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When Facebook tried to launch their own coin with Libra (now Diem) it went really badly, and they had lots of big names on-board, too: PayPal, eBay, Mastercard,

by vosper 5y ago

When Facebook tried to launch their own coin with Libra (now Diem) it went really badly, and they had lots of big names on-board, too: PayPal, eBay, Mastercard, Stripe, Visa. Diem seems to be battling on (maybe they want to make it the currency of their "metaverse") but how much do you hear about it these days? And that was when the FTC wasn't chaired by Lisa Khan.

paxys 5y ago
The difference is that Facebook presented a solution in search of a problem. Even today, browsing through the Diem site, there's a ton of vague marketing speak and zero actual things I can do with it. In contrast, "use this coin to buy anything on Amazon" is a massive product from the second it launches.
- tantalor 5y ago
  I doubt sellers will want to accept it. You can't pay your taxes with Bezos-bucks.
  - toast0 5y ago
    I assume when I buy something from an Amazon merchant, Amazon pays them in their local currency, regardless of which currency I chose to pay with. If they've got BezoBucks now, I assume paying with those still sends USD to US vendors and UKP to UK vendors and EUR to European vendors, etc. I still don't see a big upside for Amazon, but merchants wouldn't need to accept it. And of course, Amazon could incentivize merchants to use it. Maybe if you take it, you get 1% more value than if you take USD and spend it on the site/AWS.
    - davidcbc 5y ago
      What value do BezoBucks add in this scenario? They can already convert USD to other currencies to pay their vendors. Just like Facebook's cryptocurrency it's just a solution in search of a problem.
      - dontblink 5y ago
        Hedge against the dollar backed by commodities effectively. Imagine if the dollar fluctuated widely (say because of inflation) but BezosBucks does not. Your buying power stays the same (while BezosBucks becomes more expensive to buy into over time).
      - toast0 5y ago
        Well if I'm a small Amazon merchant, like maybe I just sell my used books, and I'm an Amazon customer too, if Amazon could send me $100 for my monthly sales, and I'm planning to spend $101 on Amazon this month anyway... If they send me 101 Bezobucks instead, I'm happy because they gave me $101 of value; they're happy because for that $101 purchase, they got $100 value; if I paid with a rewards credit card, they would probably get $98-$99. Why it would need to be a cryptocoin thing instead of just a gift card/credit, I don't know. Cryptocoins are hot for reasons that don't resonate with me. Maybe some way around gift card laws, and if they can back into foreign remittances without needing a money transmital license, it could be useful.
  - rualca 5y ago
    Amazon already have an internal currency in the form of its store card. I doubt sellers would say no to a sale if a client offered to purchase it with a blockchain store card.
    - WalterSear 5y ago
      There's no point to using a blockchain in this scenario, and lots of good reasons not to.
  - deevolution 5y ago
    You can't pay taxes in bezos-bucks right now, but you maybe able to in the future https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-11/miami-mayor-pushes-crypto-with-offer-to-pay-workers-in-bitcoin https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-11/miami-may...
- filmgirlcw 5y ago
  Why is that a massive product? Genuine question. The areas I could see that being useful don’t have significant Amazon infrastructure anyway (and that infrastructure would need to be built up for a coin to be valuable), and in the US, Europe, Asia, I can’t see the benefit of an Amazon coin versus any other payment form. But I’m genuinely curious, why is this a massive product for anything more than a weird form of money laundering?
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  What's wrong the coins I got issued from the federal reserve? I can already exchange them for things offered by Amazon and a whole bunch of other places. Why would I want to exchange them for a glorified Amazon gift card?
  - pricees 5y ago
    I would like to have thought BezosBucks, like the Forever Stamp, would have been inflation proof.
  - CoolGuySteve 5y ago
    It's so strange reading these kinds of comments from people who've never transacted in Canadian Tire Money. Fungible scrip coupons have already been successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Tire_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Tire_money
    - robjan 5y ago
      Gift cards and gift certificates are examples of scrip coupons
  - phasnox 5y ago
    Centralized. Manipulated. Unpredictable issuance. Subject to censorship. Among a few.
    - scoopertrooper 5y ago
