Cyber-IOU notes. Voucher hell on wheels. However you want to define Facebook's Libra, the most ridiculous part is its privacy promise Facebook – the global ad business pilloried repeatedly over the past 15 years for privacy disasters – on Tuesday announced a scheme to allow account holders to buy credits and spend the digitized funds online through a network of partners, under a "strong commitment to privacy." The antisocial network's blockchain-tracked …
it will thrive, with investors pouring in billions and millions, if not billions of facebookers cheering the "convenience". Until, one moment, their digital money goes "pop".
That said, it's no worse than your money held on your bank account, when one moment the banks go "pop" and you're left staring at a 404 page (if that).
The millenials in my office mostly use Revolut.
I believe Revolut has acquired a banking licence somewhere in Europe which it is "testing in Lithuania", though in the UK it's still saying on its website that it's operating under Electronic Money regulations. I believe N26 now has a UK banking licence, but its website merely states "a fully licensed bank" without any further details immediately visible. I haven't really found any of the "disruptor" financial operations to be very transparent about their status.
When it comes to their bundled ("premium") accounts, they seem to make it as hard as possible to find out what you're actually buying until you've bought it. Which may be because they actually seem like very poor value when you compare them against offerings from traditional banks or buying the bundled products individually.
In short, they're exactly like the existing banks - making up the margin on their free services by overcharging elsewhere and doing their best to keep you in the dark about consumer protection.
Facebook will of course confront the same issue: there's not a lot of money to be made from basic consumer banking. However, they have more ways to lever money out of their disciples than banks do and they have the advertising platform to bombard them into submission.
First paragraph of N26's T&C for the UK account:
These Terms and Conditions, alongside the further documents mentioned below govern the entire
business relationship between you, our customer "you" or the "Customer" and N26 Bank GmbH, London Branch, a corporation established in Germany and authorised and supervised by the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (the "BaFin") and whose London Branch is subject to limited regulation by the UK Prudential Regulatory Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority ("we/us" or the “Bank” or "N26"). We are included on the Financial Services Register and our Firm Reference Number is 795007. Details about the extent of our regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulatory Authority are available from us on request.
Translated into English, it is a German bank operating under EU passporting regulations.
The law here says that banks from other EU countries can operate here. That will continue to be the case until such time as the law is changed.
The law in other EU countries says the same thing, however, in the near future, the UK might not be an other EU country, so UK banks wouldn't be able to continue operating there. Italy have said that UK financial institutions will be able to continue operating in Italy post Brexit until such time as they change the law to say otherwise, but that's only Italy, not any of the other EU countries.
The law here says that banks from other EU countries can operate here. That will continue to be the case until such time as the law is changed.
Is this limited to just banks from EU countries? I was walking through The City last week and spotted quite a few of what looked like branches for overseas banks from beyond the EU, like Middle East/Gulf states, India and some others which I can't remember.
I was walking through The City last week and spotted quite a few of what looked like branches for overseas banks from beyond the EU,
Those probably operate under different rules, and if the alternative is people flying in to Heathrow with suitcases full of cash, or probably just taking their business elsewhere, I expect that banks from their countries of origin would be quite willing to expend some effort to, ehm, subject themselves to those rules.
"Facebook will of course confront the same issue: there's not a lot of money to be made from basic consumer banking. However, they have more ways to lever money out of their disciples than banks do and they have the advertising platform to bombard them into submission."
I think it's the other way around. FB sell advertising. If they can show that an advert led directly to a sale, then they've cracked the advertising problem.
Google want this too.
With SV, always worry about what data they're gathering on you.
Of course, if they're actually serious about supporting a UBI, then maybe they could just start paying it out. It'll be like tax, without the middleman :D
The millenials in my office mostly use Revolut.
Monzo and Starling seem to predominate around here. Both operate on UK Banking Licences with the standard £85k FSCS Protection.
