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Facebook Claims Its Proposed Payments Network is 7 Times Faster Than Visa's (venturebeat.com) 65

As work continues on Novi, Facebook's digital wallet the company hopes will one day be used to access currencies in the blockchain-based payment system Libra, semblances of a framework have emerged from new research published in AFT '20: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies. From a report: A paper coauthored by scientists at Facebook's Novi division proposes a transaction settlement system called FastPay, which they claim can be used to settle cryptocurrency payments or as infrastructure to support retail payments in fiat currencies. In experiments, the team managed to achieve "intra-continental" confirmation of less than 100 milliseconds and over 80,000 transactions per second with as many as 20 different payment authorities. [...]

FastPay aims to solve this by enabling authorities to jointly maintain account balances and settle prefunded retail payments between accounts. The researchers claim it supports "subsecond" latency confirmation appropriate for physical point-of-sale payments while providing capacity comparable with peak retail card network volumes and real-time gross settlement. [...] In experiments, they claim FastPay supported up to 160,000 transactions per second under a total load of 1.5 million transactions across the 48 cores -- about seven times the peak transaction rate of the Visa payments network -- while running on commodity computers that cost less than $4,000 a month to run.

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Facebook Claims Its Proposed Payments Network is 7 Times Faster Than Visa's

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  • don't care (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Friday November 06, 2020 @04:35PM (#60692938)
    Personally I don't give a shit if it is a thousand times faster, hell will freeze over before I give access to facebook to my transactions. libra is DOA.
    • Chance is you already gave it to them or they stole it or bought it from someone who stole it and you only have to say yes or no.

    • Then so is any other cryptocoin without built in anonymity.

      Libra is just as pseudonymous as say bitcoin, they do not get your identity from you simply acquiring Libra. Once Facebook can tie a wallet address to your identity through other means, such as you paying them using the address, they have your transactions ... but that would be equally true for Bitcoin.

      • Libra is just as pseudonymous as say bitcoin, they do not get your identity from you simply acquiring Libra. Once Facebook can tie a wallet address to your identity through other means, such as you paying them using the address, they have your transactions .. but that would be equally true for Bitcoin.

        You know...cash still works just fine.

        Just sayin'....

        ;)

      • for me, yes it is. I would not use a cryptocoin as currency.
      • You could always change it out for Monero, then back to Libra, ensuring any history is gone, but with how good FB is for profiling, using canvas fingerprints, screen size, and so on, it wouldn't be hard for them to pick up the money trail where it left off.

        IMHO, and this is opinion here. FB makes good products. Zstandard compression has just become a world standard because it is arguably the top dog for a general purpose algorithm (although there are others which are faster.) I don't see any niche where L

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Personally I don't give a shit if it is a thousand times faster, hell will freeze over before I give access to facebook to my transactions.

      Agreed. And when they say:

      enabling authorities to jointly maintain account balances and settle prefunded retail payments between accounts

      then I say fuck you, I'm gonna keep using my visa I don't actually wait very long at all for my transactions to be approved. A few