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Old 18th June 2019, 09:00 AM   #1
JoeMorgue
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#NoLibra/Libra Cryptocurrency:

So Facebook of all places has announced a new cryptocurrency, backed by real world currencies (including the US Dollar, Euro, and Yen) and already has support/backing from Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, Uber, and Vodafone.

https://libra.org/en-US/
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Old 18th June 2019, 09:01 AM   #2
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Which raises an interesting question: if I can pay with my credit card, why would I need an actual currency other than my own?

The whole concept is bizarre.
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Old 18th June 2019, 10:56 AM   #3
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Because nobody would trust it would be worth the same amount of stuff when you settled it (IE nobody would lend you "your own" currency)

Libra looks like a de-regulated currency board arrangement, but backed by a reserve basket of regular currencies not just one.
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Old 18th June 2019, 12:14 PM   #4
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#NoLibra

Facebooks new crypto-currency Libra is being released soon. Just say no.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/931966...ryptocurrency/
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Old 18th June 2019, 12:37 PM   #5
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I say yes.

not that I will use it, but its good that companies with a bit of wealth behind them get into the game.
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Old 18th June 2019, 12:44 PM   #6
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What game though ? What is the purpose ?
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Old 18th June 2019, 01:12 PM   #7
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more vapor for scammers to exploit
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Old 18th June 2019, 01:20 PM   #8
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There's a thread started in Economics if anyone is interested.
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Old 18th June 2019, 01:33 PM   #9
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Sounds more like pay-pal rather than BTC.
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Old 18th June 2019, 01:45 PM   #10
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Originally Posted by Dr.Sid View Post
Sounds more like pay-pal rather than BTC.
Exactly that.

Given the intentions - which are good - I'll wait to see how it works in reality before passing judgement.
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Old 18th June 2019, 02:06 PM   #11
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Originally Posted by The Atheist View Post
Exactly that.



Given the intentions - which are good - I'll wait to see how it works in reality before passing judgement.
The intention is for Facebook to take a "negible" fee for each transaction. And given where they say they are aiming it at I would go to the next level of cynicism and say it's because they can't make much money selling adverts that target the 1.5 billion "unbanked" or by selling those peoples' data. Therefore they wanted some other way to extract money from such people.
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Old 18th June 2019, 02:16 PM   #12
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How is creating a currency not illegal? I would have thought that's a thing that nations would reserve to themselves, and come down hard on anybody usurping that power.
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Old 18th June 2019, 03:02 PM   #13
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Originally Posted by TragicMonkey View Post
How is creating a currency not illegal? I would have thought that's a thing that nations would reserve to themselves, and come down hard on anybody usurping that power.
Mega corps are more powerful than many countries. And currencies are based on faith in the backers. Facebook, Google, Windows, compared to Botswanaland? XYZastan?
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Old 18th June 2019, 03:03 PM   #14
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How does Googles gross compare to the national gross product of countries?
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Old 18th June 2019, 04:17 PM   #15
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Originally Posted by TragicMonkey View Post
How is creating a currency not illegal? I would have thought that's a thing that nations would reserve to themselves, and come down hard on anybody usurping that power.
It might be illegal in some countries, but in the USA, it's not. Why would it be? You have to pay your taxes in US dollars, but otherwise the government doesn't really care. And historically, private currencies can't compete with the US dollar, so they usually fail without the government having to lift a finger.
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Old 18th June 2019, 04:44 PM   #16
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Originally Posted by Ziggurat View Post
It might be illegal in some countries, but in the USA, it's not. Why would it be? You have to pay your taxes in US dollars, but otherwise the government doesn't really care. And historically, private currencies can't compete with the US dollar, so they usually fail without the government having to lift a finger.
It might be interesting to see what happens if they don't fail.
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Old 18th June 2019, 04:51 PM   #17
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Originally Posted by Darat View Post
The intention is for Facebook to take a "negible" fee for each transaction. And given where they say they are aiming it at I would go to the next level of cynicism and say it's because they can't make much money selling adverts that target the 1.5 billion "unbanked" or by selling those peoples' data. Therefore they wanted some other way to extract money from such people.
I agree.
If they're not consuming, find a way to make them consume.
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Old 18th June 2019, 04:53 PM   #18
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Originally Posted by p0lka View Post
It might be interesting to see what happens if they don't fail.
Nothing much. At best a currency just becomes a commodity, and plenty of those get bought and sold all the time.
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Old 18th June 2019, 07:30 PM   #19
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Originally Posted by TragicMonkey View Post
How is creating a currency not illegal? I would have thought that's a thing that nations would reserve to themselves, and come down hard on anybody usurping that power.
Bitcoin was created specifically and explicitly to usurp that power.
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Old 18th June 2019, 07:41 PM   #20
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Originally Posted by arthwollipot View Post
Bitcoin was created specifically and explicitly to usurp that power.
It's not really a reserved power, so it can't really be usurped. Governments reserve the power to issue *their own* currency, but that's different.

