Facebook and Google. Money. No way.

Those two companies are having absolutely no trust from my side, they have abused the trust so often, that they no loger know what the term means. I dont care what they do, I dont care how usefull their "gifts" are. Just NO.

They have seriously flawed internet and human society as it was (is) and there is just no way I will let them into my finance. One is goverment, something completely different is survailance capitalism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw and there is a book that I would put in schools for mandatory reading: https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...)

"Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes." ("Beware of Danaans bringing the gift", reference to Trojan horse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeo_Danaos_et_dona_ferentes)

p.s.: people downvoting, you just dont understand what you are against with. Educate yourself, please, this is no longer the time of cheering for your favorite coorporation, the things have gone over the edge.

Zuckerberg’s original aspiration with Libra before he had to walk it back was enough for any reasonable person to nope out: a world currency controlled by a cartel of multinational corporations accountable not to the citizens of their constituent countries, but to shareholders and capital owners.

If anyone seriously thinks this sounds like a good idea I’m truly curious to hear your reasoning.

In my view this was always a cynical ploy by Zuckerberg. He would love to control a huge piece of the world economy, but I believe he knows that the outcry from real governments would never allow that - so he could hedge by trying to have his project regulated out of existence and taking decentralized tech with it. Decentralized tech is the greatest long term competitive threat to Facebook. Zuckerberg knows it and would love to see it incidentally banned as a casualty of taking down Libra, but his mistake was overplaying his hand too early.

I think the thought process is that paper money is already controlled by world governments, so this isn't meant to be a replacement for paper money, but rather just an intermediary so the transfer of money can be done more easily and cheaper.

I think another point is that if you want a truly decentralized, no government involved, cryptocurrency, those still exist, go buy and use some bitcoin.

>If anyone seriously thinks this sounds like a good idea I’m truly curious to hear your reasoning.

I generally feel positive about something like Libra and I'm not in favour of decentralised currency. Decentralised currency is hard to tax, threatens the sovereignty of nation states, the ability to enact sanctions, enables crime and I'm not really on board with that.

Libra (or something like it) looks like a way to built a cheap, frictionless payment that in any practical sense mostly seems to illemininate costs of transaction if it scales up well enough, and I think that's where most utility comes from in a currency. I don't see the value in some slow network that changes its value twenty times per month for the average person just so that you can stick it to the man or whatever.

As to 'controlling the world economy'. I've never really understood how this is supposed to be the result of Libra. At the end of the day it's basically a Paypal without the middleman. The Libra owners will at some point earn some money on interest but otherwise I don't really see how this confers any monstrous powers to them. As far as that goes I'm more concerned about the Facebook platform itself.

The precaution for control seems the custodial operations, where currency cummulates under the operators' trust, ie. in FB&col. The little step for keeping what you obtain in the platform inside it for further use within it is what agregates significant risk.

"If anyone seriously thinks this sounds like a good idea I’m truly curious to hear your reasoning."

I don't know if it is a good idea, but I don not share the view that being a private entity makes it lesser than government entities.

I see governments and private entities as being built by people, and those are flawed just the same, governments even more so, since they are the perpetrators of the greatest evils of modern times.

KYC is unavoidable for financial products.

No shit. That's not the point.

The point is that the world's largest privacy abuser can now directly tie all of your online habits to your government issued ID.

The implications here are staggering.

This isn't a vote of support for FB, but I've said it before and it bears repeating: you are naive if you think you _can't_ do this today. There are companies doing this pretty well (ex: DMP's, or "data management platforms.")

Agreed, but DMPs aren't perfect, they aren't considered source of truth, and are used largely for targeting for advertising. However in this case there can be serious implications outside of simply advertising and the data integrity issues with DMPs now begins to lessen.

To add to this, with the argument of fighting terrorism, since a while Governments around the world have been requiring phone numbers to be only given to people who identify themselves by their government issued ID.

And guess what Facebook etc. are requiring at login. Phone numbers. For security they claim, yet they send spam messages to the number.

If you are giving them your PII to verify your identity, doesn't that means they already have a PII database to compare you against?

Id be pretty shocked if anybody here had a FB account, under a pseudonym, and they actually believed they were keeping their true identity hidden from FB. If you have an account, they know who you are. Verifying your ID is a due diligence on their part to CYA.

How many people, saying they would never give info over to FB, willingly hand it over to the fintechs like Robinhood?

> No shit.

I think you could have gotten your point across without the rudeness. Talking to people like that creates a toxic environment.

I fully agree that there is no way I'm giving that info to FB. I noped out of running ads with them because they wanted my ID. My privacy is invaded enough by them, no thanks.

> I think you could have gotten your point across without the rudeness. Talking to people like that creates a toxic environment.

Thank you for calling this out. To some, this may seem like over-reaction, but only by calling even minimally rude statements out can we ensure that HN doesn't become Reddit.

FWIW - GP here, it wasn't intended to be rude, but more of an agreement that KYC exists but is totally besides the point. I'm sorry if it came off any other way than that.

Yes, I thought so (that you didn’t intend for it to be rude).

