from the capricorn-or-taurus-but-not-libra dept.
Facebook announces Libra cryptocurrency: All you need to know
Facebook has finally revealed the details of its cryptocurrency Libra, which will let you buy things or send money to people with nearly zero fees. You'll pseudonymously buy or cash out your Libra online or at local exchange points like grocery stores, and spend it using interoperable third-party wallet apps or Facebook's own Calibra wallet that will be built into WhatsApp, Messenger, and its own app. Today Facebook released its white paper explaining Libra and its testnet for working out the kinks of its blockchain system before a public launch in the first half of 2020.
Facebook won't fully control Libra, but instead get just a single vote in its governance like other founding members of the Libra Association including Visa, Uber, and Andreessen Horowitz who've invested at least $10 million each into the project's operations. The association will promote the open-sourced Libra blockchain and developer platform with its own Move programming language plus sign up businesses to accept Libra for payment and even give customers discounts or rewards.
Facebook is launching a subsidiary company also called Calibra that handles its crypto dealings and protects users' privacy by never mingling your Libra payments with your Facebook data so it can't be used for ad targeting. Your real identity won't be tied to your publicly visible transactions. But Facebook/Calibra and other founding members of the Libra Association will earn interest on the money users cash in that is held in reserve to keep the value of Libra stable.
Also at Business Insider and The Verge.
See also: Facebook announces new cryptocurrency called Libra - business live
Facebook's Answer to Bitcoin Poses a Double Threat
How Libra Would Work for You
Previously: Facebook Cryptocurrency
Facebook Plans to Launch 'GlobalCoin' Cryptocurrency in 2020
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Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
Facebook is planning to launch its own cryptocurrency in early 2020, allowing users to make digital payments in a dozen countries.
The currency, dubbed GlobalCoin, would enable Facebook's 2.4 billion monthly users to change dollars and other international currencies into its digital coins. The coins could then be used to buy things on the internet and in shops and other outlets, or to transfer money without needing a bank account.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook, last month met the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, to discuss the plans, according to the BBC.
Cryptocurrency without the pseudonymity? I think it'll work fine if they make it as easy to use as PayPal - and their blockchain processes transactions quickly, even without billions of records on it. Maybe we'll even finally get real microtransactions.
Planned for unveiling next week, Facebook plans to launch a new crypocurrency dubbed 'Libra' in 2020.
Facebook has secured the backing of over a dozen companies for its upcoming Libra cryptocurrency set to be announced next week, The Wall Street Journal reports. These companies include major financial organizations like Visa and Mastercard, and internet darlings like PayPal, Uber, Stripe, and Booking.com. Each will invest around $10 million to fund development of the currency, and will become part of the Libra Association, an independent consortium that will govern the digital coin independently of Facebook.
Backing from major financial entities such as Paypal, Mastercard and VISA is a new twist.
The new cryptocurrency is intended to function as a "stablecoin" to improve stability and make it more attractive to users in developing countries. A stablecoin is
designed to minimize the volatility of the price of the stablecoin, relative to some 'stable' asset or basket of assets. A stablecoin can be pegged to a currency, or to exchange traded commodities (such as precious metals or industrial metals). Stablecoins redeemable in commodities are said to be backed[.]
The plan for Libra is to
[allow] users to send money over Facebook's messaging products like WhatsApp and Messenger, Facebook hopes that its partnerships with e-commerce firms will allow users to spend the currency online. The company is reportedly also looking into developing ATM-like physical terminals for people to convert their money into Libra.
Is privacy considered a social norm in financial dealings?
(Score: 5, Funny) by Snow on Tuesday June 18 2019, @04:56PM (3 children)
Trust Facebook with your money.
It'll be okay. Trust me.
(Score: 3, Informative) by cafebabe on Tuesday June 18 2019, @05:20PM (1 child)
LibraCoin? SuckerCoin [soylentnews.org].
