>Libra’s mission is to enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure [...] This document outlines our plans for a new decentralized blockchain,
The "decentralized" can be parsed different ways. Facebook Libra is decentralizing the transactions but it does not decentralize the currency creation. (This partial decentralization happens because Facebook wants to peg Libra to stable asset reserves.) This is different from Bitcoin's idea of decentralizing both the currency creation _and_ the financial transactions.
We can see this distinction in its list of partners...
> Members of the Libra Association will consist of [...]
The bulleted list includes:
- transaction processors such as Mastercard/Visa, PayPal, Stripe, etc
- ecommerce marketplaces such as ebay, Uber, etc
- telecomm such as Vodafone
We see the industry that's noticeably missing: no banks mentioned such as JP Morgan Chase, Citi, HSBC, etc
That's because Facebook wants to be the "bank" in this new Libra economy. It wants to be the "Federal Reserve" that creates bank notes.
If I misunderstand Facebook's intentions and how it wants to position Libra in the financial world, please correct me.
> This is different from Bitcoin's idea of decentralizing
Libra is Facebook Credits [1] rebooted. All that changed is the meme it’s attaching to, “cryptocurrency” being better at suspending consumers’ scepticism.
>Libra is Facebook Credits [1] rebooted. All that changed is the meme it’s attaching to, “cryptocurrency”
My posting history will show I'm skeptical of Facebook but setting my biases aside, I think there's still a real technical difference here.
I believe the old Facebook Credits required the transactions to go through Facebook's centralized servers. (The programming api for processing Facebook Credits communicated with Facebook's servers.) This would be similar to a customer holding Marriott Hotel points and she wants to give them to a friend; she would have to call up Marriott customer service and have them transfer the credits/points from her account to someone else's. The transactions can't happen without Facebook and Marriott getting involved. That's fundamentally different from Libra since its transactions are validated by external partner nodes.
Therefore, the Libra isn't a cryptocurrency in just a "meme" bandwagon sense; it's actually designed for decentralized transactions that don't require centralized Facebook servers.
Whether the public (and merchants accepting payments) finds that technical difference of any value and massively adopts it, I don't know.
>Initially, the association (and validators) will consist of a geographically distributed and diverse set of Founding Members. These members are organizations chosen according to objective participation criteria, including that they have a stake in bootstrapping the Libra ecosystem and investing resources toward its success. Over time, membership eligibility will shift to become completely open and based only on the member’s holdings of Libra.
So it's not going to be Facebook's centralized servers, but Facebook + their friend's centralized servers. There are some vague promises, but this will start out just as centralized as Facebook Credits.
"Can't wait for a cryptocurrency with the ethics of Uber, the censorship resistance of Paypal, and the decentralization of Visa, all tied together with the proven privacy of Facebook."
It's secured via BFT PoS, which means if more than 1/3 of the validators are malicious, then the network halts until there's a supermajority (2/3). With BFT PoS blocks have finality, which means you need a supermajority of the validator set to "fork" the chain and rewrite the history.
so that we aren't cherry picking here, from the White paper:
> To ensure that Libra is truly open and always operates in the best interest of its users, our ambition is for the Libra network to become permissionless. The challenge is that as of today we do not believe that there is a proven solution that can deliver the scale, stability, and security needed to support billions of people and transactions across the globe through a permissionless network. One of the association’s directives will be to work with the community to research and implement this transition, which will begin within five years of the public launch of the Libra Blockchain and ecosystem.
> different from Libra since its transactions are validated by external partner nodes
“Facebook is expected to maintain a leadership role [in the Association] through 2019.” The Association (“an independent, not-for-profit membership organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland”) holds title to the reserves, has a monopoly on coin minting and destruction, and has sole determination over new Association members (who each get one vote).
Speaking of that branding, it was pointed out in a different thread somewhere that FB/Zuckerberg have opted to name this currency "Libra," which is quite the coincidence given that the Winklevoss twins' Bitcoin exchange is named Gemini (and touts "regulated" as its value prop no less - what a circus the crypto world is).
