Booking Holdings Is Latest to Pull Out of Libra Association (bloomberg.com) 14
Booking Holdings, an online travel company that operates Kayak.com and Priceline.com among other websites, said it's withdrawing from participation in the Libra Association, an ambitious and controversial Facebook-led project to create a new cryptocurrency. From a report: The Norwalk, Connecticut-based company joins PayPal, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, MercadoLibre and EBay in leaving the project in the past two weeks. The plan has came under intense scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators who feared that Libra could be used for criminal purposes and undercut countries' monetary policy, among myriad other concerns.
Good (Score:2)
Re: Good (Score:1)
Re: Good (Score:1)
Re: Good (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Would you rather have a private company tax you that doesn't give a fuck about whether people riot in the streets?
Re: (Score:3)
They do differ in design, but both are as public as they can be:
- Bitcoin uses a simple linked list while Libra uses a binary tree
- Bitcoin requires proof of work while Libra doesn't
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
The question if Facebook succeeds with Libra, how long will it take for them to pay all their employees in Libra where they can only buy all their things via facebook.
US Dollar is good for all Debt public and private. Libra is good for Facebook Private Debt.
Also the problem with crypto currencies is that they are very volatile. Having 1 Bitcoin being equal to over $8,000 USD where a decade ago it was a few hundred dollars, to cents on the dollar a generation ago. Also with drops in thousands of dollar, makes it very difficult to save and plan with.
The US Dollar is managed and controlled to be sure it doesn't go up too fast or drop too fast, with a lot of complex rules and regulations to help manage it. That is why when things go bad, countries invest in the USD as it is the safest investment out there, even though it isn't backed by anything tangible. Cryto isn't backed by anything real too, however there isn't a formal governance of them either. And facebook is unequipped to manage a currency.
I load sixteen tons. (Score:2)
What do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
the centers of decentralization (Score:4, Interesting)
the "secret" part of Libra, as with any private currency, is how ownership is distributed among actual _human stakeholders_ at any given moment - not "nodes" or wallets or whatever the proxy du jour is.
Thus the only secret that matters is "who has the leverage over liquidity, and thus the purchasing power of the tokens?" rather than who is mining it or staking it or transacting it, or how many nodes are running, or how much in usage fees are being paid to the network (which in essence is just the major stakeholders paying themselves to simulate volume).
All of the commonly reported usage metrics are easily gamed by individuals or cartels who wish to pretend to look like unaffiliated groups in order to entice public adoption.
Re: (Score:2)
Facebook does. It's fully managed by Facebook (Score:2)
> Thus the only secret that matters is "who has the leverage over liquidity, and thus the purchasing power of the tokens?" rather than who is mining it or
Libra is fully managed by Facebook. There is no mining; Facebook issues more when they want to. Facebook and its partners get all of the interest earned.
Dogecoin forever! (Score:3)
Dogecoin is the most stable crypto-currency. Since the beginning, one Dogecoin has always been worth one Dogecoin!
The thing appears it'll be DoA, and that's good! (Score:2)
The Norwalk, Connecticut-based company joins PayPal, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, MercadoLibre and EBay in leaving the project in the past two weeks.
Now, icing on the cake would be the whole of Facebook somehow disappearing for good.
Die, Libra, die! (Score:2)