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France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y agoBest thing I've read on Libra: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/06/24/971554-facebook-bitcoin-libra-crypto-bad/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/06/24/971554-facebook-bitcoin...
- aniforprez 7y agoAH the bit about the goal being to make payments fast makes a ton of sense. The rest of the world has left the US in the dust with extremely fast payments systems. In India, the UPI system has taken the country by storm with direct,instant bank-to-bank money transfers which take seconds to complete and have no fees attached for the consumer
- Avamander 7y agoEurope has SEPA (Instant). The Chinese have WeChat Pay and similar? I'm curious, what other solutions other countries have?
- baxtr 7y agoPayPal?
- pjc50 7y agoNot really a bank-to-bank system; money doesn't instantly arrive at the recipient's bank account and paypal's ability to withhold it is notorious.
- tannhaeuser 7y agoNor is PayPal obliged to pay into deposit protection funds as EU banks are AFAIK. I think PayPal needs to start worrying about their standing in EU and becoming a collateral damage when France and Germany are on a roll to make a case for exercising currency sovereignty.
- spiralx 7y agoI'm fairly certain that PayPal is registered as a bank here in the EU, possibly in Luxembourg. It couldn't operate how it does here otherwise.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- riffraff 7y agoSEPA Instant Credit Transfer should allow this, but it's adoption is not 100% widespread yet, in my experience.
- pantalaimon 7y agoMost banks will charge you extra for the instant payment. It's pretty ridiculous.
- lessname 7y agoThere is a function called "instant transfer" in my Raiffeisen ELBA app, it seems to be free and fast. (In Austria). However, I do not know how other banks handle thism
- jacquesm 7y agoYou're a couple of decades behind the times as far as the EU is concerned.
- vinay_ys 7y agoNot in 3/4 of the world as of today.
- kawera 7y agoTED in Brazil - instantaneous transfers between bank accounts, managed by the central bank. Cost from zero to 2-3 dollars per transaction.
- WanderPanda 7y agoSEPA ist anything but instant for me. A transfer takes a day most of the time
- Avamander 7y agoSEPA Instant Credit Transfer is a different thing than just SEPA.
- jackvalentine 7y agoAustralia has the New Payments Platform (Osko to consumers) that is basically instant.
- ImaCake 7y agoJust to add, if you don't need instant payments we also have other convenient and direct transfers between banks in Australia.
- ssijak 7y agoSerbia (not in EU) implemented instant bank to bank transfers recently
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y agoAlmost all UK banks use Faster Payments, which means ordinary bank transfers are instant.
- spoonie 7y agoCanada has free “Interac E-transfers” that you can send to an email address or mobile phone number.
- jml7c5 7y agoHistorically most banks have charged $1-$2 for an e-transfer (often with a limited number of free transfers per month, or a different type of chequing account one can sign up for to get free transfers), though it seems prices have been dropping in the past few years. Apparently the Bank of Montreal removed e-transfer fees on personal accounts a year or two ago. So there's definitely still overhead that can make small transfers infeasible, but it's getting better.
- smnrchrds 7y agoCIBC has done the same. TD charges only $0.50 on the most basic plan and it is free on other plans. Simplii (née PC Financial) has always had free Interac e-Transfers. Interac fees have vanished or are vanishing for most people. The daily and weekly maximums are still an issue though ($3k and $10k at most banks usually).
- xtracto 7y agoEven Mexico has SPEI payment network which costs $0.36 USD for any amount https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_gross_settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_gross_settlement
- yxhuvud 7y agoSweden have a thing called Swish which has instant transfer to anyone who you the mobile phone number of. End users have no fees when using the system to transfer to each others. Businesses that use it pay some though. It has gotten very prevalent.
- zhte415 7y agoFor domestic bank-to-bank payments, China has CNAPS https://www.bis.org/cpmi/publ/d105_cn.pdf https://www.bis.org/cpmi/publ/d105_cn.pdf [PDF] - the paper (2012) could be updated especially in regard to foreign currency. tl;dr CNAPS is a bank-to-bank system, but in effect means domestic CNY transfers between major banks should settle within 30 minutes. WeChat Pay / AliPay are a bit different, more like PayPal (though not completely like PayPal).
- throwawaywindev 7y agoUS banks created Zelle, with free instant transfers via your banking app. It’s a shame more people don’t use it. Otherwise people just use credit cards for paying for stuff.
- clintonb 7y agoZelle is only for P2P payments, and was not initially available at every bank. Additionally, some banks market it differently. Not everyone knows the service they are using is Zelle.
- stickfigure 7y agoZelle (possibly just "as implemented by the banks I've interacted with") has very small limits - a couple thousand dollars.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y agoAre people really going to make big transactions using Facebook money?
- stickfigure 7y agoPeople will make whatever size transactions they need to make by whatever mechanism they trust. If Zelle cannot make the transaction happen, it is out of the running. Full stop.
- a3n 7y ago> with free instant transfers I've noticed a "fee: zero" statement on the transfer page recently. I expect there will be an actual fee in the near future.
- fourthark 7y agoU.S. credit cards extort big fees from businesses and give kickbacks to consumers. Hard for "free" to beat that, if consumers have the choice. It may change now that businesses are allowed to pass on fees.
- kerng 7y agoThings like Venmo are popular in US to quickly send money here and there (not like bank transfers afaik). It's not available in Europe unfortunately.
- jazzyjackson 7y agoVenmo is bank to bank transfer, which you can do with no fees it’s just a pain in the ass to log in to the bank and enter your recipients routing numbers. Venmo could be obsoleted just by the banks having a better UX, which I gather everywhere but America already has for sending money domestically
- gjulianm 7y agoAt least in Spain there are some bank-sponsored apps (e.g. Bizum) that can be used to send money to people using their phone number as ID (if they have also an account in the system), and it's instantaneous. I think other European countries have similar systems.