Absolutely not. As someone heavily involved in social gaming and related payment solutions at the time, Facebook Credits were only intended for one-way transactions, from users to game publishers, with Facebook getting a 30% cut. You weren't able to transfer these credits to other users, so it was never any form of real currency.
>We see the industry that's noticeably missing: no banks mentioned such as JP Morgan Chase, Citi, HSBC, etc
As far as I know, they're missing because they refused to be part of the association:
>Originally the company had ambitions to get Wall Street involved, but found a lack of interest among institutional giants like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. It is still looking to have 100 members in the governing association, the person said.
Sounds about as decentralised as my private collection of cloud servers I get to make all the decisions on. Decentralised is supposed to mean individuals are both the caretakers and the users.
I would also like to add that FB is going to tie wallets to accounts so FB will know information about every transation. "Pseudonymous" wallets aren't going to be anonymous to Facebook.
I think the devil is in the details. The claim `Calibra will not share account information or financial data with Facebook,
Inc. or any third party` is followed by `without customer consent.`. From reading through the document you linked, the infrastructure will definitely be there to support the sharing of any and all data. Considering Facebook's history with getting "consent", I am willing to bet that they will take every chance they can get to manipulate users into giving such "consent".
“When Facebook notified the acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014, it informed the Commission that it would be unable to establish reliable automated matching between Facebook users' accounts and WhatsApp users' accounts. It stated this both in the notification form and in a reply to a request of information from the Commission. However, in August 2016, WhatsApp announced updates to its terms of service and privacy policy, including the possibility of linking WhatsApp users' phone numbers with Facebook users' identities.”
"We will implement cold wallets and multisig wallets that allow Libra users and association members to add extra security for their Libra coin and Libra Investment Token holdings."
“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”
If you'll allow me to riff on jwz, I think another law is applicable to social media:
"Every social media company will expand until it becomes a bank. Those social media companies which cannot so expand are replaced by the ones which will. A bank is meant in the sense that it will store and mantain things of value including favors, records, and money."
I think this coin is a really bad idea. Its just centralizing a crypto coin and then removing the laws around money because now a dollar has a libra coin wrapper on it so it's obviously totally different than a dollar.
It feels like a federal reserve moment where a bunch of rich folk get together and again dictate the future of currency. Crypto was supposed to change that trend. Unfortunately the want of convenience will probably win out over any sort moralistic/idealistic standing and unless government steps in, it will probably be widely adopted.
I think this coin is a really bad idea. Its just centralizing a crypto coin and then removing the laws around money because now a dollar has a libra coin wrapper on it so it's obviously totally different than a dollar.
Good luck with regulators. Especially regulators in the financial industry.
I don't really think that creating a Facebook account is satisfactory to cover KYC(1) and AML(2) rules, as a for example.
But they're many other examples in finance where the "better ask forgiveness than permission" will get you a go straight to jail, don't collect 200 libra on your way there card if violated.
Can you provide an example of a person in the financial industry who went to jail for violating regulations of the kind you are talking about, as opposed to fraud/dishonesty?
I think that it would be more accurate to describe "14 counts of conspiracy and securities fraud" and "a plot to launder $1.2 billion from Venezuela's state-owned oil company" as fraud and dishonesty, rather than regulatory violations.
It's not pegged to a dollar. It's pegged to a blend of currencies and assets. So it's not a dollar wrapped like Tether or USDC.
I don't understand how they plan to make it work across jurisdictions. There are so many laws and rules when it comes to transmitting and storing money or derivatives.
Like I can transfer a billion dollars worth of BTC, no problem. But if I try to wire even $100K between two of my accounts in US and EU, all kinds of red flags go off and phone calls need to happen.
If you made this proposition to me a year ago, I would probably shrug it off. But after having read about several successful companies from the late 90s and early 00s doing exactly this – PayPal being a prime example – I think you may very well be right. Heck, one could even say that the current legal/lobbying fights between the internet giants and major states is exactly this.
