16 ms·

Libra White Paper

198 points by hulahoof 7y ago

kall1sto 7y ago
I just watched the official launch video for Libra and it's just disgusting how silicon valley is abusing the image of "poor" people or people from developing countries to sell a philanthropist idea while their true intentions are just more money and more power.
- throwmex 7y ago
  I do hope all those developing countries with a democratic government will ban this one.
rahulkapil 7y ago
A fair financial system is one which I am comfortable giving to my worst enemy to run. This is not it.
- CodiePetersen 7y ago
  Very well put.
- josh2600 7y ago
  If you don’t feel comfortable letting the nsa run a node and not care, is it really secure? I’m not sure we can push the envelope that far, but it’s worth trying to get there.
zxcb1 7y ago
We believe that a global currency and financial infrastructure should be designed and governed as a public good And social infrastructure?
2T1Qka0rEiPr 7y ago
As someone somewhat out of the crypto-loop, would someone be able to explain/posit/cite why Facebook are entering this market, and why traditional payment providers are also getting involved? On the face of it, this suggests it aims to essentially reduce transaction costs (which would be to the detriment of the status-quo)?
- thefounder 7y ago
  It looks like for the end customer this is no better than a closed payment platform(think of visa network or ACH) unless they provide at least read access to the blockchain ledger/database. If that's the case it's not worth the name of crypto currency. They also say in 5 years will provide full(r/w) access to the public clients/nodes...I wouldn't hold my breath. It has "fraud" prevention built in, charge backs, compliance etc...how would that work on a public blockchain? I believe they lie and they know it will never be released as a public/permisionless blockchain.
- m1el 7y ago
  As far as I can tell, FB wants to be a bank to print money. Their own money. For every country. All full nodes on that blockchain are going to be owned by FaceBook. FB will be able to see all transactions and take money from people they don't like.
  - thefounder 7y ago
    It's no different than paypal. I was hoping the public will at least have read access to the database/blockchain and API to create wallets. The fact that they print the money can only be good because that's how a stable coin is supposed to work, right?
  - 2T1Qka0rEiPr 7y ago
    Yes - I was just reading the other article on the front page of HN which gives a summary. Pegged to fiats and traded in for fiats, so... Facebook is creating its own fiat which it wants to profit off, use its existing user network as a leap pad to do so, and to be considered the global fiat? Is that fair?
- bitxbit 7y ago
  Put it differently, banks have failed to implement something more efficient and the “bitcoin” innovators have also failed on practical aspects. As a result we have a void and it’s anyone’s game right now. Facebook is throwing money at it. A small chance it works but public trust is a big factor in currency isn’t it? Here’s what I think: any alternative currency tied to the USD (meaning a currency without intrinsic value) is DOA. The next generation currency cannot be tied to resource constraints.
bitxbit 7y ago
It is sad that Zuckerberg chose to squander all that capital on frivolous endeavors at Facebook. He could have done so much. This is what gets me the most: "We believe that a global currency and financial infrastructure should be designed and governed as a public good." It's very rich coming from Facebook who could have made itself a public good a decade ago.
- fiala__ 7y ago
  Yeah, that bit is bonkers. A huge privately-owned tech corporation talking about 'public good'. We truly are entering the era of global corporate despotism.
wslh 7y ago
I just skimmed through their documents and I saw they use BFT. BFT algorithms are slow (and slower when more nodes are added) so are they using another layer for gaining performance? Currently the fastest BFT implementation is BFT-SMaRt: https://github.com/bft-smart/library https://github.com/bft-smart/library
- 1in21m 7y ago
  Moreover, BFT algorithms do not solve BGP in a decentralized, trustless network, consensus remains subjective. Bitcoin relies on proof-of-work to provide objective consensus. Whitepaper: "We did not consider proof-of-work based protocols due to their poor performance and high energy (and environmental) costs" Right...
- bellajbadr 7y ago
  BTF is slow depending on how many nodes you're running. generally it can't support more than 100 validators
ArmandGrillet 7y ago
Interesting bits: "target launch in the first half of 2020." "“Founding Members” upon its completion are, by industry: Payments: Mastercard, PayPal, PayU (Naspers’ fintech arm), Stripe, Visa Technology and marketplaces: Booking Holdings, eBay, Facebook/Calibra, Farfetch, Lyft, MercadoPago, Spotify AB, Uber Technologies, Inc. Telecommunications: Iliad, Vodafone Group Blockchain: Anchorage, Bison Trails, Coinbase, Inc., Xapo Holdings Limited Venture Capital: Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Initiatives, Ribbit Capital, Thrive Capital, Union Square Ventures Nonprofit and multilateral organizations, and academic institutions: Creative Destruction Lab, Kiva, Mercy Corps, Women’s World Banking"
- zxcb1 7y ago
  Is this the face of technological liberation or domination?
  - alfiedotwtf 7y ago
    Thanks. Your comment made me laugh, but now upset. You raise a good point.
  - golergka 7y ago
    Yes.
  - FridgeSeal 7y ago
    Facebook is involved, so I don’t think anything positive (for users) is being liberated here.
NotPaidToPost 7y ago
I fully expect China to take over the Congo now.
- aurea 7y ago
  Hello friend
- holler 7y ago
  If you see White Rose, tell her goodbye.
- sctb 7y ago
  We've asked you countless times to please stop posting unsubstantive or flamebait comments, so we've banned the account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
throwawaylolx 7y ago
More tech-y resources: - https://developers.libra.org/docs/assets/papers/the-libra-blockchain.pdf https://developers.libra.org/docs/assets/papers/the-libra-bl... - https://github.com/libra/libra https://github.com/libra/libra - https://developers.libra.org https://developers.libra.org - https://developers.libra.org/docs/move-paper https://developers.libra.org/docs/move-paper
- xorand 7y ago
  From the Move programming language paper: "semantics inspired by linear logic". Any even more technical references? Anybody knows anybody who really work(ed) on Move? Academic? Otherwise? I'm interested because of my "poured only once" current project http://imar.ro/~mbuliga/hapax.html http://imar.ro/~mbuliga/hapax.html
  - throwawaylolx 7y ago
    > Anybody knows anybody who really work(ed) on Move? The authors are listed in the PDF
    - xorand 7y ago