I got a Monzo account - not as a main current account, but just to pop money in periodically on holiday and get the 0% on foreign transactions (which the "challenger banks" all seem to do). Having a Mastercard in the wallet is also reassuring in the ahh, unlikely event Visa falls over and my debit/credit card stop working.
They all seem to be well ahead on making life convenient for users - no having to notify for foreign travel or having features hidden in the online banking portal but not in the app. The phone buzzing with transaction notifications and being able to enable the mag stripe only when I needed it (in countries where Chip & PIN is still patchy) or indeed just freezing the card at will is all very reassuring.
I hope everyone keeps money they can afford to lose in Revolut, it's not covered under the FSCS.
I've got a great new idea for a bank. I'll going to call it myMilli and there'll be an app with a very cartoony UI in pastelly colours - Android and ioS. Whatever; it'll be written by very low-paid folk in a coding sweatshop.
Whenever a 'customer' transfers money to 'Mlli' (a cartoon of a cute twenty-something woman), the money will go straight into my bank account. The cartoon will smile widely. (So will I but the 'customer' sure as sh*t won't see that). Whenever a 'customer' wants some money back, I'll just put up a banner saying "Aaaa! Milli's not feeling well", then show a video of kittens.
Providing I vet my customers well ('Q1 - do you rely on social media more than actual life? Q2 - do you use the word like more often than any other word? Q3 - do you have any money') then I reckon I've got two years. Who's with me?
$10 million is nothing to the banks and eBays of the world. They're doing it "just in case" it takes off. It isn't like they can't easily take their money out if it goes nowhere, since it can be directly exchanged at a price set against a basket of currencies. Worst case they lose a few percent of their investment.
Facebook has had too many privacy scandals over the past couple years for people to trust them with MONEY, it has no chance. The idea that millennials will "be all over this" is particularly laughable, they are the ones fleeing Facebook the fastest or if not fleeing completely reducing their usage to a "few times a month". It is the older people especially baby boomers who are most resistant to leaving Facebook, because it is their only social network and it helps connect them to distant family and allows them to see photos of grandchildren etc.
There isn't a core group of people to make a Facebook currency happen. Five years ago they could have done it easily, it is too late now.
I was like you, not on Fb but then I started as a Tutor, including online and needed a presence and I volunteer in a sensitive capacity and there's a closed Fb group for it so I needed an account to access that.
It's for business purposes, I have a business page and the volunteer thing.
If you are of average intelligence, half the people around you are dumber than you.
No, that's median. If you are in a room with 8 persons with an IQ of 101, yours is 100, and there's one Facebook user you'd be well above average, but still not smarter than half of the others.
No, that's median
Not even that, unless "around you" means "in all of the sampled population", and we assume statistical accuracy.
This "half the people around you" cliché (I've seen it before) is just a typical sophomorism, not a useful observation.
your money's protected, sure - as long as financial situation is stable. Once it goes south... good luck trying to withdraw this 75K in cash, even with advanced notice (how would you be able to get through, by the way?), in the middle of a banking crisis. Not that in such a situation, a suitcase of paper is worth much more than a "balance" of digits on your screen.
The point is that it is protected when the institution becomes unstable. It is underwritten by the government financial services compensation scheme. If the bank goes bust you will eventually get your money back from the government. Although that may take some time it is better than losing it altogether.
I know it's always fun to have a pantomime bad guy in the target sights, but I can not think of any example in at least the last 30 years where depositors in a bank in a EU/Nth American country have lost their funds when their bank shut up shop. Happy to hear of any cases where that is not true.
I was at BCCI as part of the IT team supporting the auditors who went in to try and find out what happened. BCCI was very different to what seems to have happened at Barings: BCCI's owners were just stupendously, shamelessly, universally corrupt. They were taking millions out of the accounts and putting it into their own pockets and nobody stopped them until the money ran out. They all escaped abroad AFAIK. The less corrupt ones would take money out on a Friday night, invest it over the weekend and put it back in on Monday without anyone noticing.
Weak regulation and a mind-blowing lack of oversight let all this happen.
