23 ms·

WhatsApp Launches Instant Cryptocurrency Payments in the US

125 points by chheplo 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Users who are paid this way receive USDP, which can be withdrawn to a bank account in its equivalent value in US dollars. I feel like I’m missing something. How is this system any different than a centralized system like PayPal or any other traditional payment system, where users have a USD balance and can withdraw it to their bank accounts? If the company secretly removed the cryptocurrency backend and replaced it with a centralized database, would anything at all change for the users? Or would it be functionally identical?
- throw8932894 5y ago
  Paypal charges 3% and randomly bans accounts.
  - bierjunge 5y ago
    Whatsapp sells my data for profit and allows ME to ban innocent accounts for 24 hours.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    PayPal fees are zero when money is sent as a “gift” and isn’t coming from a credit card. That seems to be equivalent to this model. WhatsApp has to play by the same banking rules as PayPal, so they’re not automatically exempted from the same regulations around prohibited transactions. These rules are still enforced at the bank layer.
- johanneskanybal 5y ago
  Pick your middleman. Using a crypto layer internally means you can circumvent traditional payment rails which means if you're in American growth-tech where revenue isn't a thing you can just remove all fee's for a while. Paypal could do the same for sure but chose not to. Disagree with the notion they won't be shutting people out of the network when needed, that's not grounded in reality.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > which means if you're in American growth-tech where revenue isn't a thing you can just remove all fee's for a while. Paypal could do the same for sure but chose not to. PayPal doesn’t have any fees if you send money as a “gift” (that is, forgo any fraud protections) and you don’t use a credit card.
  - throwoutway 5y ago
    > Disagree with the notion they won't be shutting people out of the network when needed, that's not grounded in reality Facebook is the only one with access to write to this chain correct? If so, they can shut people out of their chain by just disabling their Facebook, WhatsApp, or meta accounts. That’s grounded in reality
  - panarky 5y ago
    Why did you put an apostrophe in "fee's" but not in "rails"? This isn't a grammar-nazi criticism because I frequently make similar mistakes with pluralization. It strikes me that there must be some cognitive explanation for why some plurals seem to need an apostrophe when other plurals don't.
    - toast0 5y ago
      Style rules used to suggest an apostrophe for initialized items such as C.D.'s for sale. Of course, modern style rules suggest CDs for sale (but don't tell the New York Times).
      - leephillips 5y ago
        The Times’ style guide would render more than one compact disc as C.D.s (no apostrophe, but with periods in intialisms). Do you have a link to any authoritative style guide that suggested “C.D.’s”? The Times' guide (2015) demands apostrophes to pluralize single letters: “the word has two t’s”. I think that’s silly, just as their use of quotation marks rather than italics for book titles. Here is a quote from the 2015 edition of the Style Guide: “G.I. The colloquial term, derived from government issue, for American soldiers. The plural is G.I.s”
- jd115 5y ago
  The timing of this is not accidental and Facebook is not acting on its own accord here. This is a move by the Russian mafia/state to make it easier to evade the imminent cut-off from SWIFT and global financial networks.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - soco 5y ago
    Why imminent cut-off? I mean, maybe Putin decides to invade Ukraine and maybe Biden decides to push for the promised cut-off, but why would Meta help them, and how would Meta be exempted from said cut-off?
  - panarky 5y ago