1702845791×2
(Score: 5, Touché) by bob_super on Tuesday June 18 2019, @11:07PM
An Ars commeter put it best :
Paypal, Uber, and Facebook ... Wrong Zodiac : it ain't Libra, it's Cancer.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @05:36PM
(Dumb fucks!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @05:10PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if-2M3K1tqk [youtube.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by istartedi on Tuesday June 18 2019, @05:17PM (4 children)
The biggest mistake made long ago was not requiring PayPal to be regulated like a bank. We've had problems with PayPal, and we'll have problems with this if it doesn't have to comply.
This is what a huge swath of tech has become--ways to do end-runs around systems that were built to protect consumers and/or workers, with predictable outcomes of failing to provide those protections.
Doing an exchange into some other currency and then using that currency to provide debit and/or credit services doesn't make you "not a bank". It makes you more like a foreign bank. This should be regulated just as if a Canadian bank set up terminals to convert USD into CAD and gave us cards to use at merchants that accepted CAD in the USA.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @05:28PM (1 child)
fuck the government and your precious regulations.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @02:05AM
fuck corporatocracy and your precious laissez-faire capitalism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @11:07AM (1 child)
Actually this is a currency that is intended to compete with the dollar in the united states, so it is wildly, incredibly, punishably, illegal.
It's like a city making their own currency, or a church, except they are rich idiots.
bitcoin is different because it has no location and no institutions, no businesses, no licenses, no nothing. It is just technology, the internet. You could try to make it illegal but it would break the internet. You could try to charge someone with counterfeit or something, but you'd have to arrest everyone in 100 different countries. And the police who confiscate it and use it themselves.
zuckerberg and the rest of the 'silicon valley' institutional players, and whoever else will fit in his asshole, are actual companies and have the same rights to print a currency as wal mart or genie energy or the mormon church(who tried look it up), which is none.
So you are right, the same thing is happening with money as happened with privacy. Just because you can create a fake personal computer that is a network listening device due to 'intel' secret management engine, and just listen to everything someone says because no journalist or lawyer or judge or congressperson understands how it works, means that you have no right to privacy and they have the right to spy on you, without any laws or meanings of words changing(visibly).
I predict that this will fail miserably, catastrophically, hilariously, primarily because faceblah is already uncool, and unused by anyone except fake propaganda and advertising accounts, and because even though their money is at maximum, their trust is at negative infinity.
And two things that don't go together are distrust and currency. That the sv elite are still jumping on board with something like this indicates how dramatically out of touch they are, which I already knew.
The echo dot is going to be the tamagoochi of 2025. facebrk will become the aol except worse.
And zuckerberg deserves prison so let's imprison this douche for what he is actually doing, which is subverting the political system and vast espionage on the population. The downside of youthful successes is aging in disgrace, so let's make this happen, take the poetic justice all the way to 11.
That what assange is doing counts as espionage but zuckerberg does not is batshit insane, brazen, obvious, naked emporer, doublethink.
Uninstall the brain update if you were affected buy the corrupted file and thought journalism was espionage and making spy software masked as social media was good business.
And btw, what what was all that stuff printed on the inside of zuckerberg's hoodie with the pentagram, anyway?
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Wednesday June 19 2019, @05:43PM
IANAL either, but It's not illegal. It's a private currency which is legal. [wikipedia.org]. Some other examples include Ithaca Hours (New York state) and the Petole used in the Pacific Northwest. It's even legal to mint coins. It's not legal to mint coins or print bills that might be confused with USD, or to use your currency as an instrument of fraud. That's where the confusion arises. You have to take some care to avoid those problems when issuing an alternative currency, but it's not straight-up illegal.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Shire on Tuesday June 18 2019, @05:24PM (5 children)
Can't wait for a crytocurrency with the ethics of Uber, the censorship resistance of Paypal, and the centralization of Visa, all tied together under the proven privacy of Facebook [imgur.com]
All hail the ZuckBuck [imgur.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday June 18 2019, @05:35PM (1 child)
> "protects users' privacy by never mingling your Libra payments with your Facebook data so it can't be used for ad targeting."