The saddest thing was that the staff left behind (business and IT) were required to keep all their money in BCCI accounts. These were ordinary people who lost everything - cash, savings, pensions, the lot. Tragic.
Cyprus, 2013. See https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyprus-banks/idUSKBN1K3242
Right now I guess they are more interested in the transactions - which I guess will happen in a Facebook-controlled application - so the will "Close the Circle", they will know if an ad (and not only ads) will turn into a buy, when and where. so they can use those info to sell even more ads, and force seller/buyers to sell more data to Facebook.
How much money you have in your Libra account may interest them a little less - their profile quite probably has already a full picture of your wealth (or lack of), regardless of how many money you put into Libra - and well, the account information will be quite the same of your Facebook account.
I think they want to be able to have links on Facebook that take you directly to "buy" something, and having Facebook currency reduces the friction of the transaction.
The question remains what is the incentive for Facebook users to turn their money in Libra bucks or whatever this is - which would probably mean linking Facebook to your bank account because I doubt they're going to let you mail them a check. I remember Google had a "Google Pay" back in the 00s for internet based transactions and they basically bribed people to use it via $10 off offers. I think maybe Microsoft did the same too? Groupon did the same early in their life.
The problem is, once those incentives go away so do most of the users. That Google Pay thing is long gone I'm sure. I haven't seen a Groupon promotion in several years, so I don't even know if they still exist. If Facebook gives you free money I might be willing to link it to one of those prepaid debit cards you get for rebates if they allow that, to take advantage of them for purchases I was already going to make off eBay or Amazon. And then never use it again once the freebies are over.
Talking of HELL, This just reeks of the Immortal Souls Division in Good Omens, or:
Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: 'Learn, guys...”
That's because most of them are too dumb to use a computer anyway.
They're the ones that need the pictures of the candidates next to the selection. On the plus side, voting pencils last longer in that region as most of them don't have the teeth left to nibble on them.
I'm surprised it's as low as 5% YES, from a country who voted for Donald Trump as their President.
He only won by way of the Electoral College; he was 3 million down in the popular vote.
Also, California, and especially the Bay area, is not exactly Trumpistan.
Especially in a radio station poll. If they asked "will you let us murder you?" they'd probably get a few percent yes from smartasses.
If 95% of people are saying no, the real "no" number is higher - some of those who said yes are just doing it to mess with the poll, the rest don't even know what they're answering but think "I like Facebook I'll try something new on it" but will shudder in horror when they go to the signup page and it asks you to give Facebook the details of your bank account.
Like I said above, they'll have to offer people freebies and basically give away money to get anyone to sign up, and once those go away so will most of their users. There won't be enough left after that to keep the service alive, so it'll be quietly shut down next year. The Libra service, not Facebook itself...sorry!
"Some people may be giving Facebook, which this year suffered a corporation-wide 14-hour outage, too much credit..."
Quite literally. Well done, I had to laugh at that one.
It appears Zuck has decided that, if he has to stand in front of committees anywhere in the world anyway, he might as well engage in something more nefarious than mere privacy violations - let's take their money too. That also creates some protection against huge fines by authorities because of all the poor victims users.
Absolutely no way. Not even with permafrost in Hell.
Pretty much any bank in the UK, including ones that are about 300 years old, will let you transfer money to other users via smartphone at zero cost, and the transfer usually takes between 3 to 10 seconds.
Go to supposedly backward countries like Kenya, and you will find that everyone there is using M-Pesa to make payments using their phones.
"Pretty much any bank in the UK, including ones that are about 300 years old, will let you transfer money to other users via smartphone at zero cost, and the transfer usually takes between 3 to 10 seconds."
Indeed. While the concerns about privacy and Facebook in general are valid, the more important question seems to simply be - what is the point? Facebook wants people to be able to send money to each other without using cash? We've been able to do that in various ways for at least two millennia. Meanwhile in the modern world, cards and bank accounts function perfectly well in actual shops, while any competent bank makes it possible, as noted above, to instantly send money to anyone you want. Exactly what benefits are added to the user forcing them to first buy nonsense Funbucks with some random erratic value before allowing them to do something that's already trivial? And then broadcasting everything they've done to the world in a public format?
