Re:Libra is targeted at developing countries
by salawat on Thursday June 27, 2019 @09:46PM
(#20300793)
Frankly, I find the entire fintech/payment processor/credit environment to be at times little more than a parasite that I'd like to see go away.
That won't happen though. Capital needs to flow as freely as possible; and the current players at least make that work. Libra, however, has no substantive purpose in the long run other than to finally tap into the rent-seeking upper layers of the financial system. It seems to be the tech industry's fallback when they can't think of anything more innovative to do. Start up a financial services division, and tap into those delicious fees from the "underbanked".
Make no mistake; the data grab possibilities are real barring explicit intervention by regulators. Any advertisement company based on data collection for ad targeting has far too much potential value to reap out of actually tapping into the transaction details of user's. Having the "world's biggest social network graph" at your disposal on top of a distributed ledger from which can be derived a parallel graph of financial activity represents a gold mine in terms of panoptic levels of informational awareness.
People don't seem to quite get it yet that a big enough pile of seemingly unidentifiable data points can be combined to create something as good as a fingerprint or DNA strand. In government work, this is explicitly highlighted anddrilled into every employee, every year (at least at the Federal level).
Caveat emptor. Embrace your localized economies; beware of those seeking to add you to their "customer base" for the sake of 'your convenience'. They wouldn't be going out of their way to get you onboard if they didn't have anything to gain in the long run.
That won't happen though. Capital needs to flow as freely as possible; and the current players at least make that work. Libra, however, has no substantive purpose in the long run other than to finally tap into the rent-seeking upper layers of the financial system. It seems to be the tech industry's fallback when they can't think of anything more innovative to do. Start up a financial services division, and tap into those delicious fees from the "underbanked".
Make no mistake; the data grab possibilities are real barring explicit intervention by regulators. Any advertisement company based on data collection for ad targeting has far too much potential value to reap out of actually tapping into the transaction details of user's. Having the "world's biggest social network graph" at your disposal on top of a distributed ledger from which can be derived a parallel graph of financial activity represents a gold mine in terms of panoptic levels of informational awareness.
People don't seem to quite get it yet that a big enough pile of seemingly unidentifiable data points can be combined to create something as good as a fingerprint or DNA strand. In government work, this is explicitly highlighted anddrilled into every employee, every year (at least at the Federal level).
Caveat emptor. Embrace your localized economies; beware of those seeking to add you to their "customer base" for the sake of 'your convenience'. They wouldn't be going out of their way to get you onboard if they didn't have anything to gain in the long run.