    Just because Russia is a mafia state doesn't mean they're behind Facebook's payments initiatives. To make this sound a bit less like mad conspiratorial ravings, could you flesh out how Whatsapp would allow Russian banks, government agencies, companies and oligarchs to move large quantities of money if they're disconnected from SWIFT? For example, how would Russia get around the fact that Whatsapp is only offering this in the United States? How would Russians get fiat currency in and out? How would Russians circumvent the very low transaction limits?
    - jd115 5y ago
      Oh, but this isn't for the Russian people! It's for the so called "oligarchs" and their families who - surprise - don't actually live in Russia! They like America and western Europe much better. And if you don't realise that Russian government / KGB is VERY MUCH behind Facebook and its initiatives, I'm afraid you have quite a bit of catching up to do.
      - qeternity 5y ago
        > And if you don't realise that Russian government / KGB is VERY MUCH behind Facebook and its initiatives, I'm afraid you have quite a bit of catching up to do. Uh, I have to say, this is a new one for me. What's the theory here?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ItsBob 5y ago
Is this jumping on the bandwagon or genuinely beneficial? I'm willing to give FB the benefit of the doubt here. However, I'm a total rookie when it comes to crypto, blockchain etc. and giving a company that permabans via ai with no human fallback control of payments seems like a bad idea to me.
- arcatech 5y ago
  Why would you give FB of all companies the benefit of the doubt?
  - ItsBob 5y ago
    I'm trying to be a bit more positive these days given all the negativity surrounding us but I'm under no illusion that FB's raison d'etre is data-gathering and advertising at all costs, even to the detriment human life. I get it. I also don't use social media at all so I'm not their customer. It's a long-shot, I know but I thought I'd chuck it out there. I wanted to find out if there is a potential genuine benefit to this system without all the anti-FB stuff getting in the way.
    - TomSwirly 5y ago
      > I'm trying to be a bit more positive these days given all the negativity surrounding us Which negativity has been brought to us by Facebook...
- mdoms 5y ago
  > Is this jumping on the bandwagon or genuinely beneficial? Considering that to this date blockchains and cryptocurrencies have not solved a single problem better than their "legacy" counterparts, I'd say the former.
leodriesch 5y ago
Why crypto? WhatsApp users are not particular tech-savvy, why not just use Fiat? The use of crypto in here just makes it more difficult to understand for the end user, or am I missing something?
- yannoninator 5y ago
  why not both? nothing wrong with having both at all.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > Why crypto? Plausible claims to being exempted from the rules for a while?
- crate_barre 5y ago
  Sort of frees up Facebook from additional government oversight. Let the crypto people handle that fight.
- josefx 5y ago
  Hard to understand for the end user, barely regulated, as an international multi billion dollar company what more do you need? Except for even less regulation, but that is a given.
- reginold 5y ago
  There are four options for Facebook to add payments: 1. Their own Paypal-like system 2. Partner with a Paypal 3. Their own cryptocurrency (ie Libra) 4. Partner with a cryptocurrency Do I have that right? And for some reason #4 allows them to be global and not face antitrust concerns in the USA.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - TomSwirly 5y ago
    Apparently so. How that works as a matter of law escapes me. Had you told me in the 1980s that anonymous individuals would create thousands of new currencies backed for the most part by nothing at all, with the stated intent of evading all government regulation (what I would have called "crime" back then), and that the regulatory agencies would simply pretend it didn't exist, I would have laughed.
xyzzy123 5y ago