Absolutely. Even the new challenger banks like Monzo, Starling and N26 are doing away with fees for foreign transactions/card usage. Facebook aren't selling a good use-case for me.
The only value I could really see is up the tree with another payment network/processor forcing a bit of competition to try and keep the (global) duopoly of Visa-Mastercard vaguely honest (c.f. the anti-trust settlement where they colluded to lock out Amex in the 90s) and make sure everyone is being competitive on swipe rates and the exchange rates they apply to foreign transactions.
But even that's pretty marginal and relatively regional examples exist (Amex, UnionPay), which aren't terribly useful for quite a lot of travel destinations or merchants.
No matter how you measure intelligence, half the people are on the stupid side of the curve. No matter how you measure gullibility, half the nominally intelligent people are on the gullible side of the curve. No matter how you measure the willingness to do research, half the nominally intelligent and nominally not gullible are on the lazy side of the curve. Hence Facebook.
In China both Alipay and weChat pay are widely used for years without a need for blockchain. So why add such a ecologic monster to it? Or can we mine them as well? Will be fun once quantum computing or other new exiting tech gets a hold of the encryption as well.
But yeah,.. no doubt this will become a success if you consider that Facebook is promoting something for it's own benefit. Considering how little influencing it took to get Trump elected, it can only be so. Soon we'll all pay to the Zuckerbots with Lubera.
"Lubera,.. your rectum,.. our pleasure.."
We're doomed I tell you... DOOMED!
Paris,.. for obvious reasons.
Remember, if your MySQL files are stored on a zfs formatted volume, (or btrfs or refs) then you are using a blockchain.
I’ve been using zfs as my main storage pool for about 8 years now. It’s better than the lvm+ext3 setup it replaced, but not that revolutionary in the overall scheme of things. It is still just a big shared network drive that I can access via smb, rsync, or webdav. The benefits are zero data loss and no need to use my backups in the past 8 years despite the fact that the only surviving original hardware from the 8 year old storage pool is 1 out of the 9 hard drives in it, 8 of the 9 sata cables and and two sata power splitters.
I’m going to replace it later this summer purely because my stock of spare 3TB hard drives is running low, and I’ll replace it with probably 6 10TB drives on a new computer.
Bitcoin’s USP isn’t actually the blockchain, it is the proof of work algorithm, and it’s also a technological dead end because it doesn’t scale, by design, and its lack of scalability and its inefficiency are essential to its operation.
Yes it is
https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/zfs-end-to-end-data-integrity
"A ZFS storage pool is really just a tree of blocks. ZFS provides fault isolation between data and checksum by storing the checksum of each block in its parent block pointer -- not in the block
itself. Every block in the tree contains the checksums for all its children, so the entire pool is self-validating.
[...]
"The blocks of a ZFS storage pool form a Merkle tree in which each block validates all of its children. Merkle trees have been proven to provide cryptographically-strong authentication for any component of the tree, and for the tree as a whole."
Blockchain is just another word for Merkle Tree. It is a pretty decent but boring technology that has been hyped way more than is justified. Anytime you see a paper extolling the virtues of "blockchain" replace the word "blockchain" wherever you see it with "computer". Find a time-travelling device and turn the clock back about 60 years. Now that you are in the late 1950s, the hype expressed in the paper might be justified. "You will be able to transfer money in seconds using a handheld computing device". Hello, it is 2019, there are people in my office who are too young to remember a time when this wasn't possible.
I believe this transcript I stole from Facebook will make the point of blockchain clear:
PR Exec [name redacted]: "We have heard some concerns about the privacy and integrity of our new currency. We'd first like to tell you how we're ensuring that money can't disappear from users' accounts. You may have heard of the revolutionary technology blockchain. This technology is used to ensure the integrity of data, like how much money each user has, even when those users don't necessarily trust one another. You don't have to trust us; the blockchain will keep people from doing anything at all to your data without your specific approval."
