Facebook Is Developing a Cryptocurrency for WhatsApp Transfers, Sources Say
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The other reason for such things is talent. If you want to attract top talent you have to (R&B) toys for them to play with. On the other hand, to say, "We'll never release this so let's not put any effort into it" is the road to irrelevance.
The budget for this effort vs the cost of irrelevance make such project a solid investment. Pointless in terms of product but essential to the brand.
You’re welcome.
Open source makes sense for companies because they want to share the collective engineering efforts - because often times the code itself isn't the thing being monetized directly. In the case of Facebook it's not the code that is worth billions it's the data they horde. In the context of a blockchain that would mean sharing that data with everyone instead of hording it and acting as a middle-man for advertising, which is very much against the business interests of Facebook or any company with that model.
I didn't think that was the case. It may be more in the spirit of crypto but I don't think it's a hard requirement?
Aside from both using cryptography, in the sense, of encryption.
So... if such buzz words are used, it seems like a huge lie.
That being said a cryptocurrency does not have to be decentralised.
However it is very important to understand the difference.
Today even decentralised cyptocurrencies depend on centralised-exchanges, and the consequence is that despite the constraints built into a blockchain algorithm are able to sell unlimited amount of the crypto to users without actually being in possession of the algorithm-limited crypto.
Tbh, to me it sounds scary instead
Is this just PR or are they genuinely so clueless? If the former I wonder if they missed the shift this year where cryptocoins stopped being the coolest kid in the town anymore.
If a centralized company wants to roll out electronic payments through its services it can just, you know, do that. They don't need blockchain or cryptocurrency to become, well, Facebank.
Why would it be buzzword bingo if its an informative article that stays in context 100% of the time, include for what you consider buzzwords.
The actual criticism is that Stablecoins are just secured bearer bonds that anybody can issue inexpensively so you could see this happening for a long time.
Not it can't. There's a world outside of the US where whole businesses run on WhatsApp. There is no solution, simply none today that exists to allow anyone from any country to register and start making and receiving payments. Not Stripe, not Paypal, none. If Facebook can deliver something that can then be exchanged for real dollars, that could be huge. If a person in a small village in Peru can just start receiving money from another person in another country and that the only barrier of entry is having WhatsApp installed on your phone, this could get ridiculously successful overnight.
At least that’s my guess..
If it were merely an account one used to pay for things then they just get to take a small percentage in transaction fees but with a blockchain they can create a bunch of FaceCoins, sell them on the open market and if things go south with their cryptocurrency laugh all the way to the bank counting their billions.
(Remember that in order to prevent double-spend attacks, you need to ensure that nobody—and no potential mining pool—is sitting on more computing power than your network has. That's feasible for a single proof-of-work currency; it's technically impossble with even two unless one outcompetes and kills the other, and certainly practically impossible for a new one at this point. And if you're not using proof-of-work, what stability does the coin have once the corporate backer is gone?)
And if the answer is: they do a transaction with someone else who wants to trade their money for WhatsApp coins then again, why do you need the blockchain versus a centralized WhatsApp currency.
Blockchain is a solution when there cannot be trust. If I trust WhatsApp, and you trust WhatsApp, and WhatsApp has a money exchange feature, we don't need the blockchain.
There's absolutely zero reason for that something to be blockchain-based. They can just release Facebucks, a private fiat currency that's just backed by ... drumroll please... a relational database.
It’s almost like none of these middle-brow dismissals have ever actually experienced a payment problem in another country.
In particular, if it could be done, why isn't WeChat doing it? And if WeChat can't do it, why can WhatsApp do it?
Since I said no even to an interview, it's hard to say what the parameters are for their thing, but I hope they fail.
From an investors standpoint, yes.
From a technological and application standpoint, there is some cool new stuff happening.
Awareness of stuff like Google+ breaches or FB's data sharing will soon become a thing of the past once these companies start dealing directly with governments and move away from public-facing products entirely. If FB starts to implement an India-specific version of China's "social credit" policy towards blacklisting suspected defaulters, with no recourse, the people likely won't even know who's supplying that technology.
Phone-based currency transfers like M-Pesa have been successful in Tanzania, Kenya and is available in India and Afghanistan. Unlike whatever FB will offer, it doesn't require you to use Whatsapp. I can't wait to see the permissions required on the new version of WA once that service is live.
Bingo. Remittances are still expensive. Basic bank accounts are still out of reach for many.
Any user with cash could become a convert-to-fiat provider.
Before Western Union had to signup shops, now you can go through your friend lists to find someone you already know and trust.