If you think a bit bigger and imagine a worldwide audience (basically the defining feature of whatsapp), the initial killer apps here are remittances and the ability to build out marketplaces and stores. Assume the goal is global wechat-like commerce. IMHO this is huge. The regulatory interactions will be formidable because every country will want to get its fingers into this, money and who gets it is ultimately politics. The crypto bit lets you work around locally broken financial systems, but a lot of negotiating with governments will still be required. Privacy will necessarily be nonexistent, to get to global reach all transactions will have to be at least as legible as current bank transfers to involved governments. This is not "WhatsApp's fault" per se, it's just the world we live in.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  What makes it so huge in your opinion? PayPal and Venmo and the like already make this very easy, internationally there are some challenges, but it’s not technical limitations so much as legal/compliance which doesn’t go away with blockchain.
  - The_Colonel 5y ago
    > What makes it so huge in your opinion? Whatsapp has 2 billion users, PayPal and Venmo probably only small fraction of that. On Whatsapp you already have your friends in the list, on PayPal I personally have nobody. It's an additional hurdle, I've never actually sent money to friend/family through PayPal.
    - thehappypm 5y ago
      Sure, but is this any more interesting than a partnership where WhatsApp lets people PayPal money to other WhatsApp users?
      - fragmede 5y ago
        From a individual perspective, if you are in the US and all of your friends are in the US and are able to get PayPal accounts, and you don't personally use WhatsApp and see it as just another messaging service, the practical answer to your question, for you, personally, is no. However, thinking of this only in terms of this this will affect you is short-sighted, and apes other hot takes that went down in Internet history (HN on DropBox, /. on the iPod). The broader context for this (as discussed in other threads here) is what makes it interesting. Similarly, from a product POV, Twitter doesn't look like much - it's the users that are on there that makes it interesting.
clvx 5y ago
Can someone explain what’s the difference between this and when Telegram tried to introduce their coin?
- MagnumOpus 5y ago
  Scale. Telegram has 50m users that use it seriously and all of them also use other messaging. Whatsapp has 1-2 billion, and for a majority of them it is their main or only messaging application. 20x larger scale means 20x more clout to bribe/lobby lawmakers and to get around the KYC/AML rules that are the main obstacle in these sorts of things.
- qqii 5y ago
  The other major difference is their use of Paxos USD, a stablecoin that's tied to the dollar.
pavlov 5y ago
This is fundamentally a centralized system like PayPal. Most transactions never touch crypto. Meta/FB keeps some USDP at hand for those very few users who actually want to do crypto withdrawals. Facebook has been trying to get payments into WhatsApp for a long time. This is just the latest experiment to try to find something that would be acceptable to local regulators while simultaneously extracting some value from the smoking ruins of the Libra/Diem/Calibra/Novi fiasco.
- thebean11 5y ago
  Do you have a source for them only keeping "some" at hand? You brought up PayPal, which holds 100% of users crypto through an intermediary (Paxos).
  - skybrian 5y ago
    Perhaps "on hand" means "in a hot wallet?"
  - reginold 5y ago
    The Novi site for the Whatsapp partnership says this: > "When you add money to your Novi account, we convert it to USDP (Pax Dollar), a stable digital currency issued by Paxos Trust Company, a regulated financial institution. USDP is designed to have a stable value relative to the US dollar. So on Novi, 1 USDP is equal to 1 US dollar." To me that implies it's done on chain...I guess it could just be in their centralized database though. Curious what the Whatsapp UI does for moments when USPD hits $0.99 like December 1 2021 when it hit $0.989. Source: https://www.novi.com/WhatsApp https://www.novi.com/WhatsApp
    - vmception 5y ago
      Protip: this is how Tether works but people in the west dont want to believe that people in the east actually deposit fiat into bitfinex. Multiple US regulators came to the same conclusion. One regulator said “well you usually create tethers 1:1 in response to deposits the vast majority of times and vast majority of amounts, but for the brief few times you didnt at least put a disclaimer up, also here is a fine for not having the disclaimer up”
