Facebook’s Libra is still dead – Diem to be sold off for spare parts
davidgerard.co.uk
davidgerard.co.uk
He ended up as the PayPal CEO. IMHO as a PP employee at the time, he was clearly out of his depth in that job. It was abundantly clear he did not have the toolkit to run a large complex business. He then left abruptly to join facebook.
At Facebook he started this thing that did nothing but burn money and generate negative headlines.
If there was a metric that was the value created for the companies you work for vs. the money you personally earned I think his would be an outlier.
It doesn’t matter if his last 3 projects failed. They were all ambitious and he got people to work on them. Many businesses run themselves on inertia alone and you just need people to keep working. He will find another job.
Of course, important to understand and try to correctly attribute what factors led to success or failure.
But if a charismatic, visionary leader chooses to pursue projects that don't have a hope of succeeding, I don't see that as a success.
That being said, don't know much about this guy's background. Maybe everything he's worked on were perfectly great ideas and failures were not due to his direction/leadership.
Anyway, I only comment on this because there's something of a bias to put extroverts/outspoken people into management roles, but I've found introverted people often do just as well. Of course always comes down to the individual.
A great example is surgeons deciding not to perform riskier surgeries, because their % success rates would get dinged. This means if you're a patient with a rare / difficult to treat condition, you may not be able to get life saving surgery. And looking at the counterfactual, by being so risk averse, advancement in the field is slower because experimental surgeries aren't attempted.
Another example is finance. It can be a pretty unscrupulous place because money is the only real success metric, and they outsource their conscience to regulatory bodies that are always a few steps behind. This can lead to some serious negative externalities while enriching those participating - pretty much the same criticism leveled at this guy. A sort of horseshoe theory in play here.
I totally agree the extraverts & outspoken have an advantage in (getting into) management roles, and it comes down to the individual. So many factors related to learning from failure, luck, entrepreneur:market match, etc to consider.
> It doesn’t matter if his last 3 projects failed. They were all ambitious and he got people to work on them. Many businesses run themselves on inertia alone and you just need people to keep working.
This reads like a CV for Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh Balwani.
Personally, I thought he had an air of arrogance that was highly off-putting.
Just getting people to work on your projects isn't necessarily that hard as long as you pay them market rates. Or they are young and naive.
If you're looking for evidence of visionary leadership, it kind of matters who, specifically, you're getting to work on your projects (because the folks you want all have their pick of places paying market rates), and it really makes a statement if highly competent folks are being paid below market rates in return for equity.
> For all the effort from journalists trying to work out the precise 12-dimensional chess Facebook must surely have been playing … maybe Libra was just very stupid. Because it was a blockchain project started by bitcoiners. Maybe it was always just dumb as hell.
Agreed.
But when you look at the name of the blog, it ain't exactly a surprise.
Also, he's been at it for quite a while, looks like he's spending inordinate amounts of time "fighting the blockchain".
I'm always puzzled when I see folks like this ... the sheer zealotry is simply amazing, and it always leads me to wonder what can possibly motivate them to be so hell-bent on destroying something that has likely zero impact on their lives.
Because it doesn't have zero impact. The amount of money that is scammed out of people and the amount of sheer environmental destruction is sickening and last I checked we all live on the same planet (if you live on the ISS then sorry for making the assumption you were on earth).
And your post history speaks quite loudly on what "bias" looks like to you.
To re-use another HN poster comment: "now do cloth dryers".
Or to phrase it easier to parse: if this is the battle people have decided matters in the fight against global warming, we're really not out of the woods.
> And your post history speaks quite loudly on what "bias" looks like to you.
Bias, eh?
While I do enjoy discussing cryptocurrencies a great deal because I find the tech. and its implications deeply fascinating, I certainly do no buy most of what folks in the space peddle out, nor am I religious about it, unlike the OP.
What I enjoy most is a well constructed argument against crypto, but unfortunately, those have been few and far between on HN in the past few years.