Extremely high-level executive [name redacted]: "How will you handle it if they notice you've not answered the privacy question?"
PR Exec: "Standard boiler plate, failing that I just threaten them with their blackmail file."
EHL Exec: "Oh, by the way, how much of the blockchain do we control?"
Tech Exec [name redacted]: "100%, sir."
EHL Exec: "So we could in fact delete all the money in about how long?"
Tech Exec: "It's a big button on the main page. Takes about two seconds to propagate. After all, we have a lot of money to spend on reliable systems for things that matter."
EHL Exec: "What if it goes down?"
Tech Exec: "That doesn't go down. It's not low-importance like all the rest of the services."
EHL Exec: "Well done. You can leave now."
[Sound of door opening and closing]
[Silence lasts eight seconds]
EHL Exec: [maniacal laughter, see recording] [Transcriber's note: If listening to recording, mental health services are recommended, contact transcriber for further details]
A blockchain is different from a cryptocurrency that uses "mining" to generate "coins". You can use a blockchain to store transactions without cryptocoins.
I don't think Facebook is interested in an artificial shortage of "coins" to create an artificial value. Facebook will be interested in giving people all the "coins" they want in exchange for real money, as they will be used to track users more - especially those very valuable data that are actual transfers of money.
Using a blockchain is "sexy" - and will make lusers think they are on the bleeding edge... while Facebook exploit them better and deeper.
A financial service from a "disruptive" Silicon Valley megacorp, provided at a random exchange rate guaranteed to fuck over its victims (I mean customers), with privacy guaranteed by Mark Zuckeberg, coded by Facebook in a brand new programming language also designed and written by Facebook.
Hmmm. Lemme think about that for a second.
I don't know whether to run away screaming in terror of the inevitable doom-fail - or run towards them screaming abuse and carrying a very large axe.
Fuck me! What an absolutely hideous idea! Normally I'd do the line about "what could possibly go wrong". But in this case the real question is what will go wrong first?
or run towards them screaming abuse and carrying a very large axe.
No, you don't scream and you don't run. Just move steadily toward them holding that very large axe and look straight at them, unblinking and with one eyebrow slightly raised.
If it's a large group you will not get some of them, but you can easily trace those because of a brown, smelly trail.
You'll only get one of them. That's a throwing axe, the handle is too short for felling, and too long for carving (the 490-2 is still a throwing axe, badly balanced by the long handle). Instead, I'd recommend this, for both visual effect and close-in functionality. Or this, just because it's the best store-bought felling axe I've ever used.
I know it's a throwing axe, but the people you're going after probably don't. And it looks sufficiently threatening; the one I was looking for was actually a Viking-era double-edged battle axe replica, but they don't list it, and a few other medieval replica axes, any more.
Never heard of that usage. Is it a brand name or something?
Not sure how far back it goes, but Rome had it as a currency more than 2000 years ago, and it's been a currency (whose symbol £ is of course a fancy L) ever since. Italy used it until the Euro replaced it. Some Roman-influence countries still use it, notably the UK and Turkey.
Being pedantic, Rome did not have a currency called "libra" over 2000 years ago. At the time it meant a set of scales, or a pound mass.
When the pound of silver became a popular measure of value, in the Middle Ages, the libra (in the forms of lire, livre) became the usual name.
Of course fiat currencies led to rapid devaluation (Gresham's Law) and before long the £ and the lire were worth very little by the silver standard - though the Maltese lire held up much better than the Italian one.
I mention this simply because I suspect that after an initial boost Facebook's libra is soon going to be worth as much as an Italian lire.
It's extraordinary how many people are already out on social media attacking the US Representatives who want regulation. Especially as a lot of them seem to have no previous posting history.
Benson's Cycle
To pedant upon your pedant...
Gresham's law doesn't state that fiat currencies lead to devaluation.