I think the point is to call their little consortium "decentralized" and let the various on-ramps (be it wallets, exchanges, merchants) deal with AML, just as if it were cash or Bitcoin.
This is apparent in how their wallet Calibra is what requires KYC, not the crypto token itself.
Many countries treat BTC as foreign currency, with all the regulations that come with that. It's not a major issue for the bitcoin community, since apart from taxes and money laundring protections you can mostly circumvent it by avoiding those jurisdictions as required. But Facebook/Libra would likely feel the full force of those regulations.
This is seriously scary. The buy-in it's already received from some of the big financial players worries me that this might actually catch-on.
Facebook is the last person I'd trust with any of my data, let alone a complete history of all my transactions.
I hope privacy is more important to the average Western Joe than it was to the Chinese. WeChat sounds like a dystopian nightmare.
"it will be backed by a collection of low-volatility assets, such as bank deposits and short-term government securities in currencies from stable and reputable central banks." from the whitepaper: https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/#the-libra-currency-and-...
It's like one to one copy of the traditional monetary system with speed of transactions improved. Low volatile assets they rely on are not real and therefore not guaranteed to stay low volatile. It may be decentralized technically but not socially or ethically.
Facebook can't keep people's phone numbers, pictures and sex life private and we trust them to invent a currency?
I'm not a crypto backer - in fact I'm skeptical of the long term usefulness, but this isn't crypto, it's shitty PayPal. It's not decentralized, not removed from fiat, not anonymous and not trustworthy.
Its introduction reads like a goading of antitrust activists. (Facebook’s advantage as a cryptocurrency purveyor being its acumen with getting away with lawlessness.)
From the Move programming language paper: "semantics inspired by linear logic". Any even more technical references? Anybody knows anybody who really work(ed) on Move? Academic? Otherwise? I'm interested because of my "poured only once" current project http://imar.ro/~mbuliga/hapax.html
> Interest on the reserve assets will be used to cover the costs of the system, ensure low transaction fees, pay dividends to investors who provided capital to jumpstart the ecosystem (read “The Libra Association” here), and support further growth and adoption. The rules for allocating interest on the reserve will be set in advance and will be overseen by the Libra Association. Users of Libra do not receive a return from the reserve.
Forget about the cryptography and "blockchain" this system will use. The real innovation here is financial in nature. Only it's not really an innovation.
I doubt today's race to negative interest rates will be kind to Libra validators, who will be demanding a fat payout sooner or later for the loss of business on highly lucrative credit cards.
There's only one way to fund this beast: fractional reserve and ever more risky investments. The temptation will be enormous. The justifications true and well-intentioned. The outcome predictable to anyone who has paid attention.
So when you purchase Libra for cash it’s like buying an index, only with no interest whatsoever. So all the risk and no reward. It’s not for no reason that index funds pay dividends - to compensate for a very real risk of losses. Interesting to see if libra will be able to pull this trick and push risk on its users without compensation.
Sounds to me like Facebook is trying to become the Wechat of the West ... (as per an article 2 days ago explaining how Wechat could be central to every payment in a daily life )
Mark Zuckerberg is very impressed by WeChat as a platform. That’s probably the best way to understand that effort. “Crypto” is less a technology and more a loose governance method because no Western company can have the authority that WeChat has in China.
>The reserve allows users of the system to enjoy a relatively stable medium of exchange from the start. At the same time, it also represents a centralized function. For the network to be fully permissionless, the association will have to explore ways to further distribute and decentralize the reserve, including automating the verification of the assets in the basket and the process of minting and burning of coins. Increasing market competition in the custody and management of the reserve will also be explored to improve the efficiency of this service, and the costs it imposes on users and custodians over time.
So this coin will be backed by a centralized reserve, and you would have to trust Facebook that the coins you own are backed by real money, with no way of verifying this. Tether works the same way, and they are just creating money out of thin air without actual dollars backing them up. I'm curious how Facebook will decentralize this reserve, or if they will even do this in the first place.