aww_dang 5y ago
Are there not already tip bots for altcoins on WhatsApp? Interesting how this is being promoted.
agentultra 5y ago
It's not like FB/Meta can't afford to participate in the US (or any other legal, regulated) payment networks and protect their end users and intermediaries. They could easily cover the cost of fees if this was a product they actually believed in and could make revenue from.
codethief 5y ago
When Signal integrated MobileCoin last year (in the UK), there was a lot of uproar here on HN – some well-founded ("Why equip a slick and lightweight standalone app for privacy-preserving messaging with payments, a feature that adds bloat and will likely attract government regulation and oversight?"), some less so ("The Signal developers are just scamming everyone"). Given WhatsApp's move toward a WeChat-like app now, I think some of the criticism against Signal/MobileCoin needs to be reconsidered: Moxie et al. might have seen that coming (which I guess wasn't too difficult in light of WhatsApp's involvement in payments in India) and they are possibly just trying to stay competitive in the long term. Addendum: Not that I'm a huge fan of the idea of crypto payments in Signal – I am not. But if the market (and especially the network effect of messaging apps) dictates it, what can they do? Moreover, I'm sure the Signal people looked into whether it'd be better/possible to move the payments feature into a second, optional app but there might have been architectural or security reasons not to do so(?)
- RL_Quine 5y ago
  There's nothing to reconsider, MobileCoin/Signal is still a terrible idea and was responsible for them withholding their open source code, for a year, with absolutely no explanation at the time or in retrospective. It's nothing but a money grab with zero expectation that this is something users want, or will use.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    > zero expectation that this is something users want, or will use. Facebook Messenger already has this feature using fiat, Apple lets you send money via iMessage, Telegram already has this feature. Seems like adding payments is staying competitive with features other messaging utilities has. It might also be a money grab, but something can be two things at once.
    - TomSwirly 5y ago
      Sending money is something that almost everyone needs. Sending cryptocurrencies is something almost no one needs. And if you did need it, why wouldn't you just send it directly from your wallet, without the middleman? Isn't that the point of cryptocurrencies?
danguson 5y ago
It would be great if other platforms starts implementing crypto payments.
dewiz 5y ago
I wonder how people will deal with this at the time of tax return, when one has to disclose all crypto transactions. Hopefully since this coin provides no gain, one can just ignore it as much as one doesn’t list all USD transactions. Surely in terms of taxes and transparency this could be a big deal
drummer 5y ago
Signal launched payments worldwide a few weeks ago using MobileCoin. I suggest staying away from Facebook's surveilance coin.
ruforrel 5y ago
We need a WAP token.
coolspot 5y ago
I think this will get some heat from regulators. Transactions can be either off-chain, or on-chain. With former it’s not much different than a database, with latter it’s becomes scammer/terrorist/drug dealer dream. Also on-chain transfer costs ~$20 in a quiet hour, e.g here is a transfer of ~$250 for a fee of $20: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7d366b14c99ca6eb457109000f637e59bb1305b6a0064f36b58f3c3677ea251e https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7d366b14c99ca6eb457109000f637e59bb... USDP whitepaper: https://insights.paxos.com/hubfs/USDP-whitepaper.pdf https://insights.paxos.com/hubfs/USDP-whitepaper.pdf Contract source: https://github.com/paxosglobal/usdp-contracts https://github.com/paxosglobal/usdp-contracts Etherscan: https://etherscan.io/token/0x8e870d67f660d95d5be530380d0ec0bd388289e1 https://etherscan.io/token/0x8e870d67f660d95d5be530380d0ec0b...