Gresham's law is usually stated as, "good money drives out bad." The original meaning was that if you debase a commodity coinage, the bad money will circulate while people hoard the good coins. So when Henry VIII did this with England's silver coinage he got the nickname "Old Copper Nose" as apparently the thin layer of silver rubbed off his nose first (assuming that story is actually true). But the debasement was definitely true and since Henry VII and previous coins had a higher silver content and the same face value, they were hoarded and people would try to only spend the crappy modern coins. You could even melt down the old coins, and sell the silver to someone for more than their face value in modern coins and make a handsome profit. If you didn't get caught and executed...
It's since been used in analogous situations. So for example if the Italian government print their threatened miniBOTS (small denomination government debt instruments with no expiry date and no interest rate), they'll have created a parallel currency to the Euro that they can print, without technically breaking the treaties. Though I'd love to see the ECJ rule on that - and it won't be in favour of Italy, even if they have to make something up...
But anyway it's not commodity money, they're both fiat - so Gresham's original law doesn't apply. But what will happen is that transactions in Italy will increasingly be done in miniBOTS. Because you can use them to pay taxes, and buy petrol from the state oil company petrol stations. At face value. So Euros will be hoarded for spending on foreign stuff, because if this happens Italy is almost certainly on it's way to the Eurozone exit door. And the Italian currency will be expected to fall. But people will take payments in miniBOTS at a premium over euros. Especially if they've got a tax bill coming up.
Of course this isn't all bad. It'll increase the Italian money supply, something that's been desperately needed - but they can't because they were stupid/unlucky enough to join the Euro. And Italy has had deflation (or been on the edge of it) for a decade now. And it allows the government to pay its suppliers on time, also boosting the Italian economy. Also, giving people a currency that encourages them to pay taxes could be a really good idea in Italy...
As it's technically legal, it might even be just enough to keep Italy in the Euro without the desperately needed Eurozone reforms that just never seem to happen (as nobody can agree on what to do).
"Crypto-" Etymology: From Ancient Greek: κρυπτός (kruptós, “hidden, secret”)
(I've said that before)
Zuckcoin will he hopes rule the world and make everyone totally dependant upon Lord Zuck. At a whim, he (or rather his minions) can make you bankwupt and destitute by denying you access to this ficticious pot of cloud based nothingness that you supposedly own.
He'll dodge the inevitable class action lawsuits as even the plaintifs lawyers will bill by the Zuckdollar.
FUCK NO.
Can someone just stop him in his quest to rule the world?
I'll say right now that if this thing takes off then I'll pay for things using groats and never Zuckmoney. (change the Z for and F and you might get the idea).
Never even seen a Faecebook login screen and hopefully never will. I am NOT a Zuck Slave I am a Free person.
If I ever met him I'd probably spit in his face as thanks for all the misery, suffering, trauma and even deaths his 'cunning plan' has bought on this world.
And Zuck saw Mr Robot and thought it was good and said "I'll have some of that".
FB seem to claim that they will hold punters' cash deposits into their currency in underlying 'safe assets' rather than cash, and pay the costs of running the service from the interest received on those assets. Not clear why they want to do that, but hey let's go with it.
What are these safe assets ? Presumably not commodity derivatives or pole dancers' buy-to-let mortgages in Florida. The usual definition of safe assets is ~AAA rated government bonds - US, France, UK, Germany, Japan, etc. Only problem is that in general those bonds pay negative interest, not positive. While that is a temporary situation as a result of the GFC, it has been temporary for the last 10 years and shows no signs of easing up in the next 5.
And what happens to prices if there is a sudden influx of new demand for a fixed supply, such as FB suddenly wanting to swap cash deposits into bonds ? Yep, they go up, which with bonds means that the interest paid becomes even more negative. Wonder if the Zuck realises that his cost model means that he will be paying to run this service and paying at a rate determined by the bond traders at the biggest banks, who coincidentally happen to be his biggest competitors for cash payment systems.
