22 ms·
Ok, so let's focus on the underlying idea, without the "Facebook is trying to rebrand their evil brand" cruft. Basically, I think the underlying idea is valuab
by tomp 6y ago
Ok, so let's focus on the underlying idea, without the "Facebook is trying to rebrand their evil brand" cruft.
Basically, I think the underlying idea is valuable - low-cost, fast, reliable, accessible money transfers - clearly something missing right now in this world, even for the "global rich" (citizens of first-world countries), let alone for the "unbanked". It could even scale even more to a money store but that's basically being a bank, which is related but somewhat orthogonal (e.g. both Revolut and TransferWise started as mostly money-sending services and are now moving towards the "bank" stage).
So, my thoughts / questions are the following:
1) Is there a reason this is tied to the blockchain? For most purposes, blockchain without proof of work is just a glorified git repository, and I'm pretty sure that not even the most law-abiding citizens want all their transactions to be public.
2) Is there a reason this would be tied to a company, instead of being run by e.g. a charity? I understand why Facebook / Apple might be more successful with launching this than e.g. TransferWise (they can utilize their platform to push this (or any other) idea to a massive userbase), but really there's no underlying reason why you'd want this to be run by a non-financial company (and an ad ("use people's data to manipulate them") company) and many reasons why you wouldn't want to comingle your financial data with the likes of Facebook / Google / Apple.
3) Why a "new currency" ("stablecoin")? I understand that it might have some desirable properties but I'm pretty sure that most people would be negatively surprised if their "stable" coins started losing value (in terms of their local currency). Also, I'd say that most people don't even care/think about "FX rates" etc. and those that do are mainly currency traders / "speculators". So I envision the "ideal" system to be basically just an app displaying "sending 100EUR to person A in country Z will cost you 0.3% and the payment will arrive in 20 minutes" and the other person seeing "person B sent you 8919 INR".
4) I'm sure there are many issues with fraud/reversible transactions/KYC/anti-terrorism/anti-money-laundering that would need to be resolved somehow.
I think this is an ideal case scenario for a charity - an almost-government (non-profit, "for the people") organisation handling an area of "social tech" that global governments aren't tackling (because they aren't incentivized to) but fundamentally all the pieces of technology are there.
If anyone is interested in funding / founding such an organization, let me know.
- baby 6y ago1) think of it as a centralized database that needs replication, you’d be a bit worried if this central place got attacked, so then you need some gossip-based protocol in place to allow some users to police the system. Consensus is a simple one because it allows most users to trust that consensus was agreed on correctly, as opposed to systems like transparency protocols that require users to more willingly engage in policing. 2) it is tied to non profits as well! The whole point is to fund this project by companies, no a company 3) we will support single currencies (a USD coin, for example) 4) that’s what we’re working on!
- tomp 6y ago2) Does Facebook (or any other for-profit company) get access to the data (now or ever in the future)? 3) So if I want to send money (from say GBP) to someone in Japan, what would happen? Is the FX exchange seamless or will I need to use some intermediary coin?
- randall 6y ago2) I don't believe so. 3) The hope is you don't have to use an intermediary coin.
- davidgerard 6y agoThey have declared that they will not access the data. However, Facebook makes extensive use of shadow profiles of people who aren't even Facebook customers. They could certainly add Diem blockchain data to those, as they will have access to said blockchain via Novi, their Diem wallet. David Marcus and Mark Zuckerberg have both stated that data from Novi will not go to the Facebook advertising engine. However, Zuckerberg and Facebook's track record on such promises is that they consistently do this anyway. Then Zuckerberg apologises, then he does it again. Just by looking at Facebook's past behaviour, you can assume that an important purpose for Diem is to collect personal information. Because everything they do is to collect personal information.
- 6y ago