Governments don't need to stop the creation of private currencies; why would they? And in fact they don't.

When you issue shares in a business, you're creating a fiat commodity based on consumer confidence in the growth value your (the issuer's) endeavor.

Hell, trading cards are a currency.

Same with cryptocurrencies. They're just fiat commodities tied to some public perception of underlying value. Just like the dollar.
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Old 18th June 2019, 07:50 PM   #21
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
It's not really a reserved power, so it can't really be usurped. Governments reserve the power to issue *their own* currency, but that's different.

Governments don't need to stop the creation of private currencies; why would they? And in fact they don't.

When you issue shares in a business, you're creating a fiat commodity based on consumer confidence in the growth value your (the issuer's) endeavor.

Hell, trading cards are a currency.

Same with cryptocurrencies. They're just fiat commodities tied to some public perception of underlying value. Just like the dollar.
Right, but Nakatomo specifically called out the need for trust in a third party in the White Paper.

Quote:
Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.
Bitcoin was created to take the power to mediate transactions out of the hands of third-party institutions like banks and governments.

Regardless, the fact is not in dispute that the power to create a currency is not reserved for government. Heck, my LARP group did it. Of course, that currency is not usable outside a very limited set of circumstances, but it was still a system of tokens that could be exchanged for goods and services.
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Old 18th June 2019, 10:13 PM   #22
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
Hell, trading cards are a currency.

Same with cryptocurrencies. They're just fiat commodities tied to some public perception of underlying value. Just like the dollar.
I can agree with that.

Trading cards are sort of like a currency, although only among people who deal in them or collect them. To me, the only value in them is the fact that others would pay money for them.
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Old 19th June 2019, 12:40 AM   #23
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Originally Posted by TragicMonkey View Post
How is creating a currency not illegal? I would have thought that's a thing that nations would reserve to themselves, and come down hard on anybody usurping that power.
almost every mobile app has their own currencies, so do MMOs, often morethan one.
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Old 19th June 2019, 12:45 AM   #24
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Originally Posted by Whip View Post
more vapor for scammers to exploit
Originally Posted by Dr.Sid View Post
What game though ? What is the purpose ?
actually, having a FB centered currency makes consumers safer because they won't have to use credit card /banking information.
It is a potential money laundering risk.

The core purpose of any currency is to make it easier to spend: FB obviously wants to sell stuff, and if you don't have to spend "real" money but "only" Libra, your threshold for buying useless stuff might be lower.
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Old 19th June 2019, 12:57 AM   #25
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Originally Posted by The Great Zaganza View Post
actually, having a FB centered currency makes consumers safer because they won't have to use credit card /banking information.

It is a potential money laundering risk.



The core purpose of any currency is to make it easier to spend: FB obviously wants to sell stuff, and if you don't have to spend "real" money but "only" Libra, your threshold for buying useless stuff might be lower.
Several of the people behind this have spoke about how it will bring the 1.5 billion "unbanked " into the global economy. This is what I posted in the other thread:

The intention is for Facebook to take a "negible" fee for each transaction. And given where they say they are aiming it at I would go to the next level of cynicism and say it's because they can't make much money selling adverts that target the 1.5 billion "unbanked" or by selling those peoples' data. Therefore they wanted some other way to extract money from such people.
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Old 19th June 2019, 01:01 AM   #26
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The data telling FB when and when not people are willing to spend money is valuable on its own.
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Old 19th June 2019, 01:17 AM   #27
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Is it just Australia where Libra is a brand of tampons and sanitary pads for women?


https://lovelibra.com/au/
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Old 19th June 2019, 04:52 AM   #28
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Originally Posted by The Great Zaganza View Post
The data telling FB when and when not people are willing to spend money is valuable on its own.
But only in a negative sense.

What this means to FB is that it has a new way to entice their customers "look it's now worthwhile advertising to this consumer because they can now pay for your goods and services".

The bigger picture is does this improve the lives of the people FB and others want to charge to use it or simply extract money for particularly the very poorest and pass it onto the likes of Mark Zuckerberg.