If they're regulated in the sense they're suggesting then no they can't

With more then 99% confidence, FB, Google and Amazon, Visa, Mastercard can all do this today already.

They are already collecting GID if you use FB for anything more than creeping these days.

It kind of depends on what financial products you are talking about right?

You can, today, do high margin longs and shorts (dYdX), collatoralized loans (Maker, Compound), buy and sell derivatives (Synthetix), and buy into funds run by fund managers (Set Protocol) without any KYC. Even as an American, though these services will be more important to South Americans, Africans, and Southeast Asians.

KYC will still be used by old firms in rich countries, but it's not a given for the future of finance and most people will likely opt out as it's more trouble than it's worth and exposes you to identity theft when one of those firms is hacked and your personal data is stolen by criminals. It's just easier, faster, and safer to not use KYC.

This statement is not correct. Southeast Asia and South America are highly focused on KYC, and while in the past, you could opt out, increasingly opting out is not a option. If anything, they are going in the other direction. I can't speak to Africa, but I can tell you that India, China, Vietnam, Thailand do not treat KYC as "optional" and are planning on only tightening restrictions past what the US and EU require.

Source - work with Asian and American banks on KYC.

Well, yeah. That's my point. People in those countries not only have to deal with the friction of KYC when even identity documents can be a problem sometimes but they also have to deal with corrupt banking systems and governments where their money and information might not even be safe to give out.

These people always have the option of using the services I listed. Anyone can. They are free and unstoppable for anyone who needs them regardless of nationality, race, status, etc.

I'm still having a hard time figuring out how this whole Facebook as a gatekeeper thing fits into the anonymous privacy-first blockchain project that is Libra. As I see it, it's either centralized with a KYC check when you sign up, OR it's decentralized with anyone being able to generate a key pair and be a part of the system. So which one of those is Libra, after all?

Didn't they drop the anonymous privacy-first part a month ago? https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/04/16/facebooks-li...

Oh. So at this point the blockchain part is only kept to be able to brag about it being a blockchain. Otherwise it's your ordinary payment system, complete with all the annoyances and limitations that come with it being that.

Facebook doesn’t want Libra to be a Facebook project, because of the negative connotations associated with the Facebook brand.

So the main goal of the blockchain part is to have friends (the Libra association) between which the responsibility is shared. It dilutes concerns and deflects issues: the headlines won’t be “Facebook faces regulatory sanctions” but “The Libra association (Facebook, Uber, Spotify, …) faces regulatory sanctions”.

Or at least that was their hope initially. The press, or the regulator, may have pushed scrutiny on Mastercard had they stayed involved, but I doubt they will assume that Spotify is responsible if something wrong happens in the Libra association.

But fundamentally, the creation of consensus on transactional history merely elects a leader, and other companies’ servers only record the leader’s blockchain.

Additionally, the assets backing the payment system are the real meat behind enabling this technology. And unlike traditional banking, Facebook & cie maintain control over those assets regardless of which company handles the Libra account.

Banks can handle your payments because they have ownership of your deposits, but funds do leave the bank when performing a transfer (ACH, SWIFT, etc.) to another bank.

In Libra, the assets remain controlled by the Libra association even when making a transfer from one Libra app to another, eg. from Novi to Spotify.

It would be nice to have KYC using a certificate system, where organizations could publish that they have performed the check. At its core, that would be optional, and it would be up to the parties to a given transaction whether they care.

Yes, but not US-based KYC for non-US based persons, i.e. in the EU.

My country (Serbia) that's not in the EU had quite a bit of drama due to sending personally identifiable private citizen data (i.e. first and last name, specific personal info, ID card number, unique personal identifier) over Cloudflare which does not currently have a legal representative according to the Serbian Data Protection Regulation, which makes it illegal for the government or any other data processor to send ANYTHING to Cloudflare because Serbia is not in the EU and even though GDPR and ZZPL (our version) are literally identical (to prepare for EU-integrations), GDPR only applies to citizens of countries that are right now in the EU.

So, I don't think some people or [all] governments will like this. At all.

edit: And yes, SHARE Foundation did sue Google, Facebook, and all other tech giants (including infrastructure providers) in Serbia for ZZPL but apparently only Google appointed a legal representative in Belgrade, and even that seems like a "PR stunt", given how weakly GDPR is being enforced, and it is backed by the whole of EU. No other company replied or appeared in court.

Right, so maybe we should be telling the government to stop requiring financial institutions to require identification.

Not the decentralized, blockchain-based ones.

Even for decentralized ones, there are legal requirements for any entity that wants to let you buy or sell. Anyone who buys or sells bitcoin from you without doing KYC is breaking US law.

No, because Bitcoin is a commodity, it's not legally classified as money. There's no need to do KYC for BTC any more than there is for baseball cards.

This is essentially what wechat and alipay and the entire social ID-based auth in almost all China domestic apps (they link mobile phone number, which requires a national ID to get in the first place).

This was, iirc, part of the bargain that Libra struck with regulators.

Turns out that people will get angry if you don't talk to regulators, they will get angry if you talk to regulators...they will get angry.

I think this is a lesson that will hopefully explain why the financial system needs changing (and also why it won't ever happen).