      Thank you. I meant to ask for others than the authors. Probably the repository is the best resource... ... I notice now that it uses the gas mechanism from Ethereum. Less interesting than I thought.
CodiePetersen 7y ago
I think this coin is a really bad idea. Its just centralizing a crypto coin and then removing the laws around money because now a dollar has a libra coin wrapper on it so it's obviously totally different than a dollar. It feels like a federal reserve moment where a bunch of rich folk get together and again dictate the future of currency. Crypto was supposed to change that trend. Unfortunately the want of convenience will probably win out over any sort moralistic/idealistic standing and unless government steps in, it will probably be widely adopted.
- bufferoverflow 7y ago
  It's not pegged to a dollar. It's pegged to a blend of currencies and assets. So it's not a dollar wrapped like Tether or USDC. I don't understand how they plan to make it work across jurisdictions. There are so many laws and rules when it comes to transmitting and storing money or derivatives. Like I can transfer a billion dollars worth of BTC, no problem. But if I try to wire even $100K between two of my accounts in US and EU, all kinds of red flags go off and phone calls need to happen.
  - grey-area 7y ago
    They plan to ignore regulations and grow quick enough so that they are too big to fail and thus too big to regulate.
    - ninjin 7y ago
      If you made this proposition to me a year ago, I would probably shrug it off. But after having read about several successful companies from the late 90s and early 00s doing exactly this – PayPal being a prime example – I think you may very well be right. Heck, one could even say that the current legal/lobbying fights between the internet giants and major states is exactly this.
  - leppr 7y ago
    I think the point is to call their little consortium "decentralized" and let the various on-ramps (be it wallets, exchanges, merchants) deal with AML, just as if it were cash or Bitcoin. This is apparent in how their wallet Calibra is what requires KYC, not the crypto token itself.
jasode 7y ago
>Libra’s mission is to enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure [...] This document outlines our plans for a new decentralized blockchain, The "decentralized" can be parsed different ways. Facebook Libra is decentralizing the transactions but it does not decentralize the currency creation. (This partial decentralization happens because Facebook wants to peg Libra to stable asset reserves.) This is different from Bitcoin's idea of decentralizing both the currency creation _and_ the financial transactions. We can see this distinction in its list of partners... > Members of the Libra Association will consist of [...] The bulleted list includes: - transaction processors such as Mastercard/Visa, PayPal, Stripe, etc - ecommerce marketplaces such as ebay, Uber, etc - telecomm such as Vodafone We see the industry that's noticeably missing: no banks mentioned such as JP Morgan Chase, Citi, HSBC, etc That's because Facebook wants to be the "bank" in this new Libra economy. It wants to be the "Federal Reserve" that creates bank notes. If I misunderstand Facebook's intentions and how it wants to position Libra in the financial world, please correct me.
- m1el 7y ago
  I would also like to add that FB is going to tie wallets to accounts so FB will know information about every transation. "Pseudonymous" wallets aren't going to be anonymous to Facebook.
  - dchest 7y ago
    Their "customer commitment" document claims otherwise https://scontent-frt3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.2365-6/65083631_355528488499253_8415273665234468864_n.pdf?_nc_cat=106&_nc_ht=scontent-frt3-2.xx&oh=6a0b1e2dcf71404fd66d5c0a733de73f&oe=5D982AC3 https://scontent-frt3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.2365-6/65083631_3...
    - Phemist 7y ago
      I think the devil is in the details. The claim `Calibra will not share account information or financial data with Facebook, Inc. or any third party` is followed by `without customer consent.`. From reading through the document you linked, the infrastructure will definitely be there to support the sharing of any and all data. Considering Facebook's history with getting "consent", I am willing to bet that they will take every chance they can get to manipulate users into giving such "consent".
muratgozel 7y ago
"it will be backed by a collection of low-volatility assets, such as bank deposits and short-term government securities in currencies from stable and reputable central banks." from the whitepaper: https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/#the-libra-currency-and-reserve https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/#the-libra-currency-and-... It's like one to one copy of the traditional monetary system with speed of transactions improved. Low volatile assets they rely on are not real and therefore not guaranteed to stay low volatile. It may be decentralized technically but not socially or ethically.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
orbifold 7y ago
> simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people. This is the material anti-trust lawsuits are made of, there is no way that nation states will allow private enterprises to gain that much power.
- thefounder 7y ago
  Tell that to visa and mastercard or SWIFT
  - Angostura 7y ago
    I don't believe either of those have introduced their own currency.
    - thefounder 7y ago
      How is their platform different in practical terms than libra? Libra itself is not a new currency. I believe it's pegged to the US dollar. In the real world you really pay with visa/mastercard, paypal or swift, not with "real" money.
      - bertil 7y ago
        Libra is pegged to a basket of values. I suspect that this could lead companies to prefer to store liquidity and report on Libra as it could be more stable than any individual currency, including USD.
  - bertil 7y ago
    Visa, Mastercard and Swift have spent a lot of time and effort lobbying their _de facto_ monopoly, carefully advocating that… for lack of a better phrasing: they are essential and facilities but not “essential facilities”. The best example of something impressive in that area is the concept of Two-sided markets, that comes with natural, customer-benefiting monopoly and even a justification for aggressive dumping baked-in in the model. I’m personally familiar with several of the contributors to that area and I can’t suspect that was ‘sponsored’ research but, Lord, you have to be lucky to get a Nobel prize to defend you.
Bombthecat 7y ago
I still think,that this coin could replace a lot of African ( unstable ) currencies ...
- masternda 7y ago
  Definitely, I agree with you about this, given their high volatility.
micksabox 7y ago
Can anyone TLDR; the smart contract capabilities outlined in the first paragraph?
- skilesare 7y ago