- geraldbauer 7y agoFYI: I collect (awesome) articles about Libra incl. official posts and pro & contra. See https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-libra#articles https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-libra#articles
- raldi 7y agoThe URL really says it all :)
- Jerry2 7y agoLove this quote: >As Sarah Jamie Lewis, the director of the Canadian nonprofit Open Privacy, put it: “Can’t wait for a cryptocurrency with the ethics of Uber, the censorship resistance of Paypal, and the centralization of Visa, all tied together under the proven privacy of Facebook.”
- marksomnian 7y agoSurely she meant decentralisation, though? Visa is anything but decentralised.
- rocho 7y agoMost likely, or it's a transcription error.
- riking 7y agoLibra at launch is going to be extremely centralized, with decentralization being merely a possibility for future "growth".
- ajhurliman 7y agoThey're two different ends of the same scale, like "It's has hard as a rock" vs "It's as soft as a rock". Either way, though, they're making fun of Libra. Visa is not decentralized and Uber is not ethical.
- grezql 7y agoI wish they just blocked facebook altogether. It has caused people more pain than good
- noisem4ker 7y agoBlocking a communication platform doesn't sound right in a free society. There's nothing inherently wrong with connecting people. On the other hand, there should be heavy regulation and enforcement in place so that users don't get their data unknowingly exploited for commercial interest.
- moksly 7y agoFacebook has turned out to be a potential threat to free society. I’m not just talking about the mass manipulation that goes on mostly unregulated, but also the fact that it has quite a lot of personal information on our citizens. Maybe that wouldn’t be an issue if Europe was the best of friends with America, but as that’s obviously not the case. I don’t think our relationship will fully deteriorate, but we can’t ignore the fact that we may have to prepare for a Europe which is less reliant on American tech companies.
- ethbro 7y agoAll problems from big tech stem from their centralization. If Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook were broken up into collections of smaller, independent companies... a lot of the ills would simply disappear, and the market as a whole would be a lot healthier.
- reaperducer 7y agoI'd like to think this would be so, too. But I don't. I suspect if they were a bunch of smaller companies, they would all just sell or trade the information with each other.
- logicchains 7y agoSince big tech companies seem to have an advantage over smaller ones (otherwise smaller ones would already be dominating the market), presumably they'd just be replaced by large Chinese equivalents, which wouldn't be broken up as they have much more cooperative relationships with their government. TikTok is already quite popular in the west, proving it's possible. Unless the west tries to ban all Chinese social networks, which would require some kind of national firewall, in which case it'd lose any moral high ground it had over China for China's banning of WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter.
- mrtksn 7y agoCan someone familiar with Libra speculate how a ban can be implemented? What comes to my mind is forbidding Facebook selling and processing it for EU users but beyond that, I am not sure how a "black market" could be prevented.
- ijonas 7y agoVery simple. Facebook is a company. You can legislate laws that determine what companies are allowed to do and what they are not allowed to do. Particularly if it concerns financial instruments. A "ban" doesn't need to be technological.
- mrtksn 7y agoHow do you stop people obtaining it and using it through their buddies on the internet? Is libra tied to an account like game money? AFAIK it's a cryptocurrency? Haven't looked at the details but cryptocurrency implies it stays on some distributed ladger and no 3rd parties have control over the transactions. Isn't that the case?
- pjmlp 7y agoYou make its use a criminal charge.
- mrtksn 7y agoI'm sure that they keep spare guillotines around but I'm not sure that it would be a popular thing to punish random Louis libra user for his few hundres Euro transaction when Facebook is paying less in taxes than him, figuratively speaking.
- pjmlp 7y agoReally? Sadly it is not uncommon to see people going to jail for stealing a few chicken because they were hungry, while many company owners and politicians hardly face any jail time for their proven corruption affairs. Being popular and law seldom come hand in hand.
- MaupitiBlue 7y agoDumbest move ever by Facebook to preanounce and give governments time to complain. They should have moved fast and dealt with the consequences later. They had a reasonable chance of being the dominant cryptocurrency, and instead they get to spend a year apologizing and backtracking before they ever deploy.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago“Move fast and break things” is a massive liability when it comes to financial law.
- xhgdvjky 7y ago"invest a lot of money and get fined"
- noname120 7y agoAlternatively, they should have worked with governments to make sure to address their worries before announcing it publicly.
- lacker 7y agoThat would just never happen. The French government doesn’t have some minor worries that can be resolved by changing an API. They are going to oppose anything that is cryptocurrency plus Facebook.
- pjkundert 7y agoThere is no “working with government”, for any proposed money substitute that gives normal people a place to hide from central bank inflationary policies.
- gjulianm 7y agoOur current capitalist system does not work without inflation.
- aazaa 7y ago> “no private entity can claim monetary power, which is inherent to the sovereignty of nations” What a bizarre statement. Providing for security is also inherent to sovereignty of nations, but private security firms flourish. It's also odd in the context of Germany in particular where a private currency has been used for many years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer I suspect there's a lot more behind this statement than meets the eye: Inflation, and the ability of the state to force it upon its citizenry by forbidding the use private money - has come to be viewed as inherent to the sovereignty of nations. The world's governments are now entering a new phase in which none can afford to hold the more valuable currency due to the damage caused to export business. Net importers like the US have been holdouts, but even it too will have to bow to reality. This conflict means that, no matter how well intentioned, policy makers will be feel compelled to devalue their own currencies. It's a race to the bottom, but without a bottom. Alternatives, especially private alternatives readily available to citizens, will increasingly be viewed as the enemy.
- speps 7y agoYour German example is a bit silly to use here given that its exchange rate is 1:1 with euros. There are other regional currencies in other countries, they don't usually operate independently from the country's own currency though.
- aazaa 7y agoHow so? The Libra proposal kept its value constant with respect to a basket of currencies.
- kazen44 7y agobecause the german example is tied to the currency used by germany (and the eurozone as a whole).
- pjc50 7y agoNot quite the same kind of inflation hedge as "free floating" limited-issue cryptocurrencies then? (This is one of the things that confuses me about Libra's target market; if you believe the cryptocurrency marketing about privacy and permissionlessness and inflation-hedging, then Libra is terrible at those things. If you don't, and you're in Europe, you just use SEPA.)