This week.
Next week : "we absorbed the subsidiary changed the EULA to retroactively transfer all the transaction details to FB, because convenience/safety/fuckyou"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @06:15PM
Changing "blockchain" to "blockhead" is a requirement.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @05:50PM (1 child)
That screenshot came from Windoze, right? How can it still have such shitty text rendering in 2019?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Shire on Tuesday June 18 2019, @06:05PM
That's insanely off topic and picky but I'll tell you that it's entirely due to the page being displayed with javascript and all 3rd party links disabled, hence only the generic fonts can be seen. Safe surfing comes with a minor price to pay.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @02:14AM
Shouldn't that be "the decentralization of Visa"? All the other points describe failings of the respective organizations. But Visa is rather good at being centralized.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @05:33PM
The drawbacks of Bitcoin combined with the drawbacks of PayPal, all backed by a company known not to give a rat's ass about privacy or security? Sign me up! /s
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @05:39PM
how orwellian!
slavery is freedom!
(Score: 5, Informative) by bradley13 on Tuesday June 18 2019, @06:16PM (12 children)
Here's a quick summary of the most important points from the Libra White Paper [scribd.com].
Facebook wants to offer not just a currency and payment service; they want to offer financial services - basically, Facebook wants to become a global bank. These financial services will be run by a wholly-owned subsidiary called Calibra, which will presumably be subject to banking regulations.
The Libra currency
The currency itself is managed by a not-for-profit organization independent of Facebook. Membership in the organization is "formed from the network of validator nodes that operate the Libra Blockchain.
Note that this group is by invitation only: you can't just start running a Libra validator node. The initial members include major payment services like Mastercard, Visa and PayPal. Otherwise, it includes a rather odd array of big tech companies, including for example both Uber and Lyft.
Technical highlights of Libra: (1) it includes a programming language, and will be able to run smart contracts, (2) it uses Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) for consensus rather the proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, (3) it does not require your Libra address to be tied to a real-world identity; hence, it is pseudonymous in the same way as Bitcoin.
The currency will be backed by assets, with the goal of creating a stable exchange rate against real currencies. The assets come from the initial members of the Libra Association; profits from investing the reserve will be used to cover expenses and otherwise be paid to the founding members.
New Libra coins are only minted when purchased with fiat currencies, which are then added to the reserve to back those new coins. Coins are destroyed when sold in exchange for fiat assets. These creation/destruction actions only apply to authorized organizations, which trade directly with the central asset pool (rather like national banks, except that money is only printed against real, retained assets). Outside of these authorized organizations, trade between individuals or organizations neither creates nor destroys Libra coins.
The Libra source code is available under an Apache license; a testnet is currently running.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by DannyB on Tuesday June 18 2019, @06:40PM (1 child)
Can't we just get one single mandated global digital currency already?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @06:48PM
i saw ur post read it and i thought this was shitpost
boy was i wrong
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday June 18 2019, @06:47PM (5 children)
Thanks for the summary. I'm not a cryptocurrency expert, but this seems like a reasonable attempt at a fiat-backed cryptocurrency. Naturally, with this type of currency you have a central stakeholder (Libra foundation) that decides the rate that coins are "purchased" (I'm not sure what the correct verb is... minting seems inaccurate as the coins are generated only when backed with capital).
My paranoia alarms are going off with anything started by FB, but if they can somehow democratize the organization to be truly independent I would be willing to consider the currency.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday June 18 2019, @08:11PM (2 children)
Yeah, I feel exactly the same way. Everything they've announced sound so reasonable, really good even. But...it's Facebook. Also: This isn't going to disrupt the credit cards, who frankly are the major global players in consumer transactions, because the credit cards are some of the Libra founders.
On the other hand, Facebook's motivation may be simple greed. Tney've founded a subsidiary that is basically going to be a bank. And they may sincerely hope to disrupt the banking industry, using Libra as a lever. Maybe the lever they've constructed isn't evil.