  It is kind of confusing. They have their own language that will let you create various kinds of structured modules. Initially, they are going to limit it to their native modules. The modules have some properties that make the contracts safer and less prone to duplication bugs. They haven't finalized the syntactic sugar version of the language yet.
DanFau 7y ago
Initial performance in the technical part: - Throughput: 1000 transactions payment per second - Latency: 10-second for validating a payment
- dx034 7y ago
  10 seconds sounds longer than current credit card payments? I could imagine that to be a barrier in some situations.
  - dr_win 7y ago
    This will be the base layer. They expect custodial wallets and payment channels on top (in Bitcoin terms exchange wallets and lightning network). See the Libra blockchain paper, section 8: > We anticipate that many payment transactions will occur off-chain, for example, within a custodial wallet or by using payment channels [45]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
daanavitch 7y ago
>The reserve allows users of the system to enjoy a relatively stable medium of exchange from the start. At the same time, it also represents a centralized function. For the network to be fully permissionless, the association will have to explore ways to further distribute and decentralize the reserve, including automating the verification of the assets in the basket and the process of minting and burning of coins. Increasing market competition in the custody and management of the reserve will also be explored to improve the efficiency of this service, and the costs it imposes on users and custodians over time. So this coin will be backed by a centralized reserve, and you would have to trust Facebook that the coins you own are backed by real money, with no way of verifying this. Tether works the same way, and they are just creating money out of thin air without actual dollars backing them up. I'm curious how Facebook will decentralize this reserve, or if they will even do this in the first place.
IlegCowcat 7y ago
I remember someone saying something along the lines of “Facebook will try and copy and crush us, but not this time- by the time they work out what’s happening, it’ll be too late”. Facebook seem to have noticed what’s happening and are moving like the wind to try and crush us. Are they too late or are we too late? Or neither?
- glitchc 7y ago
  Depends on who that someone was, doesn’t it?
_eLRIC 7y ago
Sounds to me like Facebook is trying to become the Wechat of the West ... (as per an article 2 days ago explaining how Wechat could be central to every payment in a daily life )
- kobayashy 7y ago
  Exactly. I'm gonna get my hair done so once they start with social points I can look nice on camera.
- bertil 7y ago
  Mark Zuckerberg is very impressed by WeChat as a platform. That’s probably the best way to understand that effort. “Crypto” is less a technology and more a loose governance method because no Western company can have the authority that WeChat has in China.
dreit1 7y ago
So we’ve from government issued inflationary currencies to multinational scrip backed by government currencies. Sounds like bitcoin is a better hedge than ever against today’s economic environment.
shrikant 7y ago
I find it interesting that Facebook banned cryptocurrency ads last year, citing safety from “financial products and services frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.” https://www.vox.com/2018/1/30/16950926/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-bans-crypto-advertising-bitcoin-james-altucher https://www.vox.com/2018/1/30/16950926/facebook-mark-zuckerb...
- thefounder 7y ago
  The ban was a good thing because the currencies were promoted as investments which is not the case with stable coins/fb coin. Let's separate payment platforms from gambling-like investments, shall we?
- xtracto 7y ago
  Facebook banned my previous company from asking users for their FB data to perform ML credit risk evaluation. Some weeks later they registered a patent for credit risk analysis using historical FB data. They know very well what they do.
fiala__ 7y ago
Anyone who still has doubts about the extent of Facebook's undemocratic power is clearly about to be fully convinced.
Dwolb 7y ago
I’m super curious how the initial governance framework evolves over time. From the looks of it, it’s not anything completely new and relies on standard human voting and management structures. >A Founding Member that does not comply with the Founding Member eligibility criteria can be removed by a supermajority vote of the council. The recording of this vote on the Libra Blockchain will remove the member's node from the consensus algorithm. So given this, the things working in Libra’s favor are an immediate, global social network for distribution. Against it would be lack of innovation on the governing front (i.e. prone to internal politics) but this is probably more of a long term problem. [1] https://libra.org/en-US/association-council-principles/#association_executive_team https://libra.org/en-US/association-council-principles/#asso...
mulmen 7y ago
The problem with the financial industry is not currency. Hyping cryptocurrency's benefits to actual humans is like criticizing Facebook for releasing personal data to Cambridge Analytica using tab delimited files instead of JSON. It's completely missing the point.
berbec 7y ago
Facebook can't keep people's phone numbers, pictures and sex life private and we trust them to invent a currency? I'm not a crypto backer - in fact I'm skeptical of the long term usefulness, but this isn't crypto, it's shitty PayPal. It's not decentralized, not removed from fiat, not anonymous and not trustworthy.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > it's shitty PayPal Its introduction reads like a goading of antitrust activists. (Facebook’s advantage as a cryptocurrency purveyor being its acumen with getting away with lawlessness.)
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Could have been worse. Could have been Uber. EDIT: Oh crap. It is Uber. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20211358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20211358
    - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
      > Could have been Uber Uber is a Libra Association voting member.
samdung 7y ago
A basket of bank deposits and short-term government securities will be held in the Libra Reserve for every Libra that is created, building trust in its intrinsic value. A global federal reserve in the making
samdung 7y ago
A basket of bank deposits and short-term government securities will be held in the Libra Reserve for every Libra that is created, building trust in its intrinsic value. Soon 'The Libra Reserve' will hold only a 10th of the total Libra Coins in circulation (fractional reserve). A global federal reserve in the making.
alangibson 7y ago
I propose that a blockchain with mutually trusted gatekeepers is indistinguishable from a replicated RDBMS.