- Bud 7y agoI still think it should be called Cancer, instead of Libra.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Pfdiah 7y agoWow... bad news
- thefounder 7y agoOk but can we have a digital euro? I don't like facebook coins but something(digital money) is better than nothing.
- kazen44 7y agowe have digital euro's? the fact that it is a physical note or a database record does not matter for fiscal policy. ever used a digital system to transfer money? like ideal, bancontact or giropay or just plain SEPA?
- thefounder 7y agoI mean something like digital cash so that I can choose how I spend it and when I spend it without a bunch of terms & conditions
- walshemj 7y agoWhy is this a problem most euros exist in electronic form.
- sergefaguet 7y agonations also used to be convinced it is inherent to their sovereignty to tell us who to worship and who to marry. this is no longer the case. not sure there is a principled reason why the power to govern the exchange of goods and services (which is what money facilitates) should be up to them.
- kazen44 7y agobut why should it be up to a company like facebook? What inherent right does facebook have to create a currency. The only reason it is able to do so in the first place is because of the legal framework and protections that exist thanks to the nations it does bussiness with.
- olivierduval 7y ago> nations also used to be convinced it is inherent to their sovereignty to tell us who to worship and who to marry. this is no longer the case. Except in some theocraties where you're 2nd class citizen when you don't worship the official God (Israel, some Muslims countries...) And in the US, the President oauth is on the Bible and "under God" if I remember clearly. So, in a way, it is still the case: how would a Jew or Muslim or Buddhist be able to do that? Governements are elected to provide services for the good of the nations. That include security: physically (police, army) and economically... so the money is a way for a state to provide security for the trade
- en-us 7y ago> And in the US, the President oauth is on the Bible and "under God" if I remember clearly. So, in a way, it is still the case: how would a Jew or Muslim or Buddhist be able to do that? Federal public officials in the US can swear on anything they want to, the Bible is not a requirement.
- orbifold 7y agoAs a German citizen I'm really glad they are doing this. I would be horrified if they let our monetary sovereignty slip out of their hands.
- 7y ago
- dannyr 7y agoI dislike Facebook but I kind of feel sorry for them now because any ambitious thing that they'll attempt will probably be blocked by governments now. Facebook and Zuckerberg deserves it though.
- WanderPanda 7y agoThey probably should have started it without that huge buzz and in a couple of selected countries.
- benj111 7y agoVery good point. What happens when the unstoppable force of 21st century silicon valley tech-topia meets the immovable object of western financial regulations? We are finding out. Big, shouty, trying to do an end run round the regulators isn't a great opening gambit.
- AFascistWorld 7y agoUnfortunately cryptocurrencies are all about buzz, buzz is valuation and adoption. Such as crypto showman Justin Sun, he will seize on any oppotunity to get as much eyeballs as possible.
- human20190310 7y agoI think this is a great example of the power of local authority. If there were a single set of (literally) global rules, then global-scale companies could roll out dubious innovations easily. However, if national or sub-national governments can impose restrictions, it forces companies to go the extra mile to appease a larger number of affected people, disrupting their rollout until everyone is on the same page. California often serves this purpose within the US, creating regulations that have national impact because it's too large of a sub-unit to ignore.
- quotemstr 7y agoThis situation is a consequence of squandering the company's goodwill. All the big social media companies spent years arrogantly declaring that they --- not the people, not governments, but people in quirky SFBA meeting rooms --- get to decide what you people see, what they don't see, what's true, what's false, what's offensive, what's anodyne, what's legitimate activism and what's dastardly propaganda. As it turns out, this "we know best" stance ticks off a lot of people, some of whom run states.
- dmnashir 7y agoAnybody have any information what will Indonesian govt do about Libra?
- pier25 7y agoExcuse the ignorance... but what do France and Germany specifically fear? That if Libra would become more popular than the mainstream fiat currencies Facebook could have more control over the economy than governments?
- Qasaur 7y agoIt's the fear that people may prefer using other currencies than their own, which collapses the regime of spending through inflation.
- pier25 7y agoThanks, not sure why I'm being downvoted...
- lucb1e 7y agoNot sure either, it's a legitimate question. A lot of people seem to find it obvious, but to me it seems like there is a lot of subtleties in why something is or isn't a threat. Bitcoin, Paypal, Ethereum, gift cards, and other online payment systems didn't get this reaction, it's just the Facebook-issued credits (which, for the record, isn't really a cryptocurrency, that's just the marketing department).
- wslh 7y agoI think the trend of demonopolizing currencies is unstoppable, just take time. I argue that this can be part of a new cold war dimension between countries and when some countries block financial initiatives others fund an opportunity. I wrote a little bit more about this vision in [1]. [1] https://blog.coinfabrik.com/libra-association-a-menace-and-an-opportunity-for-blockchain-ecosystems/ https://blog.coinfabrik.com/libra-association-a-menace-and-a...
- orbifold 7y agoNothing is unstoppable, nation states have militaries and intelligence services. Both can be very persuasive. Facebook is paying close to no taxes in the EU, so noone here has anything to lose from them simply disappearing.
- wslh 7y agoEven following your reasoning, I repeat the same: states/federations like US, China, Russia, and EU could find a new way to compete and handle power, so we are talking about countries with a military and intelligence balance.
- lucb1e 7y agoPerhaps a cryptocurrency is unstoppable, but Libra is the same as Visa. Banning Libra is like banning a company like Visa, it's not anything like banning Bitcoin which would be very hard indeed. > Libra will not rely on cryptocurrency mining. Only members of the Libra Association will be able to process transactions via the permissioned blockchain. (From Wikipedia) It's just a payment processor. I don't know why it's called cryptocurrency. If the bar for that is "it uses cryptography" then Paypal is a cryptocurrency because they use HTTPS.
- igammarays 7y ago> “banning Bitcoin would be very hard indeed” It’s hard to take crypto enthusiasts seriously because of delusions like this. Banning bitcoin would be trivial: no legitimate business would accept it, making it useless except to fringe outlaws.