      > Centralized. Manipulated. There is widespread manipulation in the crypo market. The difference with crypto is that there are no regulations that even attempt to hinder it. https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-join-a-crypto-pump-and-dump-group https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-join-a-crypto-pump-and-dum... https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/lbzdn7/scam_alert_please_report_this_massive_pump_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/lbzdn7/scam... https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-a-pump-and-dump-chat-group-with-over-40-000-members-Left-Telegram-group_fig5_329193706 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-a-pump-and-du... > Unpredictable issuance. Perhaps in theory, but USD has proven to be a far less volatile store of value than Bitcoin and Etherium, which have both been through the equivalent of hyperinflation and hyperdeflation over the past decade. > Subject to censorship. Currency is not subject to censorship, such a thing would be impossible. Certain payment providers have refused to process payments to various individuals, but such a thing would be possible in the crypto space as well.
- Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 5y ago
  Hey, FB employee here (views my own). I don't think Diem is necessarily in search of a problem: - Other payment systems like PayPal/Venmo/Zelle are for P2P domestic use only - you can't send money cross-borders. - Paypal/Venmo requires you to have a bank account. Diem doesn't, and so part of Diem's mission is to serve the un-banked. - This is a little pedantic, but PayPal/Venmo/Zelle/Square Cash are closed ecosystems. You can't send money from one to the other, for example. Diem is a protocol that you can interact with using any wallet, not just Novi. Not being paid to post this or anything. I just think Diem is not well advertised haha
  - phasnox 5y ago
    Nope, the problem with Diem is it's creators do not seem to understand Bitcoins appeal: permissionless transfer of value.
  - deevolution 5y ago
    The solution already exists... there's thousands of crypto coins already. If fb hasn't released a coin yet at this point they never will. They're frozen in ice by the threat of regulatory crackdown.
  - craftinator 5y ago
    > I don't think Diem is necessarily in search of a problem. I think the problem with Diem is not that it doesn't fill a market role, it's that the target market, in general, knows how evil Facebook is, and would prefer a "cleaner" alternative. The problem with doing dodgey stuff with user data for years and years is that you gain a reputation, and then even if a small subset of your massive super organization makes a really good pure product, that product still inherits the stench from the parent. We don't trust the Zuck, and until fairly recently the target market for Diem were almost entirely people tech savvy enough to understand the depths to which Facebook operates in. Imagine if Google came out with a new crypto-coin, and with all the soul and creativity a bloated bureaucracy can muster, called it "GCoin", a "New way to shop and get tracked!". Now, many normal people would stay away from GCoin purely because they know it would be in the GGraveyard in two years, but the rest of the target market would think," Ya know, Google has been absolutely evil this last decade or so, building their business model around surveiling us and toying with our emotions to get us to buy useless shit, while slowly trading away any uniqueness they ever had for fun primary marketing colors in a thousand different patterns. I think I'll pass on this GCoin bullshit...". That's how we feel about Diem. Except possibly not quite as angry, because at least Facebook has given us a figurehead to hate, instead of the faceless, souless, primary colored evil that is Google.
- iamben 5y ago
  More so if it's "use this coin to buy anything on Amazon and get 10% off all regular prices"
WheelsAtLarge 5y ago
Facebook's coin is postponed not dead. Their big problem was that they tried to grab too much power at one time. Having a company create a currency gives it too much power. Think about a company that has billions of users and they all would be forced to use FB's currency. Eventually it would be it's own country with all the power that goes with that. Politicly, no country is going to easily accept that. Now think about a currency that's used internally and slowly it gets released by the company and used by all. By the time people started fighting against it it would be too late to stop.
- thecupisblue 5y ago
  > Now think about a currency that's used internally and slowly it gets released by the company and used by all. You really think facebook employees using it internally would mean other people would accept it too?
numpad0 5y ago
> Facebook, PayPal, eBay I don’t see anything going good, PR wise, with those three in one team

by vosper 5y ago

paxys 5y ago

The difference is that Facebook presented a solution in search of a problem. Even today, browsing through the Diem site, there's a ton of vague marketing speak and zero actual things I can do with it. In contrast, "use this coin to buy anything on Amazon" is a massive product from the second it launches.