- cujic9 7y ago
  Agreed. Though it seems like the consensus protocol does protect against malicious or compromised gatekeepers. It seems that by dialing up the trust in their validator nodes (to something significantly greater than the trust you might have in a bitcoin node, but also significantly less than 100% trust), they are able to decrease the work involved in the consensus protocol, reducing energy usage.
bencollier49 7y ago
"Libra". Clearly still has a beef with the Winklevoss twins (and their company "Gemini").
FridgeSeal 7y ago
You couldn’t pay me to touch a crypto currency built by Facebook. They’re the king of shifty behaviour, dark patterns and unscrupulously harvesting all the data they can get their hands on. There’ll be no privacy from overlord FB and everything will be more or less at their behest.
megous 7y ago
So the only thing this has going for it over cash is that it may ease exchange online (to be seen). And this depends on how easy it will be to join this as a merchant or user, how nice APIs will be, and how well fraud will be handled, etc., etc. And the value will fluctuate based on the trust in the ability to convert it reliably to cash/other currencies. So there's no real peg to anything, as described previously.
- aembleton 7y ago
  Stripe are involved so I expect they'll make it easy to be a merchant.
Nerada 7y ago
This is seriously scary. The buy-in it's already received from some of the big financial players worries me that this might actually catch-on. Facebook is the last person I'd trust with any of my data, let alone a complete history of all my transactions. I hope privacy is more important to the average Western Joe than it was to the Chinese. WeChat sounds like a dystopian nightmare.
armanini_io 7y ago
I can't find on white paper, transaction are immutable or are reversible?
- berbec 7y ago
  This question is subject, like all others, to capricious changes to Libra Terms, Conditions and Implementation. Facebook values its bottom line and is taking that, and only that, into consideration determening actions to protect your privacy, the security of your wallet, the fiat it is based on, the value of its coin and which Trusted Partners™ to allow to control Libra.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- skilesare 7y ago
  Right now, it is not reversible or changeable. There is a system of rent, so it isn't permanent(although evicted data can be reconstituted via crypto-proof).
magnamerc 7y ago
Since Libra is secured via BFT PoS it'll be feasible to integrate it into Cosmos Hub, and thus you'll be able to communicate directly with Ethereum which is interesting.
mimixco 7y ago
The suggestion that this is a way to help the "global unbanned" is also disingenuous. If people don't have enough money to put any in a bank, making up a new centralized currency isn't going to change that.
- cujic9 7y ago
  Typically people are unbanked not because they are completely broke but because of one or more of the following: 1) They do not live near a bank 2) They don't meet some minimum threshold of money 3) Discrimination - The are part of some social or ethnic group that the banks won't touch
m3kw9 7y ago
I just need to know all the “what’s in it for FB” first, then I can tell if they are really opening it up, or just makes them a much bigger monopoly
m3kw9 7y ago
This shit may fail because of too many cooks in the kitchen issue. They have 30 members with equal say
apo 7y ago
> Interest on the reserve assets will be used to cover the costs of the system, ensure low transaction fees, pay dividends to investors who provided capital to jumpstart the ecosystem (read “The Libra Association” here), and support further growth and adoption. The rules for allocating interest on the reserve will be set in advance and will be overseen by the Libra Association. Users of Libra do not receive a return from the reserve. Forget about the cryptography and "blockchain" this system will use. The real innovation here is financial in nature. Only it's not really an innovation. I doubt today's race to negative interest rates will be kind to Libra validators, who will be demanding a fat payout sooner or later for the loss of business on highly lucrative credit cards. There's only one way to fund this beast: fractional reserve and ever more risky investments. The temptation will be enormous. The justifications true and well-intentioned. The outcome predictable to anyone who has paid attention. Think Tether, but orders of magnitude larger.
- flatfilefan 7y ago
  So when you purchase Libra for cash it’s like buying an index, only with no interest whatsoever. So all the risk and no reward. It’s not for no reason that index funds pay dividends - to compensate for a very real risk of losses. Interesting to see if libra will be able to pull this trick and push risk on its users without compensation.
paulluuk 7y ago
Witness the birth of a monster.
neetodavid 7y ago
So this is it Is there a German word for thinking something is trite and gross on one hand while investing with the other? I'm that German Word
- cujic9 7y ago
  I think that's just called "investing."
LyndsySimon 7y ago
So... I’ve not had time to read the whole paper, but my initial impression is that this is not really worth consider as a “cryptocurrency” - instead, it’s a limited application of “blockchain” to what amounts to a multi-party private currency. That in and of itself isn’t a terrible thing necessarily, but I guess I’m failing to see the utility it provides. OTOH, Facebook is big enough to push this into much larger adoption than existing cryptocurrencies have managed. If they do that, and if Libra is eventually opened enough that it can be traded on the open market without a “trusted” intermediary, then we might at least see the infrastructure, public acceptance, and public understanding of what cryptocurrencies are significantly improve. That could lead to a stronger ecosystem in general. Personally, I’m trying to figure out if I can have an “account” that is truly anonymous. If so, then I’ll pay attention and study it more. If not... well, then I’ll ignore this unless and until that is possible.
doubleorseven 7y ago
during the ICO era i used to read 2-3 whitepapers per day. It usually was all about decentralization and "how we are going to change the world", and then right after the sale it will be like "well the world is not ready and blockchain is not there yet so we are starting with centralization" ( in the few cases the product was not fraud). now, since all the fiat is coming in without a need for an ICO it looks like facebook is not even trying to hide their true intents. They are just saying it to my face, "We are trying to increase your dependency in our products and on the way creating a new financial device for the big guys to earn more money on your behalf". I truly hope this initiative will get blocked by the people who FB think they can fool again.

