Cryptocurrency in your digital wallet. Been out there a while now and some here may have mentioned taking bitcoin (haha....well not really funny anymore, possible) as payment. Well, your favourite company may just have an option for those interested, worldwide.

Is it.....Traceable? Transparent? As good as $ € ¥ £ ..... Don’t see why not, if developed ‘right’ in the not too distant future. 2020 some say. Will be fun to see how the discussion winds its way pass the regulations and regulatory hurdles, companies partnering with FB on libra/calibra (one high profile possibility).

Guess we’d all put it in our wallets, kinda like apple pay...

Quick primer:

Thoughts?

 

I saw the Fed Chairman being asked about it by one of the Congressional Committees the other day. They are talking about needing a bit of time to thoroughly examine it. Sounds like it could be up to 2 years out.

With so much banking being electronic anyway, I am not sure that it is a big deal anymore. But it needs to be more stable than Bitcoin, et al, in my opinion (the currency itself should not really be an 'investment'). You'll still need to be able to carry cash though, so the dollar, etc. will not be going anywhere.

 

Sister got the ransomware on her biz computer. The criminals wanted payment in bitcoin. They got bitcoin.

 

I can't wait until something comes along and makes credit cards (and the industry that supports them) obsolete. Once the bugs are worked out, it should work fine. Cash-checks-credit cards-venmo (et al)-e currency.

 

It kills me how they look at all the negatives of crypto. Money and gold has crypto beat by thousands of years

 

The US government, and others, will not allow these crypto- currencies if they encourage tax dodging, extortion, money laundering, human trafficking, drug business, prostitution, etc. That's a fact. So far Bitcoin is flying under the radar, but once a company like FB gets into the act you'll see a lot of regulatory scrutiny. This is not coming to fruition for years, maybe never. There are too many entrenched interests that are not going to relinguish control easily.

Not sure what the beef is on credit cards....they have greatly lowered the cost of most companies and made credit widely available to people who didn't have it before. I don't want to go back to the 70's when your only choices to buy something was cash, check, or a trip to the local pawnshop or loan shark.

 

I don't want to go back either, I want to go forward. At some point an ecurrency (might be crypto, might be something we haven't thought of yet) will eliminate the need for banks at all. Then we can either drop all consumer goods prices by 3% (the credit card fee) or profits can go up 3%.

 

Have a guess which options will happen.

As for some form of FB currency? I wouldn't trust them in any way with my money...

 

Dunno if I'd consider Bitcoin as flying under the radar in the US. If you file taxes, you'd still have to report capital gains on crypto like you do with stocks.

 

As a CyberSec professional, privacy is a concern to me and the fact that Facebook tries to host its Libra project in Switzerland, under Swiss regulations, is even more concerning.

Our data privacy law / framework is probably the most permissive and outdated on the continent (it hasn’t changed since 1992) is probably of the highest interest for Facebook and I must say I am not comfortable with it, at all. At the end of the day it’s Facebook and we know how they deal with data and privacy. Recall Cambridge Analytica..?

Hope EU puts some serious pressure on Switzerland to adapt its data privacy law to the famous GDPR (at least) asap.

 

I prefer my money to be more solid than Facebook's sense of morality.

 

If Facebook wasn’t already such a privacy concern Libra probably would not have been that big of a deal. I’ll bet libra will come to be. Zuckerberg donates to Schumer, pelosi and whoever else he may need to. I know crypto has been used in crimes but let’s face it, it’s a pittance compared to cash.

 

Sales tax increase by 3% No change in prices for the end-customer, he’s the one who bears the costs anyway

FIFY

 

My fear is the adoption speed of Libra if/when it goes live.

Bitcoins (or any sort of cryptocurrency) aren’t natively supported on our devices. You need some DIY to use it.

Libra will be live as another feature of the FB app in millions of devices, instantaneously, when it goes live. Millions of ignorants from the privacy perspective but still millions of users suddenly ready to use it, and they will.

 

And Facebook is currently sitting on a 56 billion dollar pile of cash. Libra will not be a bitcoin. It is not decentralized it will be controlled by a handful of companies. It could be quite massive, Facebook has a billion and a half users right? Or is it more? Libra would be completely trackable. Even bitcoin is trackable, every transaction is on the blockchain. The crimes committed with bitcoin usually end up being dumped into monero or one of the untraceable altcoins. I deleted my Facebook account back when they had the privacy blowup but I don’t see Facebook going anywhere, it a big part of people’s lives. Genius really. Once I make a transaction with bitcoin and someone knows my wallet they can see how much I have and every transaction I’ve ever made. Libra will be the same with except they will probably see your name attached to your wallet and it will be even less decentralized

 

Disclaimer: I recently started reading about cryptocurrency and still consider myself ignorant about the topic.


Bitcoin’s advantages, with my understanding from reading the opinion of bulls, are that it’s borderless, permissionless, and a decentralized store of value (with massive volatility, but a store or value nonetheless).

Libra, or any company/government-managed coin or stable coin, would NOT have the borderless, permissionless, or decentralized attributes - which makes me wonder...what would be the benefit to using them over traditional fiat currencies?

Better tracking with blockchain as a ledger? To any programmers/people that understand this stuff better than I do - can blockchain be used with fiat currency?

For me, cryptocurrencies seem kinda like printing money unless that coin is 100% collateralized and redeemable, which then makes it just another (convenient?) way to transact/store value. But I think there must be some benefit over fiat currency (lower costs?) for it to be (widely) accepted for transactions.

 

Another point is the Legal Structure of foundations which makes them very attractive for foreign companies and organisations. Most big law firms in Switzerland massively increased their capabilities in this domain, especially in Zug.

 

One of the problems with blockchain currencies is scalability. Visa processes 24,000 transactions a second, bitcoin processes 7 transactions a second, and already uses as much electricity as Ireland to do so. The other biggie is KYC — know your customer — regulations. Are enough people really willing to give Facebook their real name, certified address, certified income, and quite probably a good reason for the transaction? Cos if they aren’t, Facebook won’t be able to process the transaction without falling foul of anti-money-laundering legislation.

Everyone says fintech is going to upend the retail banking industry, and I’m sure it will eventually, but the problem is that as soon as they get as large as the banks, they’ll be regulated like the banks, and that is going to make them slow and expensive. The banks ar3bt quite the dinosaurs the techies think — 80 per cent of financial transactions are already online. That’s not to say they don’t need to up their game tho

 

Bitcoin has the lightning network which has its faults but speeds up transactions. Litecoin is quite fast. The problem is they have become stores of value. Most people hold them hoping to buy lambos and royal oaks. It wasn’t that long ago one bitcoin wasn’t worth a penny. Today one btc is 10,000 dollars.

 

Your post made me laugh. You are right about that the government does not want crypto, but for the wrong reasons. Money laundering and tax dodging are the profit centers for the banks! and powerful!!!! They do not want the competition!

Deutsche Bank fined for $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme
Wells Fargo Personal Banker Pleads Guilty to Money Laundering Charges
Citibank fined $70 million for anti-money laundering compliance shortcomings
US Bank to pay $613M to settle money laundering charges
Global Financial Institutions Fined $26 Billion for AML, Sanctions & KYC Non-Compliance
Trump’s Panama tower used for money laundering by organised crime gangs, reports say

Feds probe Trump Tower lender over money laundering
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/finance-banking/feds-probe-trump-tower-lender-over-money-laundering