To give you an example, "just dumb as hell" (from the OP), doesn't fall in the "well constructed argument" bucket.
And unlike the do-gooder out to save the world in the 'attack of the 50 foot blockchain blog', or other kind of jihadists like Diehl, I'm not a crypto bible-thumper out to convert the infidels.
In short, I find crypto interesting and worth looking into, learning about, improving upon (the existing systems being indeed far from perfect).
If you want to label that bias, more power to you, but please don't compare me to the fanatic-on-a- mission-from-god who wrote the OP.
I mean, regulators _very much are_ doing clothes dryers; see the EC's Great War on Inefficient Appliances. Traditional vented dryers are probably not long for this world, at least in Europe (they'll be replaced with heat pump dryers), but I'd expect other developed countries to follow.
Clothes dryers are getting better through government intervention and technology improvements. Our Lord and Saviour the Blockchain is getting dramatically worse. It's not surprising that people see them differently.
There are certainly problems that crypto-currencies solve, but it's not problems most people have. So when a company wish conjure up billions of dollars in value from thin air, it has all the hallmarks of a scam. While some sit back and chuckles: "Who s dumb enough to fall for that", others feel compelled to warn the world and take down the scammer.
The rest if the article is links to buy the author's books, or links to the author's other blog posts. I thought there would be a payoff in the form of a conclusion but calling it "dumb" was all there was. I'll let you guess who submitted it to HN.
Maybe "unbiased" would look more like your crypto-happy post history ?
(Now you added a personal attack about their post history, I don't think that's constructive.)
By this metric, calling the author’s bias “stupefying” is a personal attack. So either this entire thread is not constructive and your participation is exacerbating the problem or you’re merely providing cover fire for janandonly.
Personally, viewing your other comments in this thread, I’m inclined to believe it’s the later.
> viewing your other comments in this thread, I’m inclined to believe it’s the later [sic]
I have one other comment as of now...
Wisdom comes from not only knowing your domain but understanding its critics and their criticism. Ignoring all criticism to the extent that you haven’t a clue who the loudest voices are is closer to zealotry (which is a word already used here in the other direction, strangely).
I find it likely if one feels the article is biased, it is likely that person is biased in the other direction. The project was dumb, it was lambasted almost immediately by what felt like everybody, and it did utterly and completely fail.
The worst part of crypto is that the only thing it truly excels at is speculation, and in order to be successful at that the hype has to remain at 1000%. This creates hordes of crypto cheerleaders who insist that crypto will do everything from free the poor oppressed masses to usher in a techno-libertarian utopia, while the only thing they truly care about is to see green numbers on their coin of choice.
I think crypto is fun, it was super geeky and I got into and enjoyed it, profited from it quite handsomely in the past mainly due to my curiosity and being in the right place at the right time, but I am under no illusion whatsoever that is living up to the hype and promise of its founders.
The author of this post did the same thing then: summarized the actual article in a blog post, then called Libra "dumb" at the end. That doesn't add anything.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/09/12/france-shuns...
I consider myself fairly well informed and I've never heard of this guy. He just looks like a professional pundit. The kind that found the right audience to keep playing the same one chord to. There's absolutely no chance at all I won't ever have crossed paths with this man's writing if it wasn't for HN's peculiar fixation on crypto.
You did not answer the question of what is it good for. What thing is it doing that makes it important/interesting/useful/valuable?
If you're asking what in general the Diem code, used in the 0L project, is useful for : 1. well it's technically a BFT blockchain, like Tendermint. That tech is potentially useful because it can provide a decentralized ledger like a PoW blockchain, but with significantly higher throughput and significantly lower energy use. It's arguably more advanced than Tendermint because it's written in Rust and has a native smart contract VM (move language). and perhaps 2. it's a collaborative project -- there's no sponsoring company or foundation or fund raising with a token and what not. This is attractive to some for various reasons. Bitcoin had that property and some people are interested in blockchains with new tech that share that organizational aspect.