198 points by hulahoof 7y ago

I just watched the official launch video for Libra and it's just disgusting how silicon valley is abusing the image of "poor" people or people from developing countries to sell a philanthropist idea while their true intentions are just more money and more power.

throwmex 7y ago
I do hope all those developing countries with a democratic government will ban this one.

rahulkapil 7y ago

A fair financial system is one which I am comfortable giving to my worst enemy to run. This is not it.

CodiePetersen 7y ago
Very well put.
josh2600 7y ago
If you don’t feel comfortable letting the nsa run a node and not care, is it really secure? I’m not sure we can push the envelope that far, but it’s worth trying to get there.

zxcb1 7y ago

We believe that a global currency and financial infrastructure should be designed and governed as a public good And social infrastructure?

2T1Qka0rEiPr 7y ago

As someone somewhat out of the crypto-loop, would someone be able to explain/posit/cite why Facebook are entering this market, and why traditional payment providers are also getting involved? On the face of it, this suggests it aims to essentially reduce transaction costs (which would be to the detriment of the status-quo)?

thefounder 7y ago
It looks like for the end customer this is no better than a closed payment platform(think of visa network or ACH) unless they provide at least read access to the blockchain ledger/database. If that's the case it's not worth the name of crypto currency. They also say in 5 years will provide full(r/w) access to the public clients/nodes...I wouldn't hold my breath. It has "fraud" prevention built in, charge backs, compliance etc...how would that work on a public blockchain? I believe they lie and they know it will never be released as a public/permisionless blockchain.
m1el 7y ago
As far as I can tell, FB wants to be a bank to print money. Their own money. For every country. All full nodes on that blockchain are going to be owned by FaceBook. FB will be able to see all transactions and take money from people they don't like.
- thefounder 7y ago
  It's no different than paypal. I was hoping the public will at least have read access to the database/blockchain and API to create wallets. The fact that they print the money can only be good because that's how a stable coin is supposed to work, right?
- 2T1Qka0rEiPr 7y ago
  Yes - I was just reading the other article on the front page of HN which gives a summary. Pegged to fiats and traded in for fiats, so... Facebook is creating its own fiat which it wants to profit off, use its existing user network as a leap pad to do so, and to be considered the global fiat? Is that fair?
bitxbit 7y ago
Put it differently, banks have failed to implement something more efficient and the “bitcoin” innovators have also failed on practical aspects. As a result we have a void and it’s anyone’s game right now. Facebook is throwing money at it. A small chance it works but public trust is a big factor in currency isn’t it? Here’s what I think: any alternative currency tied to the USD (meaning a currency without intrinsic value) is DOA. The next generation currency cannot be tied to resource constraints.

bitxbit 7y ago

It is sad that Zuckerberg chose to squander all that capital on frivolous endeavors at Facebook. He could have done so much. This is what gets me the most: "We believe that a global currency and financial infrastructure should be designed and governed as a public good." It's very rich coming from Facebook who could have made itself a public good a decade ago.

fiala__ 7y ago
Yeah, that bit is bonkers. A huge privately-owned tech corporation talking about 'public good'. We truly are entering the era of global corporate despotism.

wslh 7y ago

I just skimmed through their documents and I saw they use BFT. BFT algorithms are slow (and slower when more nodes are added) so are they using another layer for gaining performance? Currently the fastest BFT implementation is BFT-SMaRt: https://github.com/bft-smart/library https://github.com/bft-smart/library

1in21m 7y ago
Moreover, BFT algorithms do not solve BGP in a decentralized, trustless network, consensus remains subjective. Bitcoin relies on proof-of-work to provide objective consensus. Whitepaper: "We did not consider proof-of-work based protocols due to their poor performance and high energy (and environmental) costs" Right...
bellajbadr 7y ago
BTF is slow depending on how many nodes you're running. generally it can't support more than 100 validators

ArmandGrillet 7y ago

Interesting bits: "target launch in the first half of 2020." "“Founding Members” upon its completion are, by industry: Payments: Mastercard, PayPal, PayU (Naspers’ fintech arm), Stripe, Visa Technology and marketplaces: Booking Holdings, eBay, Facebook/Calibra, Farfetch, Lyft, MercadoPago, Spotify AB, Uber Technologies, Inc. Telecommunications: Iliad, Vodafone Group Blockchain: Anchorage, Bison Trails, Coinbase, Inc., Xapo Holdings Limited Venture Capital: Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Initiatives, Ribbit Capital, Thrive Capital, Union Square Ventures Nonprofit and multilateral organizations, and academic institutions: Creative Destruction Lab, Kiva, Mercy Corps, Women’s World Banking"

zxcb1 7y ago
Is this the face of technological liberation or domination?
- alfiedotwtf 7y ago
  Thanks. Your comment made me laugh, but now upset. You raise a good point.
- golergka 7y ago
  Yes.
- FridgeSeal 7y ago
  Facebook is involved, so I don’t think anything positive (for users) is being liberated here.

NotPaidToPost 7y ago

I fully expect China to take over the Congo now.

aurea 7y ago
Hello friend
holler 7y ago
If you see White Rose, tell her goodbye.
sctb 7y ago
We've asked you countless times to please stop posting unsubstantive or flamebait comments, so we've banned the account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

throwawaylolx 7y ago

More tech-y resources: - https://developers.libra.org/docs/assets/papers/the-libra-blockchain.pdf https://developers.libra.org/docs/assets/papers/the-libra-bl... - https://github.com/libra/libra https://github.com/libra/libra - https://developers.libra.org https://developers.libra.org - https://developers.libra.org/docs/move-paper https://developers.libra.org/docs/move-paper

xorand 7y ago
From the Move programming language paper: "semantics inspired by linear logic". Any even more technical references? Anybody knows anybody who really work(ed) on Move? Academic? Otherwise? I'm interested because of my "poured only once" current project http://imar.ro/~mbuliga/hapax.html http://imar.ro/~mbuliga/hapax.html
- throwawaylolx 7y ago
  > Anybody knows anybody who really work(ed) on Move? The authors are listed in the PDF
  - xorand 7y ago
    Thank you. I meant to ask for others than the authors. Probably the repository is the best resource... ... I notice now that it uses the gas mechanism from Ethereum. Less interesting than I thought.