- billfruit 7y agoI thought, whatever is not explicitly banned is allowed. The article is just a fragment, it is not clear if it is just a politician voicing an opinion, or the declaration of policy by the governments.
- lucb1e 7y ago> I thought: whatever is not explicitly banned is allowed I can't find it anymore but I remember reading a story, either on or linked from HN (probably linked), where someone recalls a realization they had in their teen years. It went something like this: Rules do not exist because people like making arbitrary rules for no reason. It is sometimes even okay to break rules, so long as people do not mind what you are doing. Only when you make people angry, new rules are made to stop you from doing that. You can abide by the rules or break them, but you only get in trouble if you make someone unhappy. (The original was a lot more coherent/consistent, I'm just paraphrasing / mixing wordings that might have been in there.) So in the legal sense, yeah, you are technically right. But if you make a country's rulers angry, they'll just decree a new law. (Which is why I never really understood trias politica, by the way: the elected rulers can just make a law for something when the court case didn't go the way they wanted, and the unelected lawyers can create case law with far-reaching changes. But that's another topic.)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- a3n 7y agoIsn't this restraint of trade by two businesses, France and Germany, against a third business, Facebook?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- stefano 7y agoFrance and Germany are sovereign states, not businesses.
- a3n 7y agoThey claim to provide jobs, like any business. As for Libra, it's close to competition with "money," and they are restraining Libra from competing in the money business that the two countries are engaged in.
- bongobongo 7y ago^^^ this is what libertarianism does to the brain. It’s worse than early onset dementia.
- capableweb 7y agoThink this is less about liberalism (it doesn't argue for government to be run like a business) and more about US-inspired thinking where businesses are better than governments.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y agoNot arguing with the statement, but note to you: he said "libertarianism", not "liberalism". The two are obviously very different.
- capableweb 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- HashThis 7y agoThey say: > “no private entity can claim monetary power, which is inherent to the sovereignty of nations” They mean, "When the establishment rigs the economy by diluting the national currency, then the establishment must not let their citizens escape the damage". People talk about a "rigged economy". Where I found in economics it really happens is 3% inflation that comes from constantly printing money. Low income and the middle class often don't get 3%+ yearly pay increases. When they accept a job, the economy is rigged against them by 3% inflation based loss in their pay level, every year (over and over). When people stay at jobs 10 years, 3% year-over-year devistates people. 1801 to 1899 had ~0% inflation when it was on the gold standard with sound money. 3% yearly inflation came after moving off of the gold standard and with printing money. Printing money hurts workers.
- pretendscholar 7y agoHelps indebted workers
- gjulianm 7y agoFacebook can also rig the economy, even more probable because it is a for-profit business. And if current state monetary powers are quite unaccountable already, imagine when the monetary power is a foreign company.
- lawn 7y agoYou're arguing for real cryptocurrencies, not for Libra. Libra can, and most likely will, suffer from the exact same money printing problem you're arguing against.
- twblalock 7y agoIn the late 1800s the Democratic party under William Jennings Bryan was campaigning for bimetallism, which would cause inflation, in order to help farmers because inflation would make their debts less significant. This is one case of people wanting inflation. Actually if you look at the history of the gold standard in the United States, and the bimetal gold/silver standard, you'll see that the gold standard is far from a simple solution and it had a lot of problems. One of the biggest problems: how should the government decide how much gold/silver/whatever a dollar should be worth, and when should that decision be re-evaluated? Similarly you can look at the economic damage caused by Britain bringing back the gold standard in the 1920s, and also how absurd the Bretton Woods system became over the years as the exchange rates pegged to gold started diverging more and more from economic reality. The gold standard has tons of problems.
- shanecoin 7y agoWhat other times in history have private corporations taken on government entities and succeeded? Have any of these attempts been on this scale and against an entity of this power (i.e. proposing a new monetary policy against the US Federal Reserve)?
- buboard 7y agoPrivate entities attempting this would always have been shut down with violence. The prevailing violence established itself as "the state".
- dmix 7y agoIs Libra really taking on governments? It hasn't even launched yet let alone proven itself useful along consumers.
- shanecoin 7y agoI would argue that Libra is competing directly with the US dollar. It is a new form of currency for a user to obtain and use within the Libra ecosystem. I would imagine that the ideal world for Libra is for a user to onboard into the ecosystem and transact solely in that ecosystem. It would obviously require Libra to be ubiquitous for this to happen, but it may be the ultimate goal. In this case, an American user would transact solely in Libra and not US dollar. I am not an economist, but I would imagine this is similar to Americans selling US dollars for foreign currencies, which I imagine weakens the dollar if done at a large enough scale. Additionally, Libra is incorporated in Switzerland. I can only guess that this was done with foresight that the US might fight back against this new currency that competes against the dollar. With this incorporation location, it would be harder for the US to shut down this new monetary system.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zelly 7y agoWait until they find out they can't block Bitcoin.
- lucb1e 7y agoWrong thread: this is about Libra, not Bitcoin. Libra is owned by a company and Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. It looks like we not only lost the word 'crypto' (to cryptocurrency instead of cryptography), but we'll have to find a new word to distinguish Facebook-issued digital credits (Libra) from a distributed payment network running on cryptography and rough consensus (Bitcoin).
- blackbrokkoli 7y agoI'm of course not familiar with the specific mindsets and the history of this decision, but I want to share a bit of cultural perspective from Germany that is so far not really considered in this comment section: Germany is very, very keen on preventing powerful entities from acting outside of regulation and similarly, if not more, on preventing a single entity to get in control of everything. This is largely due to some foobar in the last century, which I'm sure everyone is aware of. So if Facebook, 10x of Germany's population comes around the corner with a proposal akin to "Hey do you mind if we just skip the paperwork part and just control currency, while actually being a social media tech giant" there going to be up against every trick in the book. This is not hypocrite behavior because Germany allowed some fun regional currency project no one is aware of some time ago. This is much more protecting the idea of the German society. And personally, as a German, I'm really glad about it. You remember the hundreds of cases of worked with a scummy developer on an app once, now I'm blocked out of my email and all my files stories? Now imagine that, but with money and with a company who never even bothered to pretend it isn't evil - this is gonna be a no, thank you!
