If Facebook or Google create their own currency, they can control our lives
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Though I suspect the current US president would like to revoke those and I am not sure that Boris wouldn't
Or, you’re attempting to purchase from an unapproved vendor. This vendor was suspended for donating to a candidate who voted for breaking up Facebook.
You used unapproved language, that incurs an automatic deduction of $X from your account.
The only hope is it will not become popular enough to become too big to fail.
Unless Libra aims to uphold the same regulations that banks must, then at some point, I predict that there is a huge amount of trouble coming for them. Financial services can be both used and abused, and regulators have forced banks to address the abuse (eg: AML/KYC practices) to protect participants. Circumventing these regulations is equivalent to rolling back these protections.
The same could be said about any other industry that might profit from using Libra, be it investment advisors to casinos to who knows what else.
Apparently neither the House Financial Services committee nor Senate Banking Committee were given a heads up on this launch. From a government relations perspective, this is a whiff of fresh breeze for those of us advocating for a break-up.
Sure, financial regulators are probably extremely upset about this, and are probably going to fight it. However, the data Facebook would be collecting here would extremely valuable to other regulators; data they cannot currently access precisely because it is protected by financial regulation.
If Facebook were to offer access to this data (on National Security grounds, or 'think of the children' grounds, etc.), agencies could have immediate access to immense amounts of data from potentially every user, whereas currently, they'd probably need a court order (or National Security Letter, etc.) to access the data of just one.
Would any of the committees you listed prevail against these interests?
For instance, whenever I mention the dangers of a single corporation owning everything, including money, and how indistinguishable it makes it from a government, it gets downvoted with no discussion.
A ban by facebook could literally be lifethreatening?
Same way I can be "sure" my bank is going to keep my money safe and give it to me when I need it?
This comic about Orwell's and Huxley's vision of things really lays it in simple terms (https://twistedsifter.com/2010/06/the-saturday-strip-week-13...). The source is, of course, very interesting to read.
Between "do it" and "don't do it"? Well obviously no. But compared to getting thrown in jail? Obviously it's better?
It's not a stretch from today to imagine living on company-built cities with private security, paying rent and utilities to the company, with contracts and EULAs serving as laws in all but name.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
—- From the movie Network, 1976
The network is owned by the Dutch banks, which also provide the online payment platform iDeal.
The fees are low and fixed. Offline, between 15cts and a couple of cents ( I don't know how low for the big retailers, 5cts ? )
The online fees are a bit higher, starting at 29cts.
There are no variable fees. There is no 'refund' or 'insurance'. Lots of shops do not accept creditcards ( I know of no big retailer which does ).
Note that I don't believe having companies - especially large ones that isn't primarily banks - in control of payments of any kind is a good idea, I think it's a terrible idea.
Yes, us Swedes use cards a lot, and almost every card in Sweden has Visa or MasterCard stamped on it. Most are debit cards, and the well know logos weren't there to begin with. Initially, almost all cards were debit cards issued by the various Swedish banks. Banks that people used to trust back then.
While those payment systems are technically private, they aren't perceived as such. Maybe because of the banks, maybe because they are regulated quite heavily, but people generally have confidence they won't be cut off by the bank. Personally I don't know anyone, or have heard of anyone getting denied a debit card. While that's not a useful statistic, it shows why people might perceive it the way they do.
Since 2017 the laws implementating the then new EU banking directives demands that the banks must offer any basic payment solution/product to everyone if they offer it to anyone. There are some exceptions, mostly regarding money and banking fraud, but it seems to be somewhat rare in practice, at least it doesn't seem to have garnered much attention in news.
There are however talks of introducing some kind of legal tender laws, as it is currently possible to get into a situation where you have money, but can't pay. Which is obviously terrible.
Jurisdictions literally have to enact laws today to prevent businesses from going completely cashless, which essentially means jurisdictions have to enact laws to prevent middlemen from taking a cut of EVERY transaction made.
The cash system does not require middlemen in order to transact. And people have historically not been denied the ability to handle cash, as they are denied credit cards or bank accounts today (yes, a sizable number of people are denied even bank accounts and/or are forced into bank accounts with high monthly fees in order to just get a debit card, which is arguably the most basic requirement for purchasing most things today). With cash, people who had some financial difficulty do not get extorted even more (in the form of having to pay for "subprime" services) on top of an already existing percentage cut of every transaction that the middlemen already take.
