Re:Facebook is reportedly planning its own stablecoin
by mattdeboard on Friday December 21, 2018 @03:26PM
(#18736315)
Am I wrong in being suspicious this is a plan for economic colonialism by Facebook? Can they use the custody assets as capital for lending?
Like if they have (e.g.) $100mil to back Zuckcoin, would it make any sense (or even be legal in the US) for them to start using this to start issuing, for example, microloans to rural farmers in India? I hope not but I'm interested in the answer.
Re:Facebook is reportedly planning its own stablecoin
by dvtrn on Friday December 21, 2018 @03:30PM
(#18736348)
Am I wrong in being suspicious this is a plan for economic colonialism by Facebook
Personally, my brain went in the direction of "is Facebook taking the Google approach to developing products?" i.e. they have a huge engineering team that needs to work on something, so you end up with a lot of products coming out of their dev organization, thrown at a wall, some stick and become popular in their own right (Messenger), some don't and die, and some are extensions of acquisitions (instagram).
Pure speculation and supposition, but that's the sensation I get, specifically reading this headline. shrug
Re:Facebook is reportedly planning its own stablecoin
by dvtrn on Friday December 21, 2018 @03:45PM
(#18736490)
Yeah something like that. I'm sure lots of teams do it, seems like a worthy practice to help build a culture of continuous learning when you're at the scale that you can just build "extracurricular"[1] features on your platform, provided you have product managers who can balance that with meeting core product objectives.
[1] there may be a better phrase for this which eludes me right now
Re:Facebook is reportedly planning its own stablecoin
by jameslevy on Friday December 21, 2018 @03:29PM
(#18736335)
Presumably there's a reason they have a few dozen blockchain engineers working on this beyond just Venmo/Paypal functionality, such as this stablecoin actually being an ERC-20 token that can be transferred to your own wallet.
Re:Facebook is reportedly planning its own stablecoin
by dsr_ on Friday December 21, 2018 @03:40PM
(#18736432)
Wondering why a centralized authority for a stablecoin needs to use a blockchain at all.
This is classic company scrip / money transfer business: keep a ledger of transactions, publish your fees, register as an EFT company, follow the regulations.
Like if they have (e.g.) $100mil to back Zuckcoin, would it make any sense (or even be legal in the US) for them to start using this to start issuing, for example, microloans to rural farmers in India? I hope not but I'm interested in the answer.
Personally, my brain went in the direction of "is Facebook taking the Google approach to developing products?" i.e. they have a huge engineering team that needs to work on something, so you end up with a lot of products coming out of their dev organization, thrown at a wall, some stick and become popular in their own right (Messenger), some don't and die, and some are extensions of acquisitions (instagram).
Pure speculation and supposition, but that's the sensation I get, specifically reading this headline. shrug
[1] there may be a better phrase for this which eludes me right now
This is classic company scrip / money transfer business: keep a ledger of transactions, publish your fees, register as an EFT company, follow the regulations.
Facebucks.
That's basically what happened when the USD was no longer backed by gold.