tantalor 5y ago
I doubt sellers will want to accept it. You can't pay your taxes with Bezos-bucks.
- toast0 5y ago
  I assume when I buy something from an Amazon merchant, Amazon pays them in their local currency, regardless of which currency I chose to pay with. If they've got BezoBucks now, I assume paying with those still sends USD to US vendors and UKP to UK vendors and EUR to European vendors, etc. I still don't see a big upside for Amazon, but merchants wouldn't need to accept it. And of course, Amazon could incentivize merchants to use it. Maybe if you take it, you get 1% more value than if you take USD and spend it on the site/AWS.
  - davidcbc 5y ago
    What value do BezoBucks add in this scenario? They can already convert USD to other currencies to pay their vendors. Just like Facebook's cryptocurrency it's just a solution in search of a problem.
    - dontblink 5y ago
      Hedge against the dollar backed by commodities effectively. Imagine if the dollar fluctuated widely (say because of inflation) but BezosBucks does not. Your buying power stays the same (while BezosBucks becomes more expensive to buy into over time).
    - toast0 5y ago
      Well if I'm a small Amazon merchant, like maybe I just sell my used books, and I'm an Amazon customer too, if Amazon could send me $100 for my monthly sales, and I'm planning to spend $101 on Amazon this month anyway... If they send me 101 Bezobucks instead, I'm happy because they gave me $101 of value; they're happy because for that $101 purchase, they got $100 value; if I paid with a rewards credit card, they would probably get $98-$99. Why it would need to be a cryptocoin thing instead of just a gift card/credit, I don't know. Cryptocoins are hot for reasons that don't resonate with me. Maybe some way around gift card laws, and if they can back into foreign remittances without needing a money transmital license, it could be useful.
- rualca 5y ago
  Amazon already have an internal currency in the form of its store card. I doubt sellers would say no to a sale if a client offered to purchase it with a blockchain store card.
  - WalterSear 5y ago
    There's no point to using a blockchain in this scenario, and lots of good reasons not to.
- deevolution 5y ago
  You can't pay taxes in bezos-bucks right now, but you maybe able to in the future https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-11/miami-mayor-pushes-crypto-with-offer-to-pay-workers-in-bitcoin https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-11/miami-may...
filmgirlcw 5y ago
Why is that a massive product? Genuine question. The areas I could see that being useful don’t have significant Amazon infrastructure anyway (and that infrastructure would need to be built up for a coin to be valuable), and in the US, Europe, Asia, I can’t see the benefit of an Amazon coin versus any other payment form. But I’m genuinely curious, why is this a massive product for anything more than a weird form of money laundering?
scoopertrooper 5y ago
What's wrong the coins I got issued from the federal reserve? I can already exchange them for things offered by Amazon and a whole bunch of other places. Why would I want to exchange them for a glorified Amazon gift card?
- pricees 5y ago
  I would like to have thought BezosBucks, like the Forever Stamp, would have been inflation proof.
- CoolGuySteve 5y ago
  It's so strange reading these kinds of comments from people who've never transacted in Canadian Tire Money. Fungible scrip coupons have already been successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Tire_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Tire_money
  - robjan 5y ago
    Gift cards and gift certificates are examples of scrip coupons
- phasnox 5y ago
  Centralized. Manipulated. Unpredictable issuance. Subject to censorship. Among a few.