- ralusek 7y agoGermany is obviously somewhat keen on letting single entities get control of everything, as the EU is in many ways an extension primarily of Germany, and the closest entity I'm aware of that could be said to be doing just that. I'd also like to mention that certain entities operating outside of the state are precisely the sort of thing that can prevent the sort of tyranny that Germany enacted during the 20th century. Sometimes, and often, the entity capable of "regulating" is the tyranny. Imagine if Germany had had the capability to prevent payments to Jews, or track which households were spending more on food than they should and were likely harboring enemies of the state. I'm not saying Facebook needs to be the entity that does it, but monetary systems operating outside of the state could be argued to be one of the strongest weapons against tyranny. I actually think this highlights one of the fundamental differences between Western liberalism and German schools of thought. Germany tends to fall back on the central authority, whereas liberalism thinks that the central authority is the single most corruptible attack vector.
- 7y ago
- buboard 7y agoThat's like the best Ad for libra? I think we should investigate whethere these politicians are being secretly paid by zuck
- asveikau 7y agoI thought it was irresponsible of FB to announce this thing. All over the world the question is not whether or not to regulate Facebook. It is how to do so. So, it strikes me as some kind of supreme arrogance or dishonesty to announce a currency without expecting it to be immediately shut down by governments. How does this pass internal review?
- nijynot 7y agoLibra is not all that bad. While there are problems with Facebook gaining yet another source for information that takes advantage of privacy terms, I think a stablecoin by GAFA is in the right direction. It speeds up the adoption of cryptocurrency by a lot. Paypal and other "digital cash" solutions are fully centralized which makes it impossible for devs to build on top of their platform. This means that problems that arise cannot be solved by devs looking at the problem from the outside. Libra gets around this by having an open platform that anyone can build on. Anyone can create a Libra wallet, and anyone can build Libra services. If we have a big privacy problem with Libra in the future, we might be able to find a way around it. Libra supports scripting on-chain which would make atomic swaps possible. If something like atomic swaps are possible, can we hide information from Facebook et al? Or what about mixing Libra on-chain?
- save_ferris 7y ago> If we have a big privacy problem with Libra in the future, we might be able to find a way around it. When major government policy proposals are brought into the public discourse, we argue endlessly about the edge cases, downstream effects and hypothetical scenarios that may in turn cause future problems. Universal healthcare is too expensive, the green new deal won't work, bring the troops home, etc. People argue forever around the hypotheticals of these ideas. But when one of the most powerful and consistently nefarious companies in the world starts to build a system to cut out the global banking system, we're fine to say that we "might be able to" find a way around major problems facing the platform if they gain too much control. The inconsistency in the level of scrutiny that we levy at companies compared to governments is shocking given the influence that the public has over government policy and operations compared to a private, multi-billion-dollar company. "might be able to" isn't good enough when it comes to building systems that undermine the current financial system. All aspects of the system need to be spelled out in concrete terms, and safeguards must be put into place to ensure proper implementation and alignment of incentives. This must be regulated, without question. Yes, big banks are greedy and corrupt and aren't looking out for the little guys. But neither is Facebook, and if there's an institution out there that is less fit than the banks to control the global financial system, it's Facebook.
- Qasaur 7y agoI think this action is a symptom of a much larger, and much more serious disease, namely the fall in trust for traditional fiat currencies like the euro and the dollar. Decades of irresponsible monetary policy and runaway inflation (CPI does not capture the whole picture, look at asset prices the past decade) since the abolishment of the gold standard has lead the general public to indirectly feel disenfranchised with the current monetary regime and I truly believe that we will see more of this kind of action in the future as fiat currencies continue to lose value and eventually collapse due to the extraordinary injection of money that most western central banks have been pursuing in the past couple of years. Governments feel threatened as the power to levy the inflation tax is being eroded with the rise of cryptocurrency, and I think the next couple of years are going to be very interesting as more businesses adopt crypto as a means of payment. And I wholeheartedly support this development, because much of the inequality that we've seen in recent years and general social turmoil is a direct consequence of irresponsible monetary policy.
- jayd16 7y agoI think you're right about the general unrest but frustratingly we see snake oil bubble to the top. A new gold standard with rent seekers won't save us from stagnant wage growth.
- dmix 7y agoI've never heard anyone say anything nice about Libra. Most likely Libra with be DOA, regardless of this move. I don't even know why so many people are wasting their time on this stuff. Does the German/French gov not have other more pressing issues? No need to fantasize about the risks of private mega-corp currencies taking on the monetarists even before it has made any realistic challenge to it.
- jorblumesea 7y agoNot sure what they were expecting, Libra is a direct threat to the power of nation states and their fiat currencies.
- journalctl 7y agoPrivate tech companies should not be issuing currency. I can’t believe we have to have this conversation.
- chroma 7y agoWhy not? Unlike governments, private companies can't coerce me to use their currency. If I think their currency is garbage, I'm totally free to not use it and to convert any Libra I receive into USD. That's not at all true for government-issued currencies. For example: If I try to pay my taxes with anything other than USD, men with guns will come to my home and put me in a cage.
- lucb1e 7y agoI can't believe it either, but for a different reason. If Facebook had announced that they're going to launch their own version of Paypal, nobody would have wanted to use it for privacy concerns. But because cryptocurrency is trendy and supposed to have a positive effect on privacy and not supposed to be controlled by a single party, all of those concerns fall away. Except that (Wikipedia): > Libra will not rely on cryptocurrency mining.[20] Only members of the Libra Association will be able to process transactions via the permissioned blockchain. It's not a cryptocurrency at all. It's a cryptocurrency to the same extent that, because your credit card cryptographically signs the transaction at the POS terminal, euros can be said to be a cryptocurrency. Somehow they get away with calling it cryptocurrency when it's really just another Visa or Paypal. Nobody should want to use this and that should be obvious, but 'crypto magic' is involved and so we need to have the conversation.
