Broadly they fall into these categories:
- debt-like: bonds, banknotes, credit balances, invoice/PO pairs, chips, and so on. Things where theoretically you could redeem it for the face value of real money. These should appear as liabilities on the balance sheet of the issuer. There may be problems if this gets very large.
- redeemable for services: Canadian Tyre, most gift cards. If you look closely at a lot of these things they will have an "equivalent cash value" of a tiny fraction of a penny printed on the back.
- "those that belong to the emperor": state-issued money
- security-like (Howey Test, and similar rules elsewhere): this is the big one for cryptocurrencies, since it depends very heavily on the marketing. If Libera is floating this may be a problem. If it's a normal token redeemable at a par value, it's not.
- non-redeemable consumable or durable items that are commonly used in barter: can usually be distinguished from money by not having a face value of any kind. Steam items don't look like money even if they can be traded.
I agree that a lot of this is combining people getting upset about cryptocurrency with people getting upset about Facebook, but in both cases there are underlying valid points; there is also potentially a TBTF issue - how much is Facebook going to issue, and what effects would its huge market dominance have?
Are there reward points that you a) actually own, b) have a formal value, and/or c) are allowed to trade?
For instance:
https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/executive-club/terms-an...
"21.1. Avios points, and all rights of title to and property in such Avios points issued at any time, remain with AGL at all times and never pass to the Member.
22.1. [...] Avios points are not transferable [...]
22.2. Any purported purchase, sale, transfer, unauthorised use (including bartering), procurement or redemption of Avios points issued or awarded to another person [..] will constitute a fundamental breach by the Member of these Terms and Conditions and the Conditions of Use."
I can sell them as well on a few marketplaces online, so they have an agreed value as well.
Most importantly, because I can sell and trade them... Does that not make them mine?
While true, in a lot of cases it ends up costing almost as much as they are worth to transfer them, so I'd argue it's different.
In real life if a casino doesn't think you got a chip from them directly as part of gaming at that casino they won't pay out on it. That actually happens with some regularity.
Really? In Bringing Down the House there was a plot point of the crew enlisting strippers to cash in their chips, because they could do so easily and without attracting suspicion because it was normal for them to get paid in casino chips.
Not anymore.
I'm reminded of the 'Liberty Dollar', a 'private currency' that ended in a raid by the FBI and Secret Service. It didn't help their case that their coins looked suspiciously similar to real US currency, mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_dollar_(private_curren...
The problem with your analogy is that unlike your CeC tokens, the FB Mafia completely controls whether you can give them to someone else or not. You can't trade them on their (fake) blockchain to someone else if they say no and without making a direct payment to the FB Mafia. It is also likely you can't even try to do the exchange without using the FB Mafia's wallet application. There is no physical thing that can be exchanged like with your tokens. They have also said they will comply with any government regulations. So if someone reports your CeC tokens as stolen, the FB Mafia can just steal them back and you have no recourse.
It's the way forward to a dystopian sci-fi trope: Corporate-owned and minted money that transcends national fiat currencies. The implications of which have again been extensively discussed in aforementioned media.
If they were supporting crypto they'd work with one of the x000 existing crypto currencies. Not sure they are adding any value by creating Libra aside for gaining control. And that ultimately is what bothers me.
Casinos and their chips are regulated as well, even more than the regular currencies.
Chuck e cheese tokens are one way, you can't exchange them back into dollars, as far as I know. While technically you can create a large-ish society that uses their tokens as currency, it hasn't happened yet.
I could send someone an Amazon gift card or a Starbucks digital code as long as me and recipient agree on a common medium for such transaction.
a) not a true crypto-currency because it's centralized
b) such currencies are not regulated yet in the slightest
c) the centralized authority is a consortium of private corporations of which one, Facebook, is providing the entire infrastructure
d) Facebook is known to not handle data appropriately and is not well regulated when it comes to privacy and data protection
e) I haven't seen any method to allow other people to invest or directly convert the money back to nation currencies which makes it easy for the consortium to just decide to pull the plug and exit scam with no insurance for people who bought Libra
f) The consortium have essentially become a bank out of thin air and that comes with a whole slew of regulatory issues
Facebook is not just any company either. It holds world wide dominance in marketing, advertising, and communication. It is also accessible through a wide age range. If Libra becomes the only way to interact with Facebook, what do we do about children on Facebook who are often, in the eyes of the law, not able to handle financial responsibility? Due to the current problem with loot boxes and in game gambling in video games, I can see this becoming a problem.
Libra apparently isn't pegged to a specific currency but fluctuating assets that are claimed stable. So if you put 10 fiat currency into Libra, you're not guaranteed to receive or get 10 out (even if we account for a transaction fee) which would normally happen when interacting with a bank and its services. One poor investment by some random company, and your Libra tanks.
> "Jerome H. Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve, said on Tuesday that the central bank would be looking at Libra “very carefully” given its potential scale. “I think that our expectations from a consumer protection standpoint, from a regulatory standpoint, are going to be very, very high,”
When Chuck E Cheese becomes one of the world's biggest companies and wants to turn its tokens into legal tender, regulators will be paying attention then too.
Essentially, what you'd be doing by embracing Libra is giving Facebook access to one of the few types of information about you that they can't access by law. Throw in the extra creepiness of the inevitable forensic accounting services to governments the world over, and you've basically turned Facebook into something with damn near panoptiv capabilities if there isn't some serious revamps to how customer data is mandated to be treated.
- financial data: who will own it. Governments want access to it first hand. - monetary policy: governments want to be able to define the circulating amount.