125 points by chheplo 5y ago

> Users who are paid this way receive USDP, which can be withdrawn to a bank account in its equivalent value in US dollars. I feel like I’m missing something. How is this system any different than a centralized system like PayPal or any other traditional payment system, where users have a USD balance and can withdraw it to their bank accounts? If the company secretly removed the cryptocurrency backend and replaced it with a centralized database, would anything at all change for the users? Or would it be functionally identical?

throw8932894 5y ago
Paypal charges 3% and randomly bans accounts.
- bierjunge 5y ago
  Whatsapp sells my data for profit and allows ME to ban innocent accounts for 24 hours.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  PayPal fees are zero when money is sent as a “gift” and isn’t coming from a credit card. That seems to be equivalent to this model. WhatsApp has to play by the same banking rules as PayPal, so they’re not automatically exempted from the same regulations around prohibited transactions. These rules are still enforced at the bank layer.
johanneskanybal 5y ago
Pick your middleman. Using a crypto layer internally means you can circumvent traditional payment rails which means if you're in American growth-tech where revenue isn't a thing you can just remove all fee's for a while. Paypal could do the same for sure but chose not to. Disagree with the notion they won't be shutting people out of the network when needed, that's not grounded in reality.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > which means if you're in American growth-tech where revenue isn't a thing you can just remove all fee's for a while. Paypal could do the same for sure but chose not to. PayPal doesn’t have any fees if you send money as a “gift” (that is, forgo any fraud protections) and you don’t use a credit card.
- throwoutway 5y ago
  > Disagree with the notion they won't be shutting people out of the network when needed, that's not grounded in reality Facebook is the only one with access to write to this chain correct? If so, they can shut people out of their chain by just disabling their Facebook, WhatsApp, or meta accounts. That’s grounded in reality
- panarky 5y ago
  Why did you put an apostrophe in "fee's" but not in "rails"? This isn't a grammar-nazi criticism because I frequently make similar mistakes with pluralization. It strikes me that there must be some cognitive explanation for why some plurals seem to need an apostrophe when other plurals don't.
  - toast0 5y ago
    Style rules used to suggest an apostrophe for initialized items such as C.D.'s for sale. Of course, modern style rules suggest CDs for sale (but don't tell the New York Times).
    - leephillips 5y ago
      The Times’ style guide would render more than one compact disc as C.D.s (no apostrophe, but with periods in intialisms). Do you have a link to any authoritative style guide that suggested “C.D.’s”? The Times' guide (2015) demands apostrophes to pluralize single letters: “the word has two t’s”. I think that’s silly, just as their use of quotation marks rather than italics for book titles. Here is a quote from the 2015 edition of the Style Guide: “G.I. The colloquial term, derived from government issue, for American soldiers. The plural is G.I.s”
jd115 5y ago
The timing of this is not accidental and Facebook is not acting on its own accord here. This is a move by the Russian mafia/state to make it easier to evade the imminent cut-off from SWIFT and global financial networks.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- soco 5y ago
  Why imminent cut-off? I mean, maybe Putin decides to invade Ukraine and maybe Biden decides to push for the promised cut-off, but why would Meta help them, and how would Meta be exempted from said cut-off?
- panarky 5y ago
  Just because Russia is a mafia state doesn't mean they're behind Facebook's payments initiatives. To make this sound a bit less like mad conspiratorial ravings, could you flesh out how Whatsapp would allow Russian banks, government agencies, companies and oligarchs to move large quantities of money if they're disconnected from SWIFT? For example, how would Russia get around the fact that Whatsapp is only offering this in the United States? How would Russians get fiat currency in and out? How would Russians circumvent the very low transaction limits?
  - jd115 5y ago
    Oh, but this isn't for the Russian people! It's for the so called "oligarchs" and their families who - surprise - don't actually live in Russia! They like America and western Europe much better. And if you don't realise that Russian government / KGB is VERY MUCH behind Facebook and its initiatives, I'm afraid you have quite a bit of catching up to do.
    - qeternity 5y ago
      > And if you don't realise that Russian government / KGB is VERY MUCH behind Facebook and its initiatives, I'm afraid you have quite a bit of catching up to do. Uh, I have to say, this is a new one for me. What's the theory here?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ItsBob 5y ago

Is this jumping on the bandwagon or genuinely beneficial? I'm willing to give FB the benefit of the doubt here. However, I'm a total rookie when it comes to crypto, blockchain etc. and giving a company that permabans via ai with no human fallback control of payments seems like a bad idea to me.

arcatech 5y ago
Why would you give FB of all companies the benefit of the doubt?
- ItsBob 5y ago
  I'm trying to be a bit more positive these days given all the negativity surrounding us but I'm under no illusion that FB's raison d'etre is data-gathering and advertising at all costs, even to the detriment human life. I get it. I also don't use social media at all so I'm not their customer. It's a long-shot, I know but I thought I'd chuck it out there. I wanted to find out if there is a potential genuine benefit to this system without all the anti-FB stuff getting in the way.
  - TomSwirly 5y ago
    > I'm trying to be a bit more positive these days given all the negativity surrounding us Which negativity has been brought to us by Facebook...
mdoms 5y ago
> Is this jumping on the bandwagon or genuinely beneficial? Considering that to this date blockchains and cryptocurrencies have not solved a single problem better than their "legacy" counterparts, I'd say the former.

leodriesch 5y ago

Why crypto? WhatsApp users are not particular tech-savvy, why not just use Fiat? The use of crypto in here just makes it more difficult to understand for the end user, or am I missing something?

