Carked it, Diem? Zuckerberg's grand cryptocurrency thing may sell off assets for $200m Diem, the spurned cryptocurrency payment system spawned under the name Libra by Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook (itself now operating as Meta) will reportedly sell its assets to Silvergate Capital Corporation. Silvergate, which announced a partnership with the Diem Association in May 2021, is negotiating with Diem to buy its …
I've been following this saga loosely since it was first mooted by Zuck and very quickly slapped down by regulators. It's been slapped down several times since then.
I think it says something that there was apparently never anybody at Facebook to tell Zuck that it was a bad idea (at best!)
Yup. You're missing the fact that the banking industry is so crap in the US that they've had to go and invent PayPal to try and have something useful that doesn't cost an arm and a leg to transfer money (funny money actually fails on that point, with the transfer fees costing an astounding amount for just writing a few bits into the blockchain).
It's like the telephone industry of the US : so shit that calling someone in another state requires that you call an operator to handle it first. And woes be to you if the person you want to call isn't using the same telco as you. At least, that's how it was back when I last visited a decade ago. Who knows ? Maybe they've improved on that.
Meanwhile, in Europe, I can call anyone in the world without bothering with anything more than the country code before the actual phone number. I can use my banking portal to send almost any amount of money to any IBAN number. In short, I am free to talk to who I want and send money to who I want. You know, like a person should be in the 3rd millennium.
@Pascal Monett
Impressive. Every word of what you just said was wrong.
In my lifetime, which I'm just going to say is a lot longer than 10 years, it has not been necessary to use an operator to call another state or another carrier. Calling another country I'm less sure about, but for as long as I've cared about it, it's been something you could do directly.
Similarly, most banks have portals which allow paying entities or individuals. PayPal pioneered making it easy to pay someone electronically, and the banks had to step up.
Your misconceptions are as dated as believing that the English never brush their teeth or the French never bathe.
Yes, Pascal's post was impressively wrong. We've seen him grind that axe several times before, though, and I expect we'll see it again.
To go back to the original question: There are many "stablecoins". The argument for them (which, as with all cryptocurrency projects, I do not find particularly persuasive) is that they combine the partial anonymity1 of cryptocurrency with better price stability.
There was a really nice overview of a number of stablecoin proposals and implementations, discussing the technical and economic implications of their design choices, in CACM (if memory serves) a couple years back. In many ways, the research around cryptocurrencies is far more interesting, and useful, than cryptocurrencies themselves.
1There's a substantial body of research on de-anonymizing cryptocurrency transactions using just the metadata available, to say nothing of various attacks against poor implementations and OPSEC, or making use of normal HUMINT (e.g. getting people to turn state's evidence).
They're lucky that there are still enough true believer idiots around willing to pay big cash to buy the worthless rusty old tub off them.
If there was an outside chance that these fakecoins were worth sticking with, Facebook would not be selling up.
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