Hacker News Reader

Comment by tetrisgm | Hacker News Reader

You know, strategically, when you’re about to get super regulated and the government is touting antitrust probes: maybe don’t start something that competes with the Dollar.

View on HN

I thought the same, but then it makes sense if you look at it from the sort of fuck-you attitude that FB leadership tends to have: "So you want to undermine us, fine. But what if we undermine you first?"

My read is that it IS the USD. '...it may actually cement the dollar as the world currency once and for all. As the Association mops up all the fiat in the world they’ll likely turn it into dollars on the back end anyway, so Euros and Yen become Dollars and cents.'

Yeah, being a western currency, Libra competes more with RMB than with Euros or Dollars. It's more what the CFP franc is to Euros than an anti-Dollar. If the power grows too big, it may get nationalized like how the BEIC got nationalized.

But it would still give them leverage, because cutting FB to size would then hit the USD.

The USD and petrodollar are under great pressure as reserve curencies at this point in history, this could be an effort by the globalized elites to create a new world currency. I suspect this FB initiative will fail but set up a next generation with similar size and heft

This, I think, is the value proposition to the USG. Facebook is primarily aiming Libra at foreign markets. Americans don't really particularly need a better way to pay for things online.

They want regulation so they can capture the Gov, this is move is meant to accelerate this process.

Bingo. Next stage too big to fail.

In the current climate of accelerating a new cold war, and potentially a hot one with Iran, the gov needs to take back control of all it's propaganda channels. FB has proven itself here as very valuable asset for disseminating view-points and is "too valuable" not to be unregulated

It absolutely does not compete with the dollar. And that is very deliberate. Because it's not a cryptocurrency. Its a scam that Visa and PayPal designed so that they could block Bitcoin etc. and continue to get a cut of digital transactions.

"it may actually cement the dollar as the world currency once and for all"

On the other hand, "we respect privacy" != "panopticon money."

So these things should prevent us from innovating? That’d be sad. It’s pretty cool that we can still work on projects like that and I would even say that thanks to the spotlight we already had, it puts even more pressure on us to do it right. Which is a win win imo.

This is a good time for disruption at scale. The current administration has no follow-through and Congress is deadlocked.

They are competing on a world wide stage larger than any one government.

But how does the US get there first before china does?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com