CodiePetersen 7y ago

I think this coin is a really bad idea. Its just centralizing a crypto coin and then removing the laws around money because now a dollar has a libra coin wrapper on it so it's obviously totally different than a dollar. It feels like a federal reserve moment where a bunch of rich folk get together and again dictate the future of currency. Crypto was supposed to change that trend. Unfortunately the want of convenience will probably win out over any sort moralistic/idealistic standing and unless government steps in, it will probably be widely adopted.

bufferoverflow 7y ago
It's not pegged to a dollar. It's pegged to a blend of currencies and assets. So it's not a dollar wrapped like Tether or USDC. I don't understand how they plan to make it work across jurisdictions. There are so many laws and rules when it comes to transmitting and storing money or derivatives. Like I can transfer a billion dollars worth of BTC, no problem. But if I try to wire even $100K between two of my accounts in US and EU, all kinds of red flags go off and phone calls need to happen.
- grey-area 7y ago
  They plan to ignore regulations and grow quick enough so that they are too big to fail and thus too big to regulate.
  - ninjin 7y ago
    If you made this proposition to me a year ago, I would probably shrug it off. But after having read about several successful companies from the late 90s and early 00s doing exactly this – PayPal being a prime example – I think you may very well be right. Heck, one could even say that the current legal/lobbying fights between the internet giants and major states is exactly this.
- leppr 7y ago
  I think the point is to call their little consortium "decentralized" and let the various on-ramps (be it wallets, exchanges, merchants) deal with AML, just as if it were cash or Bitcoin. This is apparent in how their wallet Calibra is what requires KYC, not the crypto token itself.

jasode 7y ago

>Libra’s mission is to enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure [...] This document outlines our plans for a new decentralized blockchain, The "decentralized" can be parsed different ways. Facebook Libra is decentralizing the transactions but it does not decentralize the currency creation. (This partial decentralization happens because Facebook wants to peg Libra to stable asset reserves.) This is different from Bitcoin's idea of decentralizing both the currency creation _and_ the financial transactions. We can see this distinction in its list of partners... > Members of the Libra Association will consist of [...] The bulleted list includes: - transaction processors such as Mastercard/Visa, PayPal, Stripe, etc - ecommerce marketplaces such as ebay, Uber, etc - telecomm such as Vodafone We see the industry that's noticeably missing: no banks mentioned such as JP Morgan Chase, Citi, HSBC, etc That's because Facebook wants to be the "bank" in this new Libra economy. It wants to be the "Federal Reserve" that creates bank notes. If I misunderstand Facebook's intentions and how it wants to position Libra in the financial world, please correct me.

m1el 7y ago
I would also like to add that FB is going to tie wallets to accounts so FB will know information about every transation. "Pseudonymous" wallets aren't going to be anonymous to Facebook.
- dchest 7y ago
  Their "customer commitment" document claims otherwise https://scontent-frt3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.2365-6/65083631_355528488499253_8415273665234468864_n.pdf?_nc_cat=106&_nc_ht=scontent-frt3-2.xx&oh=6a0b1e2dcf71404fd66d5c0a733de73f&oe=5D982AC3 https://scontent-frt3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.2365-6/65083631_3...
  - Phemist 7y ago
    I think the devil is in the details. The claim `Calibra will not share account information or financial data with Facebook, Inc. or any third party` is followed by `without customer consent.`. From reading through the document you linked, the infrastructure will definitely be there to support the sharing of any and all data. Considering Facebook's history with getting "consent", I am willing to bet that they will take every chance they can get to manipulate users into giving such "consent".

muratgozel 7y ago

"it will be backed by a collection of low-volatility assets, such as bank deposits and short-term government securities in currencies from stable and reputable central banks." from the whitepaper: https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/#the-libra-currency-and-reserve https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/#the-libra-currency-and-... It's like one to one copy of the traditional monetary system with speed of transactions improved. Low volatile assets they rely on are not real and therefore not guaranteed to stay low volatile. It may be decentralized technically but not socially or ethically.

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orbifold 7y ago

> simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people. This is the material anti-trust lawsuits are made of, there is no way that nation states will allow private enterprises to gain that much power.

thefounder 7y ago
Tell that to visa and mastercard or SWIFT
- Angostura 7y ago
  I don't believe either of those have introduced their own currency.
  - thefounder 7y ago
    How is their platform different in practical terms than libra? Libra itself is not a new currency. I believe it's pegged to the US dollar. In the real world you really pay with visa/mastercard, paypal or swift, not with "real" money.
    - bertil 7y ago
      Libra is pegged to a basket of values. I suspect that this could lead companies to prefer to store liquidity and report on Libra as it could be more stable than any individual currency, including USD.
- bertil 7y ago
  Visa, Mastercard and Swift have spent a lot of time and effort lobbying their _de facto_ monopoly, carefully advocating that… for lack of a better phrasing: they are essential and facilities but not “essential facilities”. The best example of something impressive in that area is the concept of Two-sided markets, that comes with natural, customer-benefiting monopoly and even a justification for aggressive dumping baked-in in the model. I’m personally familiar with several of the contributors to that area and I can’t suspect that was ‘sponsored’ research but, Lord, you have to be lucky to get a Nobel prize to defend you.

