Love this quote:

>As Sarah Jamie Lewis, the director of the Canadian nonprofit Open Privacy, put it: “Can’t wait for a cryptocurrency with the ethics of Uber, the censorship resistance of Paypal, and the centralization of Visa, all tied together under the proven privacy of Facebook.”

Surely she meant decentralisation, though? Visa is anything but decentralised.

They're two different ends of the same scale, like "It's has hard as a rock" vs "It's as soft as a rock".

Either way, though, they're making fun of Libra. Visa is not decentralized and Uber is not ethical.

Libra at launch is going to be extremely centralized, with decentralization being merely a possibility for future "growth".

Most likely, or it's a transcription error.

AH the bit about the goal being to make payments fast makes a ton of sense. The rest of the world has left the US in the dust with extremely fast payments systems. In India, the UPI system has taken the country by storm with direct,instant bank-to-bank money transfers which take seconds to complete and have no fees attached for the consumer

Europe has SEPA (Instant). The Chinese have WeChat Pay and similar? I'm curious, what other solutions other countries have?

Even Mexico has SPEI payment network which costs $0.36 USD for any amount

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_gross_settlement

TED in Brazil - instantaneous transfers between bank accounts, managed by the central bank. Cost from zero to 2-3 dollars per transaction.

Australia has the New Payments Platform (Osko to consumers) that is basically instant.

Just to add, if you don't need instant payments we also have other convenient and direct transfers between banks in Australia.

Canada has free “Interac E-transfers” that you can send to an email address or mobile phone number.

Historically most banks have charged $1-$2 for an e-transfer (often with a limited number of free transfers per month, or a different type of chequing account one can sign up for to get free transfers), though it seems prices have been dropping in the past few years. Apparently the Bank of Montreal removed e-transfer fees on personal accounts a year or two ago.

So there's definitely still overhead that can make small transfers infeasible, but it's getting better.

CIBC has done the same. TD charges only $0.50 on the most basic plan and it is free on other plans. Simplii (née PC Financial) has always had free Interac e-Transfers. Interac fees have vanished or are vanishing for most people. The daily and weekly maximums are still an issue though ($3k and $10k at most banks usually).

Almost all UK banks use Faster Payments, which means ordinary bank transfers are instant.

Serbia (not in EU) implemented instant bank to bank transfers recently

Sweden have a thing called Swish which has instant transfer to anyone who you the mobile phone number of. End users have no fees when using the system to transfer to each others. Businesses that use it pay some though.

It has gotten very prevalent.

SEPA ist anything but instant for me. A transfer takes a day most of the time

SEPA Instant Credit Transfer is a different thing than just SEPA.

SEPA Instant Credit Transfer should allow this, but it's adoption is not 100% widespread yet, in my experience.

For domestic bank-to-bank payments, China has CNAPS https://www.bis.org/cpmi/publ/d105_cn.pdf [PDF] - the paper (2012) could be updated especially in regard to foreign currency.

tl;dr CNAPS is a bank-to-bank system, but in effect means domestic CNY transfers between major banks should settle within 30 minutes.

WeChat Pay / AliPay are a bit different, more like PayPal (though not completely like PayPal).

PayPal?

Not really a bank-to-bank system; money doesn't instantly arrive at the recipient's bank account and paypal's ability to withhold it is notorious.

Nor is PayPal obliged to pay into deposit protection funds as EU banks are AFAIK. I think PayPal needs to start worrying about their standing in EU and becoming a collateral damage when France and Germany are on a roll to make a case for exercising currency sovereignty.

I'm fairly certain that PayPal is registered as a bank here in the EU, possibly in Luxembourg. It couldn't operate how it does here otherwise.

Most banks will charge you extra for the instant payment. It's pretty ridiculous.

You're a couple of decades behind the times as far as the EU is concerned.

There is a function called "instant transfer" in my Raiffeisen ELBA app, it seems to be free and fast. (In Austria). However, I do not know how other banks handle thism

Not in 3/4 of the world as of today.

US banks created Zelle, with free instant transfers via your banking app. It’s a shame more people don’t use it. Otherwise people just use credit cards for paying for stuff.

Zelle (possibly just "as implemented by the banks I've interacted with") has very small limits - a couple thousand dollars.

Are people really going to make big transactions using Facebook money?

People will make whatever size transactions they need to make by whatever mechanism they trust.

If Zelle cannot make the transaction happen, it is out of the running. Full stop.

> with free instant transfers

I've noticed a "fee: zero" statement on the transfer page recently. I expect there will be an actual fee in the near future.

U.S. credit cards extort big fees from businesses and give kickbacks to consumers. Hard for "free" to beat that, if consumers have the choice.

It may change now that businesses are allowed to pass on fees.

Zelle is only for P2P payments, and was not initially available at every bank. Additionally, some banks market it differently. Not everyone knows the service they are using is Zelle.

Things like Venmo are popular in US to quickly send money here and there (not like bank transfers afaik). It's not available in Europe unfortunately.

Venmo is bank to bank transfer, which you can do with no fees it’s just a pain in the ass to log in to the bank and enter your recipients routing numbers.

Venmo could be obsoleted just by the banks having a better UX, which I gather everywhere but America already has for sending money domestically

At least in Spain there are some bank-sponsored apps (e.g. Bizum) that can be used to send money to people using their phone number as ID (if they have also an account in the system), and it's instantaneous. I think other European countries have similar systems.

FYI: I collect (awesome) articles about Libra incl. official posts and pro & contra. See https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-libra#articles

The URL really says it all :)