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Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency Gets Big Backers
- WheelsAtLarge 7y agoI vote for the coin to be called, "The Zuck."
- gist 7y agoThis really says it all: >It is still not entirely clear, even to some members of the consortium, how the coin will work or what their roles will be, people familiar with the project said. Regulatory hurdles in the U.S. and elsewhere are high. You have to love when corporations and people are so FOMO they will put money into something when they don't even know how it will work.
- elorant 7y agoSame happened with Theranos. Big backers for a product that no one ever got their hands on.
- ethbro 7y agoI mean, Thenaros showed something to their investors and regulators (lab test results) but straight up lied about how they were generating them. So this would be more like... the Palm Foleo?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Mc_Big_G 7y agoI sincerely hope this fails in the worst way possible, but it will be wildly successful of course.
- WheelsAtLarge 7y agoFacebook will make this work simply because of the number of users and its world reach. It will be successful even if it only becomes a medium of sending money between countries but there are so many ways to expand it and earn a small commission for Facebook so it won't stop at just money transfers. I predict that Amazon will have to release its own currency to guard against Facebook becoming a middle man for e-commerce and becoming a threat to its business. It's only a matter of time.
- skinnymuch 7y agoHN and other online places are guilty for calling all sorts of investments ludicrous. But Instagram along with Priceline buying Booking.com, Naspers buyjg 1/3 of Tencent, and to a smaller degree Yahoo (though they stupidly sold a lot of the stake far too early) and SoftBank investments into Alibaba are the best tech investments possibly of all time. And some of the best investments overall too.
- ErikAugust 7y agoWhat is “crypto” about it? Anything? Seems like a digital currency minted by Facebook pegged to USD.
- dmihal 7y agoProbably crypto as in you sign transactions with a private key, and submit them to Facebook's semi-centralized blockchain
- zamadatix 7y ago> What is “crypto” about it? Anything? What in the article seems non crypto? That you can't make more out of thin air? It seems like your run of the mill stablecoin, the advantage being transactions would have the ability to be decentralized. How much will need to be seen at official announcement. > pegged to USD "which will be pegged to a basket of government-issued currencies"
- jryan49 7y agoTime to privatize our currency! Owned by Facebook! What could be better?
- silversconfused 7y agoSo this is like the IBM PC then? Horrible, obsolete, flawed, but adopted by everyone because it was released by a reliable business partner... I hope they call it FaceBuck.
- Urgo 7y agoTheir internal name was "GlobalCoin" but looks like it will be called "Libra". That said I like "FaceBuck" or "ZuckBuck" way better!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- RandomBacon 7y agoI hope we call it ZuckBucks. It also is good for shorthand: 10 ZB.
- cbisnett 7y agoGiven the privacy issues and general data hoarding by Facebook, giving them additional access to purchase history and account balances seems like it’s going to make the problem worse without much upside.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 7y agoWeChat v2.0
- stcredzero 7y agoWeChat reduces the iPhone to "The thing we run WeChat on." It acts to commodify the iPhone. If Facebook is going to become another WeChat, this is just about the last thing that Apple wants!
- delfinom 7y agoHilariously, Apple is the most likely candidate to ban it and release their own.
- tjpnz 7y agoPrecisely why they're doing this.
- kwiptoKoowensee 7y agoPretty sure there's a shadowy government hand puppeting this entire dog and pony show. Be surprised at how unsurprising the whole thing is, because if Facebook rolls this out smoothly and it's low-key successful, it's alphabet agencies all the way down.
- awrence 7y agoAll stablecoins are Venmo calling themselves decentralized cryptocurrencies. Venmo is honest and tells you it's managing a USD deposit balance for you and amending its private centralized ledger accordingly (and sometimes providing a short term credit service on top). FB et al are lying to you and putting a disingenuous patina of techno hype and grossly misleading decentralized implication on their project by calling them cryptocurrencies. Not surprising but completely uninteresting.
- rahimnathwani 7y agoYour first sentence doesn't have to be true. It's possible to create a stablecoin that's decentralized. And such a stablecoin exists: https://makerdao.com/en/dai/ https://makerdao.com/en/dai/ It uses collateral, lending and a careful incentive setup to maintain close to 1:1 parity with USD. I haven't looked into the detail, but it seems to have a decent record (of stability).
- awrence 7y agoI contend it's not. There are two main features which proper (decentralized) cryptocurrencies are supposed to offer. The first is censorship resistance. And I can assure you that however in the world you set up something backed by a fiat, its controlling government can step in and seize your collateral if and when it pleases and then you're screwed. But you can certainly come up with all sorts of fancy legal speak and marketing pitches to argue otherwise which makerdao is basically doing. The second is protection from currency manipulation and stable coins solve nothing on that front, but let's assume for the sake of argumentation that people interested in stable coins are aware of that.
