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Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

This should have happened for a long time. Facebook's properties are the places where my friends naturally ask for money from me to help. Even with all the negativity I see here in other comments, this is the natural way for Facebook to grow, not trying to compete with the Federal Reserve.

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In an ideal world I'd love to see social media apps be able to loosely hook in to banking apps. So facebook messenger would handle requests and you would tap "send" in facebook messanger which would open your bank app with something like "Send $10 to facebook user ___ and let facebook confirm transaction success" so facebook never has to hold your money or make transactions, but you can make payment requests in messenger.

Although I do remember that the US doesn't really have a good/fast way to make instant bank to bank transactions so that could be an issue.

PSDR2 (EU) and Open Banking (UK) regulations have this as a possibility.

I'm not up to speed on how fast implementation of the 'L2' has been, but this is a very real use case. And no need to open your banking app since delegation to your 3rd party app (Facebook in this case).

The US is expecting to release this in 2023. https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....

Jack Mallers (CEO of Strike) gave a presentation about the Lightning network as the open protocol for international fiat debit payments, and multiple Facebook managers were on that meeting. Now that Cashapp integrated sending money with it, Strike can be connected with US Chase bank account, the race for embracing the open protocol is on.

The cool thing with USD payments over lightning network is that capital gains tax is not triggered.

> The cool thing with USD payments over lightning network is that capital gains tax is not triggered.

This is a bug, not a feature, to the US government.

Why would capital gains be paid for a transaction?

Facebook had a multimillion dollar business (yes, million, not trillion, but this was solid) in the form of FB marketplace. That was the one part of FB that was super useful and if they hooked it up with a secure payment system that worked with these kinds of transactions it could have been amazing. Instead they squandered it on ads, as they always do. The platform is now unusable.

FB marketplace is pretty much the goto place for most people. For the most parts its valid users.

Users are. Listings aren’t. Most of my feed is ads for online stores masquerading as local listings. Like legit 10 out of 12 are this. You can search but you can’t just see “what has been listed lately” and their AB testing keeps changing the UI slightly so you can’t always find the right filters anyways.

I`m a big fan.

Is there any good alternative to FB MarketPlace these days? Craigslist is just too old fashioned and most people I know don't use it anymore.

I suspect a lot of the alternatives are pretty regional, for example tori.fi in Finland.

There's Gumtree[0], which is owned by eBay. Pretty popular over here in the UK.

[0]: https://www.gumtree.com

Offerup is probably the only other alternative but the network effects of Craigslist and FB are hard to beat.

Freecycle[0]?

[0]: https://freecycle.org

What you described has been available for a long time. The old Facebook Pay (i.e. the ability to send payments to your friends via ACH) has been available in Messenger for at least 5 years (probably even longer). This new Facebook Pay seems to just add an easy way to link payment methods to your account and pay merchants on Facebook/Instagram.

I'm just glad they're doing this properly. They wasted almost a decade on determining what everyone in the world already knew, i.e. ads in messaging products are just. not. gonna. work.

I guess that they were blinded by the margin discrepancy, like many others.

Isn't ACH a US specific thing?

For sending money inside a country is easy generally, international payments are much harder.

Yep, ACH is US specific, which is why Messenger Facebook Pay is only supported in the US [1]

[1] https://pay.facebook.com/availability

> this is the natural way for Facebook to grow, not trying to compete with the Federal Reserve.

Yeah, but only the latter is likely to be able to push them into the too-big-to-fail category.

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