Unless a new platform can reliably offer a no-fee or at least an absolutely ridiculously low fee transaction platform that absolutely does not deny anyone access nor extort anyone for the ability to gain access, AND we can be reasonably assured that no central organization is using it as a tool to load people onto its platform for later extortion....essentially unless we can get almost exactly the same open access as cash...unless we can get that, I don't support it, and probably neither should you.
(Disclaimer: I admittedly haven't looked into the details of Libra yet)
True.
> a business cannot refuse cash as payment.
Or, rather, it cannot collect additional legal penalties for nonpayment of debt for the time period after a tender of payment in legal tender is made. A business may refuse payment offered in exchange for goods and services that have not yet been provided.
edit: corrected typo
So imagine the current status quo is that either paypal or visa/mastercard are the principle payment methods and they charge the current rates.
But with libra, you still pay with paypal or visa/mastercard but using libra coin instead of fiat coin and % of the fee also goes to facebook.
What I can't wait for. Is the raft of people who will be denied creating wallets. How many people have had their accounts frozen by Paypal, kicked off using Visa/Mastercard and even Stripe! Quite a few I can tell you.
Think the situation will be different from Libra? Doubtful...
As if it wasn't already the case.
People simply don't care, they wouldn't be on any of these platforms otherwise, and governments don't understand, or chose not to understand for X reasons. They'd sell their soul for more (perceived) convenience or a better way to fill their narcissistic ego trips. It's like giving chocolate to 3 years old kids, they only stops when they gets sick, and so far "users" aren't sick.
You don't have to stand against it, simply don't use it. Just like most people don't do heroin or control their sexual urges.
You bring up heroin, but heroin is a heavily regulated controlled substance precisely because it's an example of something which people in general cannot be reliably trusted to control themselves with.
$1.333820449136241002 = 1.333739068902037589 PentiumSX837$
1. Nobody (decentralized), like Bitcoin.
2. USD cryptocurrency, created by the US government.
(I have not read the Libra papers fully. Im doing a far speculation here.)
Well... let's say you're a politician wanting to regulate Facebook, and let's say you have an affair with whom you communicate on Facebook or in Instagram DMs. If I were Facebook, I'd simply let an investigation team check if any dirt can be mined out of the troves of data - anything, even the dataset of GPS or other location pinpoints, can be enough to get a first hint. And now I discretely contact you and advise that there may be information around and that it would be a pity if that information were to get public.
This is the ultimate problem with the size and capabilities that companies such as Facebook have.
That's Dark and Illegal
Is this really a threat any longer? I mean, Stormy Daniels, $130k payoff pre-election, etc and all...
That's not true at all. Cash has the same problem of undeclared transactions, but the tax mostly still manages to get collected. If anything, the fact that Libra transactions will leave an electronic record makes it more likely that tax will get paid.
It's axiomatic that cryptocurrency transactions are rarely taxed, most people have not paid taxes on those transactions. The IRS is certainly trying to tax them, and the electronic ledger function of (some) cryptocurrencies will make it easier to track them under some circumstances than cash. That may change as time goes on -- I'm not sure enough how libra is implemented to have an opinion on that yet.
The idea of a pegged cryptocurrency is interesting though, potentially. We really need a lot more/bigger/better institutions that aren't companies or governments.
So...churches? What are you proposing?
Incidentally... "things that make currency shouldn't be companies" is not necessarily a rare or new idea.
Mysterious unknown founder who manages to remain anonymous for a decade? Who might turn out to be Visa or Exxon, and just make bitcoin as unpalatable...
In any case, that's neither here nor there. There are things which are neither governments corporations. These days, those two aren't always all that different
The only big example I know of is Air Miles. That seems pretty well run for a currency.
Central banks don't have inflation under control, they've just pushed it to places where it's not measured as part of the definition of inflation - primarily house prices, bonds and equities. That's what you'd expect given the way printed money is inserted into the economy.
Were there any wars fought for money and not for something more material like resources,lands, strategical territories, ideology ? If you are referring that weapon makers need wars to make money then crypto won't fix that anyway
The petrodollar conspiracy gets causation backwards.
People don’t use dollars because oil is mostly dollar denominated. International trade is priced in dollars because American consumers put lots of dollars in exporters’ pockets. That drives demand for dollar financial products which powers a varied financial services system. (Oil is regularly traded in pounds sterling and Euros with limited fanfare.)