Facebook launches cryptocurrency with Visa, MasterCard, Uber, and others
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I don’t trust that Weasel named Zuckerberg as far as I could throw him!
Yeah, No Data Breaches Here, Move Along!
Yeah, No Data Breaches Here, Move Along!
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They were ad free for years. They'll wait until they have a monopoly before raising prices. I doubt Visa and MasterCard are promoting a competitor without a monetization strategy.
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For that matter, I'm not really gonna just trust Facebook's definition of "never."
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Hmm.....interlace my financials with a company who routinely sell out any and all information, is nipple deep in a myriad of ongoing anti-trust lawsuits, and are run by a guy who literally called people dumbasses for giving him their information?
There isn't a big enough turnip truck for me to fall off of.....
There isn't a big enough turnip truck for me to fall off of.....
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See, this is something Facebook absolutely ought to not be allowed to be involved in. That's not "punishing a company for being successful", that's "protecting the world from a shadow government led by private parties out only for their own bottom line".
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Well, technically if they exclude only 1 case (maybe the CEO), its limited. So that means they would only be able to share say 99.999999999% of the stuff, right?
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While I have plenty of banks and various type of bank accounts to choose from, most of the world doesn't.
Most of the people who are alive today are very poorly served by banking services compared to what I (in France) enjoy.
While I have the luxury to not participate in this latest of Zuck's ventures, most of the people alive today will have to make a choice basically between two evils: giving up all their personal data on one hand and not being able to benefit from their work to the fullest extent on the other.
This is not aimed at the Western world. They are set to enslave, and I don't believe I make a too wild claim, the rest of human kind.
There's no more growth for Facebook & Zuck here. Smart guy that he is, he sets out to conquer the rest.
Most of the people who are alive today are very poorly served by banking services compared to what I (in France) enjoy.
While I have the luxury to not participate in this latest of Zuck's ventures, most of the people alive today will have to make a choice basically between two evils: giving up all their personal data on one hand and not being able to benefit from their work to the fullest extent on the other.
This is not aimed at the Western world. They are set to enslave, and I don't believe I make a too wild claim, the rest of human kind.
There's no more growth for Facebook & Zuck here. Smart guy that he is, he sets out to conquer the rest.
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There could be something akin to purchasing Microsoft or Nintendo points. Sure, the game costs 900 fun-bucks, but if the fun-bucks are only sold in minimum batches of 200, the makers are getting that you'll forget about the extra 100 fun-bucks in your account, essentially meaning you gave them money for nothing.
(I know, Nintendo allows you to buy exactly the amount equating to what you need, but you get the point)
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Of all the things I don't want to be involved in, this is near the top of the list.
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Yeah, but they'll issue a heart-felt apology when it happens.
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I am speechless.
I mean, I knew what was coming, but I am still speechless.
Uber, Facebook, Paypal, Visa, Mastercard...
Dream team.
I mean, I knew what was coming, but I am still speechless.
Uber, Facebook, Paypal, Visa, Mastercard...
Dream team.
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Where is Angel when you need him? Corporate Demons were in his arena.
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Serious question: what problem does this solve? Other than giving Facebook more data and more money, obviously. Is the idea that people who have only access to a smartphone and Facebook can now send money from their Facebook account to someone else?
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It sounds more like the latter. The blockchain is maintained by a smallish number (~100) of "validator nodes", controlled by Libra Association members, running an efficient fault-tolerant consensus protocol. Users connect to a validator node to submit transactions or to query the current blockchain state. Users don't need a copy of the whole blockchain, and presumably it's not hard for validator nodes to store it - it's no harder than any regular database with ten billion entries per year, which is small by Facebook's standards.
According to https://libra.org/en-US/permissionless-blockchain/ they want to change to a "permissionless" model, where anyone holding enough Libra can participate in the network, starting about five years from now, but they don't know how to do it yet.
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No, fully decentralized public blockchains need some mechanism to prevent sybil attacks, where one participant creates a lot of fake nodes to gain a majority of the network's voting power. The approach pioneered by Bitcoin (and copied by Ethereum and others) was to have each node do a non-trivial amount of make-work to prove that they're a "real" node. This effectively leads to a "one CPU cycle, one vote" rule.
Nodes that participate in the network get rewarded with new bitcoins, and as bitcoins get more valuable people are willing to throw more and more computing power at the problem. To account for this, the network has steadily increased the difficulty of the make-work problem, which in turn means it takes more and more energy to create one bitcoin.
This proof-of-work mechanism accounts for the vast, vast majority of Bitcoin's energy consumption. The actual work of collecting and verifying transactions is comparatively trivial.