- pushtheenvelope 7y ago> And I can assure you that however in the world you set up something backed by a fiat, its controlling government can step in and seize your collateral if and when it pleases and then you're screwed. hmm -- the collateral in this case is ether. So, unless you feel the US govt can step in and seize all ether in the world, this statement seems unlikely to be true.
- ihm 7y agoThey plan to “market it aggressively in developing nations”. Western companies extracting rent from the global south: this is colonialism by another name.
- ekianjo 7y agoMany small countries have issues having stable currencies, in case you have not noticed.
- bduerst 7y agoTrue, but that's a symptom of other problems that cryptocurrencies can't solve.
- ekianjo 7y agoIt is not about solving country wide problems, rather helping individuals have a currency they can trust to store value. If your life savings go to the drain because of inflation or other factors that is a highly desirable option to have. Also, most countries with currency issues usually accept the dollar for commerce whenever they can, if not forbidden, since it is a lot more reliable than their local option.
- bduerst 7y agoSure, but again, no cryptocurrency can do that. The last thing people in Venezuela need is a payment method that takes 20 minutes to process, caps at 7 tx/s, and can't handle a refund or chargeback. What they really need is a basic monetary policy. If the actual, genuine goal is to solve the problem of lack of viable currency in these nations, then the best solution is to solve the cause, not the symptom. Right now your goal is trying to find a nail for a hammer that doesn't have any, and you're trying to shoehorn vaporware onto a symptom when that's not what the people really need.
- ihm 7y agoDid the people who live in those countries ask Mark Zuckerberg et al to come replace their national currencies with one which allows Mark et al to control how they’re allowed to use their money? If so then maybe this would be an ok argument, but this is a massive change to people’s lives that’s being forced upon them without the slightest consultation, and which will almost certainly be used to control and surveil them for Facebook’s benefit.
- chubbyrabbit 7y agoNot related to the article but recently it's hard to get an objective view on any Facebook's news in HN comments due to the overall attitude towards the company.
- CondensedBrain 7y agoWhat would an objective view look like?
- gervase 7y agoI think people are missing the big picture here. This isn't a replacement for Apple Pay, Alipay, or PayPal - it's something new, driven by the sheer scale of Facebook's userbase. The cryptocurrency aspect is a smokescreen for the actual impact. In fact, I predict that national governments are going to have to get on board with electronic currencies if they don't want to unwittingly transfer control over their own economies from their national treasuries to a private company. Indications are that this won't be pegged to USD, but rather to a basket of international currencies. Since there are so many ways to combine a basket of currencies into a single value, this gives Facebook plenty of leeway as to how to price this currency. Essentially, this is the equivalent of the virtual Facebook nation-state establishing their own federal reserve. More importantly, they've already got buy-in from the major non-governmental players. This will essentially create, all at once, a settlement layer that not only bypasses any individual national government, but also the established banking channels like SWIFT. The US dollar is the predominant international reserve currency at the moment, and the US government leverages that as a pretty big club via SWIFT injunctions. If there is an alternative that is ostensibly neutral from a governance perspective, and publicly auditable to prevent arbitrary adjustments/freezes, I could see that being very attractive to countries with a less-than-friendly relationship with the US. We already see rumblings to this effect in US-unfriendly countries: http://fortune.com/2018/07/26/iran-sanctions-cryptocurrency/ http://fortune.com/2018/07/26/iran-sanctions-cryptocurrency/ Of course, since Facebook is based in the US, it also provides the US government with a nice, local target for legal leverage. But it would also be very easy for Facebook to spin off this as a subsidiary and place it somewhere out of reach, like Switzerland. Perhaps they could call it something like Libra Networks? Wait, that sounds familiar... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-switzerland-payments/facebook-forms-swiss-fintech-firm-with-payments-focus-idUSKCN1SN1ZT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-switzerland-paym... It would be very difficult to outlaw transactions in a currency when those transactions can be initiated and validated on a blockchain directly by the participants. You'd have to play the whack-a-mole game with access to the chain itself, because with direct validation, you're essentially trying to outlaw barter. Look at the efficacy of the cryptocurrency ban in Venezuela as an example. Facebook is currently doing an end-run to create the first supranational currency, and it's billion+ users combined with the technological agility (specifically, the lack thereof) of national governments means that they actually have some chance to succeed.
- jamesviggy 7y agoReminder: A fiat-pegged "stable-coin" is only as stable as the fiat underlying it. The underlying fiat of Facebook's "cryptocurrency" has many disadvantages compared to Bitcoin.
- momentmaker 7y agoThey might be using ChainLink as the oracle for sourcing price data feed.
- CryptoPunk 7y agoWhat's the basis for that speculation?
- Fjolsvith 7y agoComing soon, mining in Messenger.
- lowdose 7y agoZuckerberg et al Snapchat a WeChat?
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.is/roYY9 http://archive.is/roYY9
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]