Let me know if that doesn't adequately answer the question.
Real tps has to be tx written to the ledger per second. Anything else is dishonest.
How does this affect the rest of Crypto, because I suspect that governments around the world can shutdown Bitcoin and others any time they want. Given that fact, I'm wondering why other crypto currencies are being tolerated.
Part one would be a note of the laws establishing the Treasury Department's mandate to regulate financial instruments.
Part two would be a finding that cryptocurrencies are harmful to the interests of the USA.
Part three would be an order to the Secretary of the Treasury to determine what businesses are involved in cryptocurrencies, and to take the following sanctions: ...
prohibit any transfers of credit or payments between financial institutions, or by, through, or to any financial institution, to the extent that such transfers or payments are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and involve any interest of the sanctioned business;
prohibit any United States financial institution from making loans or providing credit to the sanctioned business;
(iv) prohibit any transactions in foreign exchange that are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and in which the sanctioned business has any interest;
(v) prohibit any United States person from investing in or purchasing significant amounts of equity or debt instruments of the sanctioned business;
Form and specific sanctions taken from EO 2021-27505, from December 17 2021.
"Untestedly" being the important part. There is no practical limit on the orders that can be issued but actually enforcing those rules on anyone outside the executive branch is a different matter. Also, you skipped over the parts of EO 2021-27505 where (a) it required declaring a (rather dubious IMHO) state of emergency, (b) the sanctions were previously authorized by Congress in the Fentanyl Sanctions Act, and (c) all the sanctions applied to "foreign persons", not citizens. There is no state of emergency, sanctions were not authorized by Congress, and you want to sanctions citizens of the United States and locally-owned businesses.
Also Japanese American internment camps.
You think shutting down Coinbase is bigger than that?
The minute the fed considers Bitcoin and crypto to be a risk, they'll axe it. Coinbase or not.
I think the CIA likes having Bitcoin as a means for foreign nationals to exfiltrate money. That's harder to do now in certain countries, but still possible.
And the FBI likes being able to watch where the money flows.
Alcohol you can drink
Yes, but I thought the whole point of prohibition (unless you're living in that weird period between 18th amendment and 21st amendment) is that it was a terrible idea, never to be repeated again.
> The minute the fed considers Bitcoin and crypto to be a risk, they'll axe it. Coinbase or not.
This doesn't make sense, you presume that Fed has zero understanding of consequences of their actions.
Fed may consider something to be a risk and yet not act on it. Just because they haven't acted on it, doesn't mean they don't consider it to be a risk.
Not to mention that it would be extremely easy for the FBI to just, like, find miners and tell them to shut stuff down (at least US miners). A coordinated worldwide effort and bitcoin dissapears overnight.
I think the only way to stop bitcoin is economically, like say Satoshi appears destabilizing the market.
That said, there is an early wallet that is attributed to Satoshi with a giant amount of early mined BTC in it. If it ever moves, people will flip out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto
"Nakamoto owns between 750,000 and 1,100,000 bitcoin. As of November 2021, that puts his net worth at up to 73 billion US dollars, which would make him the 15th richest person in the world.[21]"
There's also the issue that, if governments are seizing the mining hardware, if they gather enough of it they could perform 51% attacks against the chain to effectively prevent it from working.
Similarly, I've watched several retro-game preservation communities[1] I've been a part of disappear mysteriously overnight. Certain sets are still very difficult to find on public trackers and the private ones are difficult to get into.
In other words, they may not be able to eliminate it but they can make it very inconvenient.
[0] Yes, I know this isn't backed by bittorrent.
[1] Backed by bittorrent but having little to do with Hollywood.
[2] Actually I guess Exodus was first. I always forget which one was the fork.
In the end, it _is_ still illegal activity, where being "inconvenient" is typically par for the course.
BTC does a perfectly good job of this on its own, no state intervention needed.