yannoninator 5y ago
why not both? nothing wrong with having both at all.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> Why crypto? Plausible claims to being exempted from the rules for a while?
crate_barre 5y ago
Sort of frees up Facebook from additional government oversight. Let the crypto people handle that fight.
josefx 5y ago
Hard to understand for the end user, barely regulated, as an international multi billion dollar company what more do you need? Except for even less regulation, but that is a given.
reginold 5y ago
There are four options for Facebook to add payments: 1. Their own Paypal-like system 2. Partner with a Paypal 3. Their own cryptocurrency (ie Libra) 4. Partner with a cryptocurrency Do I have that right? And for some reason #4 allows them to be global and not face antitrust concerns in the USA.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- TomSwirly 5y ago
  Apparently so. How that works as a matter of law escapes me. Had you told me in the 1980s that anonymous individuals would create thousands of new currencies backed for the most part by nothing at all, with the stated intent of evading all government regulation (what I would have called "crime" back then), and that the regulatory agencies would simply pretend it didn't exist, I would have laughed.

xyzzy123 5y ago

If you think a bit bigger and imagine a worldwide audience (basically the defining feature of whatsapp), the initial killer apps here are remittances and the ability to build out marketplaces and stores. Assume the goal is global wechat-like commerce. IMHO this is huge. The regulatory interactions will be formidable because every country will want to get its fingers into this, money and who gets it is ultimately politics. The crypto bit lets you work around locally broken financial systems, but a lot of negotiating with governments will still be required. Privacy will necessarily be nonexistent, to get to global reach all transactions will have to be at least as legible as current bank transfers to involved governments. This is not "WhatsApp's fault" per se, it's just the world we live in.

thehappypm 5y ago
What makes it so huge in your opinion? PayPal and Venmo and the like already make this very easy, internationally there are some challenges, but it’s not technical limitations so much as legal/compliance which doesn’t go away with blockchain.
- The_Colonel 5y ago
  > What makes it so huge in your opinion? Whatsapp has 2 billion users, PayPal and Venmo probably only small fraction of that. On Whatsapp you already have your friends in the list, on PayPal I personally have nobody. It's an additional hurdle, I've never actually sent money to friend/family through PayPal.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    Sure, but is this any more interesting than a partnership where WhatsApp lets people PayPal money to other WhatsApp users?
    - fragmede 5y ago
      From a individual perspective, if you are in the US and all of your friends are in the US and are able to get PayPal accounts, and you don't personally use WhatsApp and see it as just another messaging service, the practical answer to your question, for you, personally, is no. However, thinking of this only in terms of this this will affect you is short-sighted, and apes other hot takes that went down in Internet history (HN on DropBox, /. on the iPod). The broader context for this (as discussed in other threads here) is what makes it interesting. Similarly, from a product POV, Twitter doesn't look like much - it's the users that are on there that makes it interesting.

clvx 5y ago

Can someone explain what’s the difference between this and when Telegram tried to introduce their coin?

MagnumOpus 5y ago
Scale. Telegram has 50m users that use it seriously and all of them also use other messaging. Whatsapp has 1-2 billion, and for a majority of them it is their main or only messaging application. 20x larger scale means 20x more clout to bribe/lobby lawmakers and to get around the KYC/AML rules that are the main obstacle in these sorts of things.
qqii 5y ago
The other major difference is their use of Paxos USD, a stablecoin that's tied to the dollar.

pavlov 5y ago

This is fundamentally a centralized system like PayPal. Most transactions never touch crypto. Meta/FB keeps some USDP at hand for those very few users who actually want to do crypto withdrawals. Facebook has been trying to get payments into WhatsApp for a long time. This is just the latest experiment to try to find something that would be acceptable to local regulators while simultaneously extracting some value from the smoking ruins of the Libra/Diem/Calibra/Novi fiasco.

thebean11 5y ago
Do you have a source for them only keeping "some" at hand? You brought up PayPal, which holds 100% of users crypto through an intermediary (Paxos).
- skybrian 5y ago
  Perhaps "on hand" means "in a hot wallet?"
- reginold 5y ago
  The Novi site for the Whatsapp partnership says this: > "When you add money to your Novi account, we convert it to USDP (Pax Dollar), a stable digital currency issued by Paxos Trust Company, a regulated financial institution. USDP is designed to have a stable value relative to the US dollar. So on Novi, 1 USDP is equal to 1 US dollar." To me that implies it's done on chain...I guess it could just be in their centralized database though. Curious what the Whatsapp UI does for moments when USPD hits $0.99 like December 1 2021 when it hit $0.989. Source: https://www.novi.com/WhatsApp https://www.novi.com/WhatsApp
  - vmception 5y ago
    Protip: this is how Tether works but people in the west dont want to believe that people in the east actually deposit fiat into bitfinex. Multiple US regulators came to the same conclusion. One regulator said “well you usually create tethers 1:1 in response to deposits the vast majority of times and vast majority of amounts, but for the brief few times you didnt at least put a disclaimer up, also here is a fine for not having the disclaimer up”

aww_dang 5y ago

Are there not already tip bots for altcoins on WhatsApp? Interesting how this is being promoted.