We really could use a truly international currency outside the control of any particular nation. That's what some people thought Bitcoin (or ETH, or some other cryptocurrency) was going to be, though it never really had a chance. Having the Libra Association based in Switzerland is a good step towards keeping it independent of national politics - Switzerland isn't perfect, but it's a better choice than anything else I can think of.
Dunno...we'll have to see what happens in the next year or three...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @11:18PM (1 child)
Btc never had a chance? Amazing how delusional people still are about what's happening. No gov or corporate coin has a chance because they will never agree to what "fair" to all interested parties, just look at what happened to SDRs.
Meanwhile bitcoin chugs along exactly as planned (just read the first few years of bitcointalk posts to see literally everything that has come to pass was perfectly predicted back then) and you'll be adding the coming ETF to your retirement account at $100 to $1k per mbtc in a few years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @12:40AM
If only I could understand the mind of people who just downvote stuff they don't want to hear... even if it makes them poor.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday June 18 2019, @11:53PM
Ah, you mean like it's tethered [wikipedia.org] to a fiat currency? Yeah that will totes be guaranteed safe!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @04:51PM
why would you voluntarily line up for the slave auction? why not use monero like a free person?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Fnord666 on Tuesday June 18 2019, @09:45PM
The important thing to understand is that Facebook's Calibra is something separate from Libra. Libra is the cryptocurrency and the network to manage that. It's run by a number of large scale investors with significant buy-in. They make money on the interest earned off of the Libra Reserve, the real world capital that is being held when Libra coins are minted. They don't make money unless the whole network succeeds. Facebook is one of those investors, but just one of many.
Calibra on the other hand is a wallet implementation that will interact with the Libra network to perform your transactions. The other major investors are likely to have their own wallets, and if you don't like any of those you can write your own. As long as your wallet abides by the protocols you're good to go. If you're interested, the developer page can be found here [libra.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @10:21PM (1 child)
So, is it going to make a more correct version of cyberpunk dystopia we are currently living in? 🤔
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @10:53PM
It's a long road to 2077.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @02:42AM
Actually the LibraBFT paper [libra.org] claims it is "designed as a proof-of-stake system, where participation privileges are granted to known members based on their financial involvement."
Furthermore the paper states "Initially, the participating validators will be permitted into the consensus network by an association consisting of a geographically distributed and diverse set of Founding Members" but that "Over time, membership eligibility will shift to become open and based only on an organization’s holdings of Libra."
Also interesting is how it states "LibraBFT maintains consistency among honest validators, even if up to one-third of the validators are corrupt" - so, not a 51% attack but more like a 34% attack.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @07:25PM
>founding members of the Libra Association will earn interest on the money users cash in
But these investors and tycoons never do anything with one angle.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 18 2019, @08:16PM
Gonna have to quote my Korean father-in-law on this one (imagine very thick Korean accent): No in-te-rest!
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday June 18 2019, @08:55PM
Can Facebook, Visa, Mastercard, the US government, or another entity seize, block, undo, or destroy my funds or transactions?
If so, then I'm not interested. When I send money to Wikileaks I want it to go to Wikileaks. If I receive a payment for something I don't want that payment charged back. Those reasons are why I use BTC.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @08:57PM (1 child)
Oh, it was the bitcoin bubble bursting! If you got in on the fad, you better start dumping it while it still has any kind of value.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @02:45AM
Would be hilarious if bitcoin bubble bursting caused an economic collapse.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Alfred on Tuesday June 18 2019, @09:46PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @10:53PM
The important part is that after we're done raiding the dumpster outside of Zuckerberg's mansion, we can collect Libra on ZTurk or by e-begging.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:15AM
It's not Libra, it's Gemini.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @12:42PM
Visa makes so much money from CC transport fees they would not be supporting a cryptocurrency that would eliminate that. There is something here that benefits Visa, and likely the other backers, that we haven't seen yet.