But one thing the US is regulating is money laundering - the US sanctions regime is super-important. So FinCEN in the US and FATF internationally are tightening traceability on the crypto system, wherever it interfaces to actual money. 'Cos they might not be able to stop bitcoin trades, but the interface to actual money is entirely in their purview.
The one thing the US couldn't tolerate about Libra was that Facebook was trying to mess with the money, at systemic scale - and doing so incompetently, which was probably a worse failing.
Regulators and legislators had Libra's number immediately - they knew this species of dumbassery, and they knew that these bitcoin-VC bros were absolutely stupid and arrogant enough to do another 2008 financial crisis all by themselves.
I understand that the whole concept of committing crime was a bit clearer in LR than it is in Tether, but Tether sounds like what LR would have been, after they learned from their mistakes?
None of this will happen, as governments aren't this united. Even within the US there's crypto-friendly and crypto-hostile states. Right now, Bitcoin is explicitly recognized as an asset/commodity, not as a currency. Property, not a security.
There's definitely regulation pending regarding crypto. In particular, many non-Bitcoin cryptos are likely securities. Stablecoins backings are to be regulated. And there may be mining regulation where it's not outright banned, but (CO2) taxed.
Could the government legally restrict me from solving a math problem?
If mitigating the CO2 produced by using some energy isn't priced into that energy, that's the fix. We absolutely need to incorporate externalities into prices.
No, in the same way there isn’t for money laundering or wire fraud.
Calculating a hash for Bitcoin and then broadcasting it assumedly has the same level of First Amendment protection as calculating a hash for someone else's password and then broadcasting it.
They can 'regulate' it by banning Proof-of-Work mining for 'climate change' reasons and then it will be outlawed or heavily taxed, just like in China, Kosovo, Kazakhstan and possibly Russia.
Sure, Bitcoin (and any other cryptocurrencies) can't be totally 'banned', but enough to discourage mining and using PoW cryptocurrencies via legislation or taxes.
Yes, just as they can shut down movie downloads on BitTorrent.
As another example: just because Google Glasses flopped because of privacy issues it doesn't mean that future Apple/... Glasses which will have exactly the same privacy issues will not be a thing.
I don't have a FB account and will never get one, but I'm casually interested in the quest2.
Facebook said something to the effect of not requiring a Facebook login at some future date, and said future date has yet to materialize. Neither did they specify what the alternative login would be, but it wouldn't be surprising if it was just a "Meta" account instead.
That has nothing to do with Facebook's half-baked hype around the "metaverse".
For me it's just another "Libra".
Minecraft, Fortnite, hell FFXIV and WoW are all digital spaces where people go to hang out with friends. You don't just log in to play the game but to hang out -- the digital version of "being in the room" that feels really different than something like a group chat.
I'm not at all surprised that the owners of a bunch of successful "classic" social media properties is rightfully scared of a completely different kind of social network that crept up on them and that they have zero foothold in.
Because money is a system of control. Even Bitcoin and other "decentralized" currencies are still systems of control, and the large Internet companies extract revenue from control, so of course they would want "in" on something they see potentially bypassing their controls over time.
Why would they sit and watch this grow around them, or be beholden to existing legacy systems like SWIFT or credit cards, when they can potentially build something they are in complete control of instead.
Ask yourself why governments reacted so harshly and swiftly against Diem, and you'll see how important a system of control money is.
It's all excessive and can't be justified, given the doom ahead.
You think a 75" inch TV is useful and its massive energy use is fine, just because you said it is. Personally, I think 55" should be the maximum. After that, you can't in any way justify utility and clearly don't give a damn about the planet.
People have a house full of electronics and fluff. The footprint of an American household would require 8 planets if everybody lived this way and yet people are so eager to preach about their "care" for the planet.
Clearly this 700% overshoot in footprint is not to be messed with, these are your "basics", because they are "useful". Let's just ensure that the rest of the world doesn't embrace these "useful" things, right?