- nagaramlakshmi 7y agoLibra is a joke. I am glad they blocked it in all honesty
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- tryptophan 7y agoI'm surprised at the amount of hate that libra seems to be getting, even on the tech-startup forum of HN. Are we all becoming a bunch of Luddite conservatives? When I look my own life an experiences, I can't really say I feel any of the alleged horrors cast down upon us by big tech. I get that privacy is an issue, but ... it is avoidable. I host my own cloud(nextcloud), use tracking blockers, avoid signups...etc. Personally, I think its an interesting project, with both interesting technical, monetary, and political problems that will be encountered. I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out.
- booleandilemma 7y agoCountries don’t want a foreign company controlling the currency their citizens use. Surprise surprise.
- xxxpupugo 7y ago> no private entity can claim monetary power, which is inherent to the sovereignty of nations Well said, that should be self-explainable enough.
- rainyMammoth 7y agoAs a European I'm very happy about this decision. I'm not against Cryptocurrencies but Libra is an attempt by some of the most corrupt and unethical entities in the world (Facebook,...) to control financial flows. I can only hope other countries will follow soon.
- oscargrouch 7y agoAlso, i know this will not be a very popular opinion here but, the prophecy in the book of revelation says about a entity(be it a country, company or both) who controls the financial markets and where only people who are 'marked', (have a valid subscription) can trade, buy, sell, etc.. Apart from the religious point of view, the control of a very powerful currency by one entity is very likely to happen. And while before computers and the internet we could use paper money and other means, and work without any sort of centralized control and regulation (at least a very effective one), with the extinction of paper currency and with digital control of a global currency, if this entity somehow decides that you should be left out you are doomed and will face severe consequences because you wont be able to support yourself anymore. I know i could have expressed my point without the religious aspect of it, but the fact that we are very likely to reach this point, its kind of creepy how someone could have predicted that 2000 years ago with a very different reality than ours. Im also glad that Europe is awake to understand the real consequences of all the mess this can bring. If the Nazi regime were happening right now, with all the tecnology we have, they would actually become a 'thousand year reich' and be unstopable. And i guess some greedy entity, someday might forge all the right symbols(digital currency, AI, control of truth, etc..) and become this inevitable hydra we cant escape from.
- Thaumatorium 7y agoIt's a centralized cryptocurrency. That is where the problem is. It's (IMO) not even the corruption of Facebook et al. which is the problem.
- paulcarroty 7y agoTypical government don't want: * easy cross-country payments * non-government money institutions 'Cause money always been the major element of government power. For typical people, I think, Libra and similar are more positive. If you can pay someone in Africa from Japan with minimal fees/headache, it's very cool.
- tgv 7y agoUntil Zuckerberg changes his mind, or something else happens. Then it's back to bitching about governments failing to protect your rights. Money is power, as you imply, and I don't want any of it in Zuckerberg's hands.
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- jayd16 7y agoThat Zuck...is he really trying to turn the crypto community from wanting to abolish banks towards appointing Facebook as the biggest too big to fail bank in history? People seem to be swallowing it, though.
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- SN76477 7y agoWho doesnt want a currency controlled by a private company?
- holler 7y agoor better yet, controlled by a conglomerate of Silicon Valley Tech companies.
- segmondy 7y agoPride comes before the fall. Facebook should have spent much of their energy fixing their image first and not tackling anything like Libra. If they need money they need to focus on products that provide real value without intruding on privacy. They need to study how Microsoft turned around their image. It takes time.
- qubex 7y agoI think the last thing anybody wants is a vast perceivable immoral entity such as Facebook, which is involved in so many scandals and should likely be broken up if anti-trust enforcers had any bite left to them, insinuating themselves into a fundamental function such as the issuance of money and the transactions thereof. It’s like a hybrid of The Circle and Mr Robot’s Evil Corp’s eCoin.
- llcoolv 7y agoThe great firewall of EU :D
- shrimpx 7y agoCalifornia pats itself on the back for passing massive social reform measures while its flagship tech corporations are going to town picking apart people's lives and profiting from them.
- mcthrowaway123z 7y agoProblem solved, use USDC. Not invented here but what did you really have to add anyway? A non-sovereign unit-of-account was just a bad idea for consumer adoption anyway. We still have issues with financial literacy here, why not seek simplicity? I'll tell you why not, because it doesn't satisfy someone's career advancement metrics forced on them by a misguided peer-review/stack-ranking system. What other justification was there to use Libra in lieu of anything else?
- nicodjimenez 7y agoNot the first time Germany “bans” the “banking elite”... Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Well the US banned Germany from ever having a military so I guess the Germans should at least have the freedom to control their stagnant economy however they see fit, and ban US companies from doing business there if they wish.
- mcgwiz 7y agoWhat technical distinctions between Libra and cryptocurrencies running on other permissioned blockchains (like Lumens/Stellar) would prompt this type of regulatory response?
- Y2WATERMARK 7y agoWith a16z, eBay, Mastercard, Stripe, Visa, Spotify, PayPal, Uber, and many others, this is not just about Facebook. https://libra.org/en-US/partners/ https://libra.org/en-US/partners/
- lucb1e 7y agoI guess that's indeed how Facebook likes it.
- gtfratteus 7y agoOther than the fact that they have some sort of block chain backend, how is Libra even different from Venmo? Seems like they're just banning it because they don't understand it.
- ciocan42 7y agoWhat do they mean to "block Libra"? To block merchants using it? If yes, I think it won't matter at all. EU already have real-time electronic payments and mostly everyone uses contactless cards or appley/android pay. I think the benefit of Libra, as peer-to-peer money is valuable for countries in Africa or other parts of the world where cash is king and unsafe (due to high crime rate).
- lucb1e 7y ago> [p2p money may be useful for] parts of the world where cash is king and unsafe (due to high crime rate). How is this going to make a difference? Either I steal your wallet or I steal your... wallet.
- AzzieElbab 7y agoIs EUR a threat to souverinity of the nations then? What is the difference between libra and BTC if not the sad state of affairs wrt to btc's usefulness as an everyday currency?