agentultra 5y ago

It's not like FB/Meta can't afford to participate in the US (or any other legal, regulated) payment networks and protect their end users and intermediaries. They could easily cover the cost of fees if this was a product they actually believed in and could make revenue from.

codethief 5y ago

When Signal integrated MobileCoin last year (in the UK), there was a lot of uproar here on HN – some well-founded ("Why equip a slick and lightweight standalone app for privacy-preserving messaging with payments, a feature that adds bloat and will likely attract government regulation and oversight?"), some less so ("The Signal developers are just scamming everyone"). Given WhatsApp's move toward a WeChat-like app now, I think some of the criticism against Signal/MobileCoin needs to be reconsidered: Moxie et al. might have seen that coming (which I guess wasn't too difficult in light of WhatsApp's involvement in payments in India) and they are possibly just trying to stay competitive in the long term. Addendum: Not that I'm a huge fan of the idea of crypto payments in Signal – I am not. But if the market (and especially the network effect of messaging apps) dictates it, what can they do? Moreover, I'm sure the Signal people looked into whether it'd be better/possible to move the payments feature into a second, optional app but there might have been architectural or security reasons not to do so(?)

RL_Quine 5y ago
There's nothing to reconsider, MobileCoin/Signal is still a terrible idea and was responsible for them withholding their open source code, for a year, with absolutely no explanation at the time or in retrospective. It's nothing but a money grab with zero expectation that this is something users want, or will use.
- fragmede 5y ago
  > zero expectation that this is something users want, or will use. Facebook Messenger already has this feature using fiat, Apple lets you send money via iMessage, Telegram already has this feature. Seems like adding payments is staying competitive with features other messaging utilities has. It might also be a money grab, but something can be two things at once.
  - TomSwirly 5y ago
    Sending money is something that almost everyone needs. Sending cryptocurrencies is something almost no one needs. And if you did need it, why wouldn't you just send it directly from your wallet, without the middleman? Isn't that the point of cryptocurrencies?

danguson 5y ago

It would be great if other platforms starts implementing crypto payments.

dewiz 5y ago

I wonder how people will deal with this at the time of tax return, when one has to disclose all crypto transactions. Hopefully since this coin provides no gain, one can just ignore it as much as one doesn’t list all USD transactions. Surely in terms of taxes and transparency this could be a big deal

drummer 5y ago

Signal launched payments worldwide a few weeks ago using MobileCoin. I suggest staying away from Facebook's surveilance coin.

ruforrel 5y ago

We need a WAP token.

coolspot 5y ago

I think this will get some heat from regulators. Transactions can be either off-chain, or on-chain. With former it’s not much different than a database, with latter it’s becomes scammer/terrorist/drug dealer dream. Also on-chain transfer costs ~$20 in a quiet hour, e.g here is a transfer of ~$250 for a fee of $20: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7d366b14c99ca6eb457109000f637e59bb1305b6a0064f36b58f3c3677ea251e https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7d366b14c99ca6eb457109000f637e59bb... USDP whitepaper: https://insights.paxos.com/hubfs/USDP-whitepaper.pdf https://insights.paxos.com/hubfs/USDP-whitepaper.pdf Contract source: https://github.com/paxosglobal/usdp-contracts https://github.com/paxosglobal/usdp-contracts Etherscan: https://etherscan.io/token/0x8e870d67f660d95d5be530380d0ec0bd388289e1 https://etherscan.io/token/0x8e870d67f660d95d5be530380d0ec0b...