If you need a plumber, in some parts of the world you’d be insane to open up the phone book and call a random one. You would call your cousin who’s friends with one instead. And probably cook them lunch when they come over.
Look at MLMs and which countries and groups they thrive in, vs ones that they would never take off in.
Even with large & relatively liquidity cryptocurrency the spread to covert to local currency is large.
Right now if I want to get rid of a Bitcoin and get Vietnamese Dong I see rates from 89,286,016.80 to 90,135,312.89. The actual price according to Google is 93,851,364.64. So you're losing 4%, which is already comparable to a traditional remittance (the World Bank says 5% is the average cost for educated users).
Except this new cryptocurrency would be less popular and less liquid than Bitcoin, so the spreads would be higher.
edit: I also trust PayPal, as I use it regularly, and it doesn't use a cryptocurrency. My point is that I don't understand why Facebook would need a Cryptocurrency to allow payments. As far as I know, WeChat doesn't use cryptocurrency and is probably the main payment system of China.
Let me try to explain. You trust your bank and PayPal and it's perfectly fine. But only to the point things are going ok in general.
In some, say, areas, the situation is possible when you see a message on the doors and ATMs of your previously trusted for decades banks: "Sorry, no check out today". And it can long for days or even months.
And your previously trusted online e-money processor can freeze your funds for whatever reason - "fraud suspect, suspicious activities, server offline".
It is hard to imagine for citizens of some countries, but in my opinion, this is only matter of time when it happens.
Cryptocurrency and blockchains in general are indeed highly inefficient databases and a tiny Postgres server outperform them all in Transactions Per Second, that's true.
But Postgres database running on a centralized service won't give you a feeling of independence and trust the biggest cryptocurrencies can provide (sure, they are volatile in price and you need to manage your private keys etc, but still).
But I really doubt that facebook is going to release a coin which they cannot control.
What is their case for creating a coin if they have no control over it?
And the case would be not to own the biggest stake and control everything, but instead having a popular cryptocurrency with APIs natively integrated with Facebook's services. It'll bring new users and developers to their platform, which has the real value.
2. A traditional centralized database doesn't allow offline transactions with any degree of trust. I don't know if this is a problem they are solving, but in principle, something with a blockchain-like architecture makes it possible to provide cryptographic proof that you have the money and intend to transfer it without any server round trip and still be secure against many kinds of attacks.
Also more ways for a huge American company to mess with my life if anyone human, bot or algorithm working there has a bad day at work. (if anyone doesn't catch my drift here, losing access to your mail account happens, getting it fixed most likely involves either knowing a person working with said company and/or hitting the front page of HN or another watering hole.)
Paypal is still expensive and uncommon for person to person transactions in real life.
They'd probably run into trouble cashing out their coins in that case, though.
For example, perhaps they'll let users generate their own keys, thereby letting everyone transact freely with each other. This may allow FB to wash their hands of KYC laws except for those depositing and withdrawing fiat directly.
[0] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/sweden-cashless-socie...
Zero reason for anyone to use Bitcoin/Ethereum/Monero when these exist. (Unless they want to commit crimes—and yes, that’s how it would be perceived.)
"Zero reason for anyone to use Bitcoin/Ethereum/Monero when regular money exists. (Unless they want to commit crimes—and yes, that’s how it would be perceived.)"
When I pay someone 1000$, I expect that to arrive as 1000$ (excluding fees here). With stable currencies that is a pretty safe bet, unless the transaction takes days.
This article probably isn't true, but something like it is going to happen someday.
Facebook will have to build something that its users want to buy, and then find something for the users to do to earn fbcoin.
Maybe they could allow ads to be purchased in fbcoin, and pay users to translate ads to their native language for fbcoin.
- $1.7B raised in ICO: This is far more than has ever been raised in any other ICO. I also think it says something about investor optimism. I'd bet that this was a data point in Facebook's decision to do something similar with WhatsApp.
- Telegram's development team: Some of the best in the world. They've done a lot with a few highly talented programmers and mathematicians.
- 200,000,000+ monthly active users as of March 2018.
> development team: Some of the best in the world
Well, messaging isn't exactly rocket science.
And they did a lot right (open source clients, bots, channels, proxies). But their secret chat implementation is weird (literally every crypto expert has the same question: "why did you pick these extremely unpopular barely known primitives to reinvent your wheel?")
> WhatsApp has an encrypted child porn problem (techcrunch.com) >33 points by sahin-boydas 9 hours ago | hide | 57 comments
FML