out that people will get angry if you don't talk to regulators, they will get angry if you talk to regulators...they will get angry.
I think this is a lesson that will hopefully explain why the financial system needs changing (and also why it won't ever happen).