Visa, Mastercard and Swift have spent a lot of time and effort lobbying their _de facto_ monopoly, carefully advocating that… for lack of a better phrasing: they are essential and facilities but not “essential facilities”.
The best example of something impressive in that area is the concept of Two-sided markets, that comes with natural, customer-benefiting monopoly and even a justification for aggressive dumping baked-in in the model. I’m personally familiar with several of the contributors to that area and I can’t suspect that was ‘sponsored’ research but, Lord, you have to be lucky to get a Nobel prize to defend you.
SWIFT is just a on paper private entity, there’s a reason they are located in Belgium where also the NATO headquarters are: SWIFT is a pillar of the US empire and its client states.
How is their platform different in practical terms than libra? Libra itself is not a new currency. I believe it's pegged to the US dollar. In the real world you really pay with visa/mastercard, paypal or swift, not with "real" money.
Libra is pegged to a basket of values. I suspect that this could lead companies to prefer to store liquidity and report on Libra as it could be more stable than any individual currency, including USD.
I just watched the official launch video for Libra and it's just disgusting how silicon valley is abusing the image of "poor" people or people from developing countries to sell a philanthropist idea while their true intentions are just more money and more power.
As someone somewhat out of the crypto-loop, would someone be able to explain/posit/cite why Facebook are entering this market, and why traditional payment providers are also getting involved? On the face of it, this suggests it aims to essentially reduce transaction costs (which would be to the detriment of the status-quo)?
It's not really a crypto coin. It's a stable coin. The value is backed by hard cash in a vault somewhere. And not anyone can mine it, only the 10 million buy in organizations can process transactions on their nodes. But essentially it's pay pal labeled as a crypto coin. So they can get away with skirting some laws because "it's not actually money man".
Just a sleezeball move in my opinion to capitalise on the hard work the crypto community has been putting in to make safe trustworthy decentralised systems. That's in no way saying there isn't sleeze balls in the community, but there are real believers about the whole idea that have been working hard.
On top of that it's likely that they'll run a fractional reserve scheme, meaning that only a small portion of the coins will be backed by real currency at any given time. I haven't found any reference to this in their paper, I wonder if they'll provide transparency on this topic.
Because people (especially here) have been underestimating crypto by (maybe) a Trillion Dollar margin.
There are many legitimate uses for a cross-border currency that has a strong backer. There is a ton of services (like Skrill) that try to bridge the gap for a big portion of the world un-banked.
I say "legitimate" because the uses are fine within the US/EU (holding a "hard" currency like the USD). But many countries around the world prohibit that. If Facebook currency ignores that (given their size), they can access these markets.
This is, maybe, a trillion dollar market.
People here have been ignoring crypto because they don't understand the effects on closed economies. Small online-banks have failed because of difficult regulations and name recognition. Facebook might make it because they have a strong brand, big audience and can battle whole countries.
Put it differently, banks have failed to implement something more efficient and the “bitcoin” innovators have also failed on practical aspects. As a result we have a void and it’s anyone’s game right now. Facebook is throwing money at it. A small chance it works but public trust is a big factor in currency isn’t it?
Here’s what I think: any alternative currency tied to the USD (meaning a currency without intrinsic value) is DOA. The next generation currency cannot be tied to resource constraints.
FedWire transfers are instantaneous and cheap if not free at many institutions. The “bank transfers are slow and expensive” argument is financially illiterate.
I agree. I think we should have used Keynes' Bancor proposal [1], rather than gold and therefore USD as a reserve currency.
> Keynes was able to make his proposal the official British proposal at the Bretton Woods Conference but it was not accepted. Rather than a supranational currency, the conference adopted a system of pegged exchange rates ultimately tied to physical gold in a system managed by the World Bank and IMF. In practice, the system implicitly established the United States dollar as a reserve currency convertible to gold at a fixed price on demand by other governments. The dollar was implicitly established as the reserve by the large trade surplus and gold reserves held by the US at the time of the conference.
It looks like for the end customer this is no better than a closed payment platform(think of visa network or ACH) unless they provide at least read access to the blockchain ledger/database. If that's the case it's not worth the name of crypto currency.