- lucb1e 7y ago> What is the difference between libra and BTC Libra is owned by a company and Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. But I guess we now not only lost the war on the definitions of 'hacker' (media word for cracker) and 'crypto' (media word for cryptocurrency), but also cryptocurrency (media word for digitally exchangeable currency, e.g. Paypal credits / gift cards / Facebook Libra). We'll have to find a new word to distinguish Facebook-issued digital credits (Libra) from a distributed payment network running on cryptography and rough consensus (Bitcoin).
- AzzieElbab 7y agoto be honest, I am not entirely sure about the precise definition of permissioned-blockchain-based, assets-backed, electronic currency that is also mostly vaporware at this time. The ownership is also non-linear. So, IMHO France and Germany are banning something that not only does not exist but also not even clearly defined. which feels like either a "fu Zuck" or "we are scared"
- w0de 7y ago> fu Zuck > we are scared In my opinion both completely reasonable reactions to Facebook attempting to set up a private currency.
- webninja 7y agoImagine the power of the United States if it controlled the world’s currency through Facebook’s Libra as a reserve currency? Oh wait the U.S. dollar is already the world’s reserve currency and is included in over 50% of the world’s FX transactions. Not much would change.
- galipgokalp 7y agothis is not good
- gooseus 7y agoThis is pretty much exactly what I said the response would be: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252375 Currency and sovereignty are inseparable, have been for all of human civilization.
- ridaj 7y agoWhat are they blocking exactly? Does Libra even exist yet or is it vaporware still? Are they also blocking other crypto currencies?
- Future95 7y agoWhy will they ban such a new wave? I don't agree to their policies.
- xiaodai 7y agoLibra is backed by real world assets, to try and prevent wild fluctuations! Having it backed by real world assets make no sense! Defeats the whole purpose of crypto!
- usr1106 7y agoThis was a political statement. It is far from clear that Libra would be in conflict with existing laws. Probably new laws would need to be written to forbid it. Germany has not had any capital controls after WW2, so I don't take it for granted that such law would pass. On the other side Facebook's reputation in Germany might be even worse than in many other countries, so that could create political pressure, even if Libra is legally not the same as Facebook. Personally as a consumer I see the biggest problem is customer support and accountability. Banks are not known for closing customers accounts and keeping the money. Internet giants are known for no customer support and (automatic?) deactivation of accounts for unspecified violations of terms of service. (Has happened to my Microsoft Drive where I stored 1 file, an encrypted backup. And HN readers have read about more cases)
- smsm42 7y ago"no private entity can claim monetary power, which is inherent to the sovereignty of nations" - very bizzare statement. What's "monetary power"? If it's the power to make certain medium of exchange legal tender, Facebook certainly didn't claim that, moreover, by very definition of it such power can not belong to a private entity - a private entity can not force German government to accept taxes in Libra, for example. The power to set legal tender is inherently governmental power, and there's no need to proclaim this banality as something that isn't obvious by definition. On the other hand, there are thousands real and virtual moneys that exist and can be exchanged for real and virtual goods - from game money to crypto tokens to vouchers to points and miles, and so on. There is literally thousands of entities that create means of exchange that later can be exchanged for goods, and commonly are - and nobody has ever had trouble with that, at least not in any free countries (in USSR, you'd got no miles for flights :). So what changed?
- bawana 7y agoDoes the use of cryptocurrency allow people to evade taxes? Does it allow bad actors to transact dangerous goods? People have good and evil within them. If you give people complete freedom, there will be those who allow evil free reign. Trust but verify./
- vidoc 7y agoI find how Facebook continues to actually push for Libra astounding. I was at Best Buy the other day, and as I was browsing through the home automation shelves, my eyes were quickly attracted by an ugly logo, blue over white with an atrocious font -> "Facebook Portal". While I did remember hearing about Facebook plans to just, build this home camera+microphone connected thing, never would I imagine a remote universe where this product would actually hit the shelves. In fact, I naively always thought there are these teams called product and marketing that among other things are supposed to analyse the market and predict consumer reactions. I might be entirely wrong of course but I never ever imagined a world where such a product could be sold to a customer while being branded Facebook at the same time. I have exactly the same feelings about Libra. A currency controlled by a corporation is a "no thanks" to begin with, but in the case of Libra we are talking about the last corporation anyone with a sane mind would ever consider (a bit of exageration here but let's say, one of the worst). I seriously have a hard time understanding how those evidences are not determined internally before communicating such plans publicly. It is either trolling, or there is a serious problem of isolation and there might be a yes men plague in this company.
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- ajhurliman 7y agoI think the biggest threat that the US government sees in crypto currencies is the ability of adversarial countries (Russia, Iran, etc) to avoid sanctions. If you want to conduct international financial transactions, you must do it in US dollars, and the US government controls that. In the future, if governments (or private entities) can get around that, then the US doesn't really have any non-military leverage. The US government seems interested in Libra because if it grows and becomes the de facto crypto currency in the future, and they have a good amount of control over it, then they don't lose any power. Then again, they might lose control over it while Facebook just hustles everyone for their data and money. France and Germany are probably interested in the international financial systems being stable, but are probably a lot less inclined than the US to bet on Libra because they don't control the US dollar right now anyways, and if anything goes sideways they can't really control FB either.
- buboard 7y agoWhat if facebook allowed libra holders to hold elections and vote for the leadership of the project? They could build the worlds first virtual state, arguably a very popular and populous one.
- Tylereves 7y agoThe beginning of the article reads... "In a joint statement, the two governments affirmed that “no private entity can claim monetary power, which is inherent to the sovereignty of nations”. Is this irony in the US that a private entity, the Federal Reserve, is in just such a position of monetary power. It's all smoke and vaping, chickens and eggs, hemp and da kine.
- taffer 7y agoAlthough the Federal Reserve formally is privately owned, it is a government entity. It was established through a law and is controlled by the Board of Governors, appointed by the US President and approved by the US Senate.