J4,
It's true that a lot of government detb is earning very poor returns. That was actually the whole point of QE. To force down the interest on government detbs and push money out along the risk curve in order to, for example, lower corporate borrowing costs. There's lots of AAA rated corporate debt that pays a return.
You can also do what pension / insurance companies do and have a mixed portfolio of investments. Because obviously the plan is for this currency to exist forever, so you can have a pool of stuff invested in the stock exchange to make you long-term profits, and other assets in corporate bonds and only some in the safest and most liquid investments like government debt.
It's still a shit idea, but this bit would be the easy bit. If Facebook were trustworthy, rather than greedy, incompetent scofflaws.
Yeah, except that FB explicitly say in their docs that it will be "low-volatility assets, such as bank deposits and short-term government securities from stable central banks". No mention of corporates, munis, short paper, and certainly not any equity or equity-linked.
There is more than USD 12.5 trillion of debt already in negative yield and there are fewer than 20 AAA rated non-bank debt issuers worldwide. The point about a sudden demand increase from FB driving yields down below their operating costs still stands even if they extend their mandate beyond govvies.
Suddenly it occured to me how this goes.
It's like a certain show. That is, like The Prisoner. At least that's what Lord Zuck wants, a nice, little village where he controlls everything 'connecting people'.
But..
As "Number Six" would put it: 'I am not a number! I am a free man!'
And further: 'I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own!'
So, no thanks. I won't join.
I only just about tolerate having to use Whatsapp to communicate with a small group of friends that use it. Even then I only use the bare minimum of words to communicate.
The chances of me having anything to do with some Farcebook currency exchange is non existent. Hopefully this will fail similarly to the Farcebook / Zynga credit based gift-tokens that were all over the supermarkets a few years ago.
They were talking about this on t'wireless yesterday. They had on an interviewee who is a highly respected editor of one of our biggest personal finance publications. Asked "will you use it?", she answered "probably, yes".
I wonder if the goal is a world where Facebook is custodian of many peoples' money? Not large amounts, but a working balance. Enough that you'd piss off an awful lot of people if you took too heavy-handed action against Facebook in the wake of some scandal?
Heard her on Radio 4 - she seems clueless as to what existing banks and other services already offer (was v. critical of what was on offer - obviously not knowledgeable on some of the newer entrants in the banking field)
Clueless on IT / security implications of it all - she was obviously a Facebook user & (like many FB users) lives in a bubble of ignorance (be it deliberate or otherwise) about FB issues so long as she can like her friends posts in FB.
The Register collective have failed! Us commentards should hold our collective heads in shame - as should the subbies what write the headlines.
The first reply to that absurd Twitter post linked in the article about how digital and crypto currencies will be more stable than national ones (tee fucking hee!) - well they got it. To quote them:
"Libra? They should have called it Cancer."
Is there anything more to say on the subject of Facebook after that?
Face it. The vast majority of Facebook users will be very happy. They can now share bills, lend each other a few quid, buy stuff from each other, with no friction.
The real worry is that its ubiquity causes it to be the default way of processing micropayments for web sites. Now you must be logged in to Facebook to browse the web. The end times are nigh.
John McAfee made the bold statement that he would "Eat his own d*ck" if Bitcoin doesn't reach 1M.
https://cryptocur.exchange/john-mcafee-will-eat-his-d-ck-if-bitcoin-doesn-t-reach-1m-by-2020/
Maybe Mark Z. could announce that if Libra doesn't reach 1 Bilion he would eat McAfee's ...(well, you get the picture)
...we should divide the citizens of the Earth into two groups: those that think a new 'currency' devised and controlled by two companies with, shall we say, less than perfect trust profiles, is a really wicked-cool idea that can't help make everything fizzy, and the rest of us.
The former group, let's call them 'the stupids', can be sent to do an on-location year-round survey of penguins in the arctic*, whilst the rest of us live in peace with far more to go around and far more chance of getting things fixes.
(* I know, I know... that's the idea. I don't want these idiots to actually disturb real penguins who never asked for this nonsense).
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