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    > Centralized. Manipulated. There is widespread manipulation in the crypo market. The difference with crypto is that there are no regulations that even attempt to hinder it. https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-join-a-crypto-pump-and-dump-group https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-join-a-crypto-pump-and-dum... https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/lbzdn7/scam_alert_please_report_this_massive_pump_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/lbzdn7/scam... https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-a-pump-and-dump-chat-group-with-over-40-000-members-Left-Telegram-group_fig5_329193706 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-a-pump-and-du... > Unpredictable issuance. Perhaps in theory, but USD has proven to be a far less volatile store of value than Bitcoin and Etherium, which have both been through the equivalent of hyperinflation and hyperdeflation over the past decade. > Subject to censorship. Currency is not subject to censorship, such a thing would be impossible. Certain payment providers have refused to process payments to various individuals, but such a thing would be possible in the crypto space as well.
Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 5y ago
Hey, FB employee here (views my own). I don't think Diem is necessarily in search of a problem: - Other payment systems like PayPal/Venmo/Zelle are for P2P domestic use only - you can't send money cross-borders. - Paypal/Venmo requires you to have a bank account. Diem doesn't, and so part of Diem's mission is to serve the un-banked. - This is a little pedantic, but PayPal/Venmo/Zelle/Square Cash are closed ecosystems. You can't send money from one to the other, for example. Diem is a protocol that you can interact with using any wallet, not just Novi. Not being paid to post this or anything. I just think Diem is not well advertised haha
- phasnox 5y ago
  Nope, the problem with Diem is it's creators do not seem to understand Bitcoins appeal: permissionless transfer of value.
- deevolution 5y ago
  The solution already exists... there's thousands of crypto coins already. If fb hasn't released a coin yet at this point they never will. They're frozen in ice by the threat of regulatory crackdown.
- craftinator 5y ago
  > I don't think Diem is necessarily in search of a problem. I think the problem with Diem is not that it doesn't fill a market role, it's that the target market, in general, knows how evil Facebook is, and would prefer a "cleaner" alternative. The problem with doing dodgey stuff with user data for years and years is that you gain a reputation, and then even if a small subset of your massive super organization makes a really good pure product, that product still inherits the stench from the parent. We don't trust the Zuck, and until fairly recently the target market for Diem were almost entirely people tech savvy enough to understand the depths to which Facebook operates in. Imagine if Google came out with a new crypto-coin, and with all the soul and creativity a bloated bureaucracy can muster, called it "GCoin", a "New way to shop and get tracked!". Now, many normal people would stay away from GCoin purely because they know it would be in the GGraveyard in two years, but the rest of the target market would think," Ya know, Google has been absolutely evil this last decade or so, building their business model around surveiling us and toying with our emotions to get us to buy useless shit, while slowly trading away any uniqueness they ever had for fun primary marketing colors in a thousand different patterns. I think I'll pass on this GCoin bullshit...". That's how we feel about Diem. Except possibly not quite as angry, because at least Facebook has given us a figurehead to hate, instead of the faceless, souless, primary colored evil that is Google.
iamben 5y ago
More so if it's "use this coin to buy anything on Amazon and get 10% off all regular prices"

WheelsAtLarge 5y ago

Facebook's coin is postponed not dead. Their big problem was that they tried to grab too much power at one time. Having a company create a currency gives it too much power. Think about a company that has billions of users and they all would be forced to use FB's currency. Eventually it would be it's own country with all the power that goes with that. Politicly, no country is going to easily accept that. Now think about a currency that's used internally and slowly it gets released by the company and used by all. By the time people started fighting against it it would be too late to stop.

thecupisblue 5y ago
> Now think about a currency that's used internally and slowly it gets released by the company and used by all. You really think facebook employees using it internally would mean other people would accept it too?

numpad0 5y ago

> Facebook, PayPal, eBay I don’t see anything going good, PR wise, with those three in one team