They also say in 5 years will provide full(r/w) access to the public clients/nodes...I wouldn't hold my breath.
It has "fraud" prevention built in, charge backs, compliance etc...how would that work on a public blockchain? I believe they lie and they know it will never be released as a public/permisionless blockchain.
As far as I can tell, FB wants to be a bank to print money. Their own money. For every country.
All full nodes on that blockchain are going to be owned by FaceBook. FB will be able to see all transactions and take money from people they don't like.
Yes - I was just reading the other article on the front page of HN which gives a summary. Pegged to fiats and traded in for fiats, so... Facebook is creating its own fiat which it wants to profit off, use its existing user network as a leap pad to do so, and to be considered the global fiat? Is that fair?
I imagine the only reason a traditional payment provider will get involved is to "keep your enemies closer" Once there's real money to be made, the greed will show and their will be all sorts of split & forks of the project.
You couldn’t pay me to touch a crypto currency built by Facebook. They’re the king of shifty behaviour, dark patterns and unscrupulously harvesting all the data they can get their hands on.
There’ll be no privacy from overlord FB and everything will be more or less at their behest.
A basket of bank deposits and short-term government securities will be held in the Libra Reserve for every Libra that is created, building trust in its intrinsic value.
So... I’ve not had time to read the whole paper, but my initial impression is that this is not really worth consider as a “cryptocurrency” - instead, it’s a limited application of “blockchain” to what amounts to a multi-party private currency.
That in and of itself isn’t a terrible thing necessarily, but I guess I’m failing to see the utility it provides.
OTOH, Facebook is big enough to push this into much larger adoption than existing cryptocurrencies have managed. If they do that, and if Libra is eventually opened enough that it can be traded on the open market without a “trusted” intermediary, then we might at least see the infrastructure, public acceptance, and public understanding of what cryptocurrencies are significantly improve. That could lead to a stronger ecosystem in general.
Personally, I’m trying to figure out if I can have an “account” that is truly anonymous. If so, then I’ll pay attention and study it more. If not... well, then I’ll ignore this unless and until that is possible.
I just skimmed through their documents and I saw they use BFT. BFT algorithms are slow (and slower when more nodes are added) so are they using another layer for gaining performance?
Moreover, BFT algorithms do not solve BGP in a decentralized, trustless network, consensus remains subjective. Bitcoin relies on proof-of-work to provide objective consensus.
Whitepaper: "We did not consider proof-of-work based protocols due to their poor performance and high energy (and environmental) costs"
I remember someone saying something along the lines of “Facebook will try and copy and crush us, but not this time- by the time they work out what’s happening, it’ll be too late”.
Facebook seem to have noticed what’s happening and are moving like the wind to try and crush us.
Are they too late or are we too late? Or neither?
I’m super curious how the initial governance framework evolves over time.
From the looks of it, it’s not anything completely new and relies on standard human voting and management structures.
>A Founding Member that does not comply with the Founding Member eligibility criteria can be removed by a supermajority vote of the council. The recording of this vote on the Libra Blockchain will remove the member's node from the consensus algorithm.
So given this, the things working in Libra’s favor are an immediate, global social network for distribution.
Against it would be lack of innovation on the governing front (i.e. prone to internal politics) but this is probably more of a long term problem.
The problem with the financial industry is not currency. Hyping cryptocurrency's benefits to actual humans is like criticizing Facebook for releasing personal data to Cambridge Analytica using tab delimited files instead of JSON. It's completely missing the point.
I find it interesting that Facebook banned cryptocurrency ads last year, citing safety from “financial products and services frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.”
The ban was a good thing because the currencies were promoted as investments which is not the case with stable coins/fb coin. Let's separate payment platforms from gambling-like investments, shall we?
Facebook banned my previous company from asking users for their FB data to perform ML credit risk evaluation. Some weeks later they registered a patent for credit risk analysis using historical FB data.
So we’ve from government issued inflationary currencies to multinational scrip backed by government currencies. Sounds like bitcoin is a better hedge than ever against today’s economic environment.