Bombthecat 7y ago

I still think,that this coin could replace a lot of African ( unstable ) currencies ...

masternda 7y ago
Definitely, I agree with you about this, given their high volatility.

micksabox 7y ago

Can anyone TLDR; the smart contract capabilities outlined in the first paragraph?

skilesare 7y ago
It is kind of confusing. They have their own language that will let you create various kinds of structured modules. Initially, they are going to limit it to their native modules. The modules have some properties that make the contracts safer and less prone to duplication bugs. They haven't finalized the syntactic sugar version of the language yet.

DanFau 7y ago

Initial performance in the technical part: - Throughput: 1000 transactions payment per second - Latency: 10-second for validating a payment

dx034 7y ago
10 seconds sounds longer than current credit card payments? I could imagine that to be a barrier in some situations.
- dr_win 7y ago
  This will be the base layer. They expect custodial wallets and payment channels on top (in Bitcoin terms exchange wallets and lightning network). See the Libra blockchain paper, section 8: > We anticipate that many payment transactions will occur off-chain, for example, within a custodial wallet or by using payment channels [45]
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daanavitch 7y ago

>The reserve allows users of the system to enjoy a relatively stable medium of exchange from the start. At the same time, it also represents a centralized function. For the network to be fully permissionless, the association will have to explore ways to further distribute and decentralize the reserve, including automating the verification of the assets in the basket and the process of minting and burning of coins. Increasing market competition in the custody and management of the reserve will also be explored to improve the efficiency of this service, and the costs it imposes on users and custodians over time. So this coin will be backed by a centralized reserve, and you would have to trust Facebook that the coins you own are backed by real money, with no way of verifying this. Tether works the same way, and they are just creating money out of thin air without actual dollars backing them up. I'm curious how Facebook will decentralize this reserve, or if they will even do this in the first place.

IlegCowcat 7y ago

I remember someone saying something along the lines of “Facebook will try and copy and crush us, but not this time- by the time they work out what’s happening, it’ll be too late”. Facebook seem to have noticed what’s happening and are moving like the wind to try and crush us. Are they too late or are we too late? Or neither?

glitchc 7y ago
Depends on who that someone was, doesn’t it?

_eLRIC 7y ago

Sounds to me like Facebook is trying to become the Wechat of the West ... (as per an article 2 days ago explaining how Wechat could be central to every payment in a daily life )

kobayashy 7y ago
Exactly. I'm gonna get my hair done so once they start with social points I can look nice on camera.
bertil 7y ago
Mark Zuckerberg is very impressed by WeChat as a platform. That’s probably the best way to understand that effort. “Crypto” is less a technology and more a loose governance method because no Western company can have the authority that WeChat has in China.

dreit1 7y ago

So we’ve from government issued inflationary currencies to multinational scrip backed by government currencies. Sounds like bitcoin is a better hedge than ever against today’s economic environment.

shrikant 7y ago

I find it interesting that Facebook banned cryptocurrency ads last year, citing safety from “financial products and services frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.” https://www.vox.com/2018/1/30/16950926/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-bans-crypto-advertising-bitcoin-james-altucher https://www.vox.com/2018/1/30/16950926/facebook-mark-zuckerb...

thefounder 7y ago
The ban was a good thing because the currencies were promoted as investments which is not the case with stable coins/fb coin. Let's separate payment platforms from gambling-like investments, shall we?
xtracto 7y ago
Facebook banned my previous company from asking users for their FB data to perform ML credit risk evaluation. Some weeks later they registered a patent for credit risk analysis using historical FB data. They know very well what they do.

fiala__ 7y ago

Anyone who still has doubts about the extent of Facebook's undemocratic power is clearly about to be fully convinced.

Dwolb 7y ago

I’m super curious how the initial governance framework evolves over time. From the looks of it, it’s not anything completely new and relies on standard human voting and management structures. >A Founding Member that does not comply with the Founding Member eligibility criteria can be removed by a supermajority vote of the council. The recording of this vote on the Libra Blockchain will remove the member's node from the consensus algorithm. So given this, the things working in Libra’s favor are an immediate, global social network for distribution. Against it would be lack of innovation on the governing front (i.e. prone to internal politics) but this is probably more of a long term problem. [1] https://libra.org/en-US/association-council-principles/#association_executive_team https://libra.org/en-US/association-council-principles/#asso...

mulmen 7y ago

The problem with the financial industry is not currency. Hyping cryptocurrency's benefits to actual humans is like criticizing Facebook for releasing personal data to Cambridge Analytica using tab delimited files instead of JSON. It's completely missing the point.

berbec 7y ago

Facebook can't keep people's phone numbers, pictures and sex life private and we trust them to invent a currency? I'm not a crypto backer - in fact I'm skeptical of the long term usefulness, but this isn't crypto, it's shitty PayPal. It's not decentralized, not removed from fiat, not anonymous and not trustworthy.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> it's shitty PayPal Its introduction reads like a goading of antitrust activists. (Facebook’s advantage as a cryptocurrency purveyor being its acumen with getting away with lawlessness.)
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Could have been worse. Could have been Uber. EDIT: Oh crap. It is Uber. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20211358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20211358
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > Could have been Uber Uber is a Libra Association voting member.

samdung 7y ago

A basket of bank deposits and short-term government securities will be held in the Libra Reserve for every Libra that is created, building trust in its intrinsic value. A global federal reserve in the making

samdung 7y ago

A basket of bank deposits and short-term government securities will be held in the Libra Reserve for every Libra that is created, building trust in its intrinsic value. Soon 'The Libra Reserve' will hold only a 10th of the total Libra Coins in circulation (fractional reserve). A global federal reserve in the making.

alangibson 7y ago

I propose that a blockchain with mutually trusted gatekeepers is indistinguishable from a replicated RDBMS.

cujic9 7y ago
Agreed. Though it seems like the consensus protocol does protect against malicious or compromised gatekeepers. It seems that by dialing up the trust in their validator nodes (to something significantly greater than the trust you might have in a bitcoin node, but also significantly less than 100% trust), they are able to decrease the work involved in the consensus protocol, reducing energy usage.

bencollier49 7y ago

"Libra". Clearly still has a beef with the Winklevoss twins (and their company "Gemini").