Libra is a permissioned blockchain where there is a fixed number of nodes that are all known to each other. Sybil attacks aren't a concern and so there's no need for a proof-of-work security mechanism. Cryptocurrencies are just entries in a digital ledger, so there's no inherent reason creating them should take a lot of energy. So my guess is that energy consumption won't be a significant concern.
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Share that spleen fairly, people! In addition to Facebook, Libra (Hey! they stole my star sign) includes such monopolizers manqué as Visa, Mastercard, eBay, Uber …
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Yet another altcoin is exactly what humanity needed at this point. A dodgy one, even. Thanks, Facebook.
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Facebook want's to become your bank so they can have even more of your data and lock you into their increasingly large walled garden. This goes against every principle of what a cryptocurrency is supposed to be. I don't even want to call this a cryptocurrency to be honest, because that would be an insult to actual cryptocurrencies.
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I'm gonna go with NO on this one.
And the thing about spinning off a separate subsidiary for privacy reasons is a good joke when the facebook app and Whatsapp already sneakily share your data when installed together on the phone.
And the thing about spinning off a separate subsidiary for privacy reasons is a good joke when the facebook app and Whatsapp already sneakily share your data when installed together on the phone.
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It would be nice to have a globally accessible payment system that was easy and free, but there are costs involved, who pays them if it isn't the users?
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Ding ding ding. This just shifts who gets the transaction fees and who has access to your purchasing history. And further erodes consumer privacy (probably, because FB).
Get a CC or debit card from a financial institution with 'we don't sell your purchase history etc etc' in their terms of service. A local credit union for example.
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My take on it would be that a company having it's own currency can manipulate its value to their advantage. An extremely flagrant example that wouldn't fly but done here only for the sake of the explanation would be: Today, 20 Fakebucks would be $10 dollars; tomorrow, it could intentionally become fifty cents. Then there's that tracking thing.
But, not being an economist, maybe the corporation is actually being benevolent and has unforseen good intentions that requires the deeper understanding of trained professionals.
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So this is another stage in the fight of gaining control of payments through the phone?
like we saw with Walmart developing their own standards when it was all about ApplePay/Google Pay
taking over.
like we saw with Walmart developing their own standards when it was all about ApplePay/Google Pay
taking over.
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The answer to what it solves has to be related to who just announced it. If Facebook is doing this, it’s to solve a problem for Facebook.
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And that's why there's exactly zero incentive to switch. I don't know how they expect this to succeed against an entrenched system if they aren't going to offer something above and beyond what everyone already has.
A lot of companies seem to look at WeChat and think "we could do what they're doing in the US!" but seem to forget that, AFAIK, WeChat likely didn't have to displace any other near-universally used system in the process, they were in the right place at the right time. But that time has long passed here.
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So Facebook wants to own its own currency.
What's next, nuclear weapons?
Those fliers the rusky soviets used to print about capitalism were suppossed to be propaganda , not textbook material.
What's next, nuclear weapons?
Those fliers the rusky soviets used to print about capitalism were suppossed to be propaganda , not textbook material.
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First thing I thought of when reading this article was M-Pesa.
This is just big-tech's (and Visa and MasterCard) approach to get in on that financial ecosystem using flashy "crytpocurrency" jargon so they can - as Pea Nut put it - enslave the rest of the world who aren't already getting sucked into their vortex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
50 Things that made the Modern Economy Podcast on M-Pesa: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04kxddv
It also reminds me of Superman 2, but in this case FB is Richard Pryor and wants to take a tiny bit of every tiny transition x billions of transactions.
This is just big-tech's (and Visa and MasterCard) approach to get in on that financial ecosystem using flashy "crytpocurrency" jargon so they can - as Pea Nut put it - enslave the rest of the world who aren't already getting sucked into their vortex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
50 Things that made the Modern Economy Podcast on M-Pesa: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04kxddv
It also reminds me of Superman 2, but in this case FB is Richard Pryor and wants to take a tiny bit of every tiny transition x billions of transactions.
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As much as I hate Facebook, Visa, MasterCard and traditional banks care even less about my privacy. At least the advertisers with whom Facebook shares data DON'T SEND ME ACTUAL MAIL.
Oh, Visa and MasterCard are also in on this? Sigh.
Oh, Visa and MasterCard are also in on this? Sigh.
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"without customer consent"
which you'll have to give to even use the platform at all. So yeah it's a trick.
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OrangeCream
Ars Legatus Legionis
I expect Apple to lead in that space using Apple Pay, Apple Cash, and iMessage.
The problem is, of course, that it requires the entry fee, an iPhone.
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