The cynic in me thinks it's simply to make more money and it wont actually improve folks lives. The optimist in me (he still hangs on by a thread) hopes this can improve the lives of those 1.5 billion.
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Old 19th June 2019, 05:08 AM   #29
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Are people so poor they don't have bank accounts a) using Facebook at all, b) going to buy things using Facebook's Itchy and Scratchy money? I have trouble seeing the "unbanked" using a designer fake currency, even if they're yearning to give Zuckerberg a cut of their nonwealth.
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Old 19th June 2019, 05:14 AM   #30
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I'm very much "banked" but this just reeks of Facebook wanting to profit off of the "unbanked". Both from fees but certainly also from suddenly being able to profile their users using financial transactions as well as all the other data.

There is no way Facebook is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. This is business. They want to make (even more) money.
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Old 19th June 2019, 05:16 AM   #31
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Old 19th June 2019, 05:20 AM   #32
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My caddie/chauffeur informs me that a bank is where people put money that isn't properly invested. --Judge Whitey

I don't see a cryptocurrency helping anybody who's so far down the finance totem pole they're not even able to make the common mistake of the general public.
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Old 19th June 2019, 05:49 AM   #33
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Originally Posted by Ziggurat View Post
It might be illegal in some countries, but in the USA, it's not. Why would it be? You have to pay your taxes in US dollars, but otherwise the government doesn't really care. And historically, private currencies can't compete with the US dollar, so they usually fail without the government having to lift a finger.
Originally Posted by The Great Zaganza View Post
almost every mobile app has their own currencies, so do MMOs, often morethan one.
There also appears to be a number of existing and defunk private and semi public currencies around the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._United_States
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Old 19th June 2019, 06:08 AM   #34
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Libra looks like an informal (non state backed) "currency board" to me, reserved with a basket of regular currencies rather than just one. The idea seems to be that it is less speculative than things like bitcoins, also it shouldn't waste gob loads of energy to "mine".

Struggling to see the utility of this that is in any way unique from zillions of other mobile/micro payment platforms. Probably its the piggy-back onto facebook and nothing else.
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Old 19th June 2019, 06:10 AM   #35
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Originally Posted by erlando View Post
this just reeks of Facebook wanting to profit off of the "unbanked". Both from fees but certainly also from suddenly being able to profile their users using financial transactions as well as all the other data.

There is no way Facebook is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. This is business. They want to make (even more) money.
Of course they are in it for the money.

Arguably one reason why poor people are poor is that there are not enough ways to make money off them, meaning not enough ways to trade with them something worth more to them than the money. But there's plenty of space for a lot of cynicism about that!
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Old 19th June 2019, 06:11 AM   #36
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Originally Posted by applecorped View Post
Facebooks new crypto-currency Libra is being released soon. Just say no.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/931966...ryptocurrency/
It's great for the little people that Rupert M has their back.
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Old 19th June 2019, 06:17 AM   #37
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Facebook probably should issue its equity in libra, then it would be eating its own cooking. Wonder how likely that is.
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Old 19th June 2019, 06:20 AM   #38
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Originally Posted by Francesca R View Post
Libra looks like an informal (non state backed) "currency board" to me, reserved with a basket of regular currencies rather than just one. The idea seems to be that it is less speculative than things like bitcoins, also it shouldn't waste gob loads of energy to "mine".

Struggling to see the utility of this that is in any way unique from zillions of other mobile/micro payment platforms. Probably its the piggy-back onto facebook and nothing else.
I agree.

Originally Posted by Francesca R View Post
Of course they are in it for the money.

Arguably one reason why poor people are poor is that there are not enough ways to make money off them, meaning not enough ways to trade with them something worth more to them than the money. But there's plenty of space for a lot of cynicism about that!
I also agree with that.

There is potential for good in this, but as Francesca says, Its not clear why this would be better than the million other ways to transfer money via phones. It is facebook so there is plenty of reason to be skeptical. I shall reserve judgement for now.
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Old 19th June 2019, 06:23 AM   #39
TragicMonkey
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Originally Posted by Francesca R View Post
Facebook probably should issue its equity in libra, then it would be eating its own cooking. Wonder how likely that is.
Like the people who urge everyone to buy their gold because it's better than money...in which case why are they selling it, for money?
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Old 19th June 2019, 06:31 AM   #40
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Originally Posted by TragicMonkey View Post
Like the people who urge everyone to buy their gold because it's better than money...in which case why are they selling it, for money?
Right. There was this really nice pair of shoes I was interested in recently, but at the checkout it suddenly dawned on me if they are so good why on earth is the shop lady trying to unload them onto me, so I walked out.

(Actually you probably will be able to buy FB shares with this currency, they would be daft not to do that)

Last edited by Francesca R; 19th June 2019 at 06:35 AM.
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