- gringler 7y agoThe problem lies in the unit of account. If Libra becomes one of the global unit of accounts with own money supply outside of other monetary sovereigns reach while still keeping the impact on their economies, then Libra is a direct threat to their economies.
- arisAlexis 7y agoeventually Facebook will need to use something like Ethereum or Bitcoin
- weddpros 7y agoIf the Internet was invented today, it would probably be banned in Europe too
- danielovichdk 7y agoInternet giants should not be able to circumvent or manipulate the economy of any country, by creating a currency. It's fucking mad and wrong by design.
- rohan_shah 7y agoThere is a relatively low understanding among the public of how money is created and how the economy expands in today's modern economy after 1971 Gold standard deviation. If some part of the monetary system is taken over by something that is not money, it is almost impossible to be able to control the amount of money in circulation or inflation or the need for new government money will be uncalculatable. I can not comprehend any country allowing this unless it has got some extremely high tech mechanism to control the amount of money that goes into crypto/libra.
- doomjunky 7y agoOne key difference between a government issued currency and a distributed cryptocurrency is that the former is based on a promise and the latter is based on trust. A government issued currency is based on the promise [1] given by a state that this money must be accepted by everybody else. Everyone can enforce his rights by law. A distributed cryptocurrency is based on trust given mutually by the users. The trust relays on the circumstance that no significant number of participants will abandon their precious investment may it be acquired through mining or purchasing of coins. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promissory_note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promissory_note
- igammarays 7y agoIt’s still “trust” in both cases. One must trust the power of the government making the promise, or rather the global system of governance.
- rohan_shah 7y agoExactly. If a substantial amount of people stop trusting the "promissory state money", then the inflation will be uncontrollable (or not controllable by the state) and the state won't be able to give anything in return of their promissory notes.
- doomjunky 7y ago
- SRTP 7y agoMeanwhile, Bitcoin still hasn't returned their calls.
- igammarays 7y agoI’m wondering if the EU and/or the US would ever release their own government-backed crypto and ban the use of all others.
- accounn 7y agoAI. Investors > Intelligence. Artificial Inflation. AI.
- bubble_talk 7y agoI for one welcome Libra, but only for exactly one purpose. The next time governments bail out another bank, they should just hand them a zillions Libras and ask the banks to collect the actual money from Facebook when they need it. Don't know if that is technically possible, but I would certainly support such a bailout scheme. :-)
- ahmtokta 7y agoI don't expect similar things from other countries. They have something to do with crypto and Blockchain Technologies. Speak your rights
- nsai 7y agowhat does facebook's libra have to offer that current cryptocurrencies don't already?
- p0nce 7y agoAs a french, this is exactly what I expect from my government. Libra is a putsch by a (vampiric) private sector entity that want to concentrate powers.
- vagab0nd 7y agoThis is probably one of the reasons why Satoshi Nakamoto didn't use their real name - If there's a single entity for governments to target, they will.
- padiyar83 7y agoI will show this comment to my grand kids one day - Do whatever you can, think whatever you like - By the end of this decade, we will have at least half a dozen such currencies with a couple of them in active circulation. Whether Facebook succeeds or fails - they have covered so much ground in pushing existing establishment on value of an universal currency, offered by firms that provide services directly to customers - that it now becomes hard to ignore. Crypto currencies such as Ethereum and Bitcoin will ride on the coat tails of these currencies to be truly first class citizens of the banking world.
- zekarlos 7y agois good? is bad? i don't know... :/
- jokoon 7y agoIt reminds me of this off shore city facebook wanted to build or something like that. The problem with big money and big idea people, is that at some point they want to build a new world, but if you ask them about the old world, they don't have a solution, and deep inside they would rather see the old world burn to the ground. They're not even obsessed with power, they just want to build new things like they built an app in 1 month, to see if it could work, because the idea is sound and that it might solve many problems. Those guys always have big big ideas but the truth is that they have absolutely no clue how the actual real world have been working for centuries and what are the real cogs of human society. It's like history doesn't matter, and that silicon made everything completely obsolete. If you understand this, in a way, you can definitely understand why China has a big firewall. And frankly it sounds like the internet has just turned into a big advertising, political propaganda machine that just turn people into consumerist monkeys. Of course it's serving american hegemony pretty well, especially if you look at how google is siphoning data all over the world. I'm glad that countries are realizing that internet is not the cool thing of the 90s anymore. What's weird is that facebook is now a thing for old people, the young doesn't even use facebook. I stopped using facebook in 2010 so I would never have known anyway. Frankly there are days I wish the internet would collapse. GDPR is already setting a big fight, the battle against US digital giants is far from being over and I hope it keeps going.
- dbtc 7y agoThanks, this resonates. But "there are days I wish the internet collapse" made me laugh! After how long will the internet be part of the old world, which the young disrupters wish would burn down so they could build something new instead? Maybe since it existed.
- leegr 7y agoI applaud this decision
- dnprock 7y agoI think Libra is a fine digital currency. It explores semi-centralized/semi-decentralized category. The main problem with Libra is its timing. It's too early. I don't think the market is ready for it. Most people think Bitcoin is working as a digital native currency. In reality, Bitcoin is not doing anything much. Bitcoin community is sticking with digital gold, Store of Value narrative. That makes Bitcoin uninteresting. Normal people cannot really use it. There is a big gap between digital native crypto like Bitcoin and government issued currencies. The market needs to evolve to fill in the gap before we can use a currency like Libra. I outline the problem I see in the below article. I think we need a digital native stablecoin to connect Bitcoin to the real world. https://bitflate.org/post/2019/08/26/bitcoin-missing-link-to-the-world.html https://bitflate.org/post/2019/08/26/bitcoin-missing-link-to...
- joshfraser 7y agoIf it were a real cryptocurrency, that wouldn't be possible.
- tripzilch 7y agoGood. Nobody wants Facebook money. Countries like Germany and France have a better track record being trustworthy than a company like Facebook. Facebook has been proven several times over its very short lifetime to not be trusted.
- Equanimous 7y agoNever in my life I'd even consider to use this social credit coin named Libra, but this is funny.