You don't care. At all. You only care when it's easy. When you see a monster truck, you want it banned. Because you don't have a giant car and they are ridiculous. But there's hardly any cars like that so it does nothing. If you'd truly care about outcomes, you'd be in favor of banning things that move the needle. Which means all the things I mentioned.
And suddenly nobody cares for the planet anymore. It's all performative.
I live in a cold climate. My neighbor recently installed an outdoor hot tub, as well as outdoor heat lamps. In the midst of winter, clearly this guy is having the time of his life. It has value to him.
I would hope that you agree that this is an excessive consumption of resources and that the personal notion of value means nothing. Because it means that everybody just cherry picks "value" and conveniently calls for the banning of everything that they did not pick.
That's why perhaps an emission based tax is the way to go. Everybody can continue to self-optimize "value", but you're going to pay for energy suckers, regardless of what it is, a 75" TV or Bitcoin. This creates the proper incentive in both consumption and production.
but imo shutting down cryptocurrencies will do absolutely nothing to change our course.
maybe global, borderless, coordination and communication tools could be very useful though...
Let's enjoy the 10% inflation!
(Of course, most currencies debased in lockstep this pandemic, so a basket of currencies would have been equally bad. But it would have been a good indicator!)
I’m also in disbelief whenever pundits try to reassure me inflation isn’t that bad because it is either “transitory” or due to pandemic supply issues.
Here’s a non-anecdotal source: https://theovershoot.co/p/understanding-covid-flation
The article is paid. But I see it excludes energy which is pretty relevant, especially during winter.
No, inflation can have more than one causes. That's why care is needed to identify which factors contributed to a particular incident, just as you might have a different solution to a headache based on whether, say, you also have symptoms of a cold or were drinking heavily the night before.
Housing is, but again, there are multiple factors driving those prices up. This is coming up in the context of a cryptocurrency so there's clearly a financial conflict of interest causing people who hold cryptocurrencies to attribute the problem to monetary policy with the solution being to buy their tokens but that ignores the other factors like changes in demand due to the pandemic, well-known problems related to supply issues & zoning running back decades, increased competition from investment funds buying properties, changes in consumer buying habits, etc.
When the fed keeps a near zero interest rate, people have lower monthly mortgage payments, and can thus take on more debt. When they have the ability to take on more debt, they can bid higher on housing prices.
When the fed injects trillions of dollars into the economy in the form of stimulus and quantitative easing, there is a surplus of money that makes it way throughout the economy, and this attributes to inflation.
It's called a debt crisis leading to hyperinflation and economic collapse. It may not be happening now, and maybe not even in our lifetime, but it is inevitable based on the current model of monetary policy. And when the USD/US economy collapses, it will be the biggest one in history.
We’re nowhere near what economists consider hyperinflation and the 7% we’re seeing is more convincingly explained by the well-known issues caused by a global pandemic which will not run forever.
The inflation you're seeing is largely and principally caused by the reactionary measures of central banking.
https://fedguy.com/2-trillion-pandemic-savings/
"During the pandemic many special programs were rolled out to support household incomes: $1.1t in forgivable business loans to maintain payroll, $800b in direct stimulus checks, and $700b in extra unemployment benefits. While the pandemic programs of other countries prevented incomes from falling too much, the U.S. programs actually significantly boosted incomes. Overall wages did not fall, and total income rose above trend due to transfer payments (stimulus checks and unemployment benefits)."
But you say, "These measures were necessary. We were in a pandemic unlike any other. People needed to survive during lockdowns." Fair enough, but all actions have equal and opposite reactions.
The creation of new money is the devaluation of old money. The government does not have trillions of dollars in a savings account, ready and available to be spent.
Stepping back, we look at the federal debt and see that it is $29 trillion USD presently. How did it get that high, and will it ever be paid off? Which political party will be popular enough to tax enough wealth, long enough, that this debt gets paid down? Some theorists believe US debt doesn't matter; it can always be paid off, because the US controls the reserve currency and the magic money printer.
To me, it is clear what the next 100 years of this thinking will result in.