FridgeSeal 7y ago

You couldn’t pay me to touch a crypto currency built by Facebook. They’re the king of shifty behaviour, dark patterns and unscrupulously harvesting all the data they can get their hands on. There’ll be no privacy from overlord FB and everything will be more or less at their behest.

megous 7y ago

So the only thing this has going for it over cash is that it may ease exchange online (to be seen). And this depends on how easy it will be to join this as a merchant or user, how nice APIs will be, and how well fraud will be handled, etc., etc. And the value will fluctuate based on the trust in the ability to convert it reliably to cash/other currencies. So there's no real peg to anything, as described previously.

aembleton 7y ago
Stripe are involved so I expect they'll make it easy to be a merchant.

Nerada 7y ago

This is seriously scary. The buy-in it's already received from some of the big financial players worries me that this might actually catch-on. Facebook is the last person I'd trust with any of my data, let alone a complete history of all my transactions. I hope privacy is more important to the average Western Joe than it was to the Chinese. WeChat sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

armanini_io 7y ago

I can't find on white paper, transaction are immutable or are reversible?

berbec 7y ago
This question is subject, like all others, to capricious changes to Libra Terms, Conditions and Implementation. Facebook values its bottom line and is taking that, and only that, into consideration determening actions to protect your privacy, the security of your wallet, the fiat it is based on, the value of its coin and which Trusted Partners™ to allow to control Libra.
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skilesare 7y ago
Right now, it is not reversible or changeable. There is a system of rent, so it isn't permanent(although evicted data can be reconstituted via crypto-proof).

magnamerc 7y ago

Since Libra is secured via BFT PoS it'll be feasible to integrate it into Cosmos Hub, and thus you'll be able to communicate directly with Ethereum which is interesting.

mimixco 7y ago

The suggestion that this is a way to help the "global unbanned" is also disingenuous. If people don't have enough money to put any in a bank, making up a new centralized currency isn't going to change that.

cujic9 7y ago
Typically people are unbanked not because they are completely broke but because of one or more of the following: 1) They do not live near a bank 2) They don't meet some minimum threshold of money 3) Discrimination - The are part of some social or ethnic group that the banks won't touch

m3kw9 7y ago

I just need to know all the “what’s in it for FB” first, then I can tell if they are really opening it up, or just makes them a much bigger monopoly

m3kw9 7y ago

This shit may fail because of too many cooks in the kitchen issue. They have 30 members with equal say

apo 7y ago

> Interest on the reserve assets will be used to cover the costs of the system, ensure low transaction fees, pay dividends to investors who provided capital to jumpstart the ecosystem (read “The Libra Association” here), and support further growth and adoption. The rules for allocating interest on the reserve will be set in advance and will be overseen by the Libra Association. Users of Libra do not receive a return from the reserve. Forget about the cryptography and "blockchain" this system will use. The real innovation here is financial in nature. Only it's not really an innovation. I doubt today's race to negative interest rates will be kind to Libra validators, who will be demanding a fat payout sooner or later for the loss of business on highly lucrative credit cards. There's only one way to fund this beast: fractional reserve and ever more risky investments. The temptation will be enormous. The justifications true and well-intentioned. The outcome predictable to anyone who has paid attention. Think Tether, but orders of magnitude larger.

flatfilefan 7y ago
So when you purchase Libra for cash it’s like buying an index, only with no interest whatsoever. So all the risk and no reward. It’s not for no reason that index funds pay dividends - to compensate for a very real risk of losses. Interesting to see if libra will be able to pull this trick and push risk on its users without compensation.

paulluuk 7y ago

Witness the birth of a monster.

neetodavid 7y ago

So this is it Is there a German word for thinking something is trite and gross on one hand while investing with the other? I'm that German Word

cujic9 7y ago
I think that's just called "investing."

LyndsySimon 7y ago

So... I’ve not had time to read the whole paper, but my initial impression is that this is not really worth consider as a “cryptocurrency” - instead, it’s a limited application of “blockchain” to what amounts to a multi-party private currency. That in and of itself isn’t a terrible thing necessarily, but I guess I’m failing to see the utility it provides. OTOH, Facebook is big enough to push this into much larger adoption than existing cryptocurrencies have managed. If they do that, and if Libra is eventually opened enough that it can be traded on the open market without a “trusted” intermediary, then we might at least see the infrastructure, public acceptance, and public understanding of what cryptocurrencies are significantly improve. That could lead to a stronger ecosystem in general. Personally, I’m trying to figure out if I can have an “account” that is truly anonymous. If so, then I’ll pay attention and study it more. If not... well, then I’ll ignore this unless and until that is possible.

doubleorseven 7y ago

during the ICO era i used to read 2-3 whitepapers per day. It usually was all about decentralization and "how we are going to change the world", and then right after the sale it will be like "well the world is not ready and blockchain is not there yet so we are starting with centralization" ( in the few cases the product was not fraud). now, since all the fiat is coming in without a need for an ICO it looks like facebook is not even trying to hide their true intents. They are just saying it to my face, "We are trying to increase your dependency in our products and on the way creating a new financial device for the big guys to earn more money on your behalf". I truly hope this initiative will get blocked by the people who FB think they can fool again.