So the only thing this has going for it over cash is that it may ease exchange online (to be seen). And this depends on how easy it will be to join this as a merchant or user, how nice APIs will be, and how well fraud will be handled, etc., etc.
And the value will fluctuate based on the trust in the ability to convert it reliably to cash/other currencies. So there's no real peg to anything, as described previously.
A basket of bank deposits and short-term government securities will be held in the Libra Reserve for every Libra that is created, building trust in its intrinsic value.
Soon 'The Libra Reserve' will hold only a 10th of the total Libra Coins in circulation (fractional reserve). A global federal reserve in the making.
during the ICO era i used to read 2-3 whitepapers per day.
It usually was all about decentralization and "how we are going to change the world",
and then right after the sale it will be like "well the world is not ready and blockchain is not there yet so we are starting with centralization" ( in the few cases the product was not fraud).
now, since all the fiat is coming in without a need for an ICO it looks like facebook is not even trying to hide their true intents.
They are just saying it to my face, "We are trying to increase your dependency in our products and on the way creating a new financial device for the big guys to earn more money on your behalf".
I truly hope this initiative will get blocked by the people who FB think they can fool again.
Agreed. Though it seems like the consensus protocol does protect against malicious or compromised gatekeepers.
It seems that by dialing up the trust in their validator nodes (to something significantly greater than the trust you might have in a bitcoin node, but also significantly less than 100% trust), they are able to decrease the work involved in the consensus protocol, reducing energy usage.
The suggestion that this is a way to help the "global unbanned" is also disingenuous. If people don't have enough money to put any in a bank, making up a new centralized currency isn't going to change that.
Typically people are unbanked not because they are completely broke but because of one or more of the following:
1) They do not live near a bank
2) They don't meet some minimum threshold of money
3) Discrimination - The are part of some social or ethnic group that the banks won't touch
Since Libra is secured via BFT PoS it'll be feasible to integrate it into Cosmos Hub, and thus you'll be able to communicate directly with Ethereum which is interesting.
This question is subject, like all others, to capricious changes to Libra Terms, Conditions and Implementation. Facebook values its bottom line and is taking that, and only that, into consideration determening actions to protect your privacy, the security of your wallet, the fiat it is based on, the value of its coin and which Trusted Partners™ to allow to control Libra.
Right now, it is not reversible or changeable. There is a system of rent, so it isn't permanent(although evicted data can be reconstituted via crypto-proof).
It is sad that Zuckerberg chose to squander all that capital on frivolous endeavors at Facebook. He could have done so much.
This is what gets me the most: "We believe that a global currency and financial infrastructure should be designed and governed as a public good." It's very rich coming from Facebook who could have made itself a public good a decade ago.
Yeah, that bit is bonkers. A huge privately-owned tech corporation talking about 'public good'. We truly are entering the era of global corporate despotism.
It is kind of confusing. They have their own language that will let you create various kinds of structured modules. Initially, they are going to limit it to their native modules. The modules have some properties that make the contracts safer and less prone to duplication bugs. They haven't finalized the syntactic sugar version of the language yet.
The "decentralized" can be parsed different ways. Facebook Libra is decentralizing the transactions but it does not decentralize the currency creation. (This partial decentralization happens because Facebook wants to peg Libra to stable asset reserves.) This is different from Bitcoin's idea of decentralizing both the currency creation _and_ the financial transactions.
We can see this distinction in its list of partners...
> Members of the Libra Association will consist of [...]
The bulleted list includes:
- transaction processors such as Mastercard/Visa, PayPal, Stripe, etc
- ecommerce marketplaces such as ebay, Uber, etc
- telecomm such as Vodafone
We see the industry that's noticeably missing: no banks mentioned such as JP Morgan Chase, Citi, HSBC, etc
That's because Facebook wants to be the "bank" in this new Libra economy. It wants to be the "Federal Reserve" that creates bank notes.
If I misunderstand Facebook's intentions and how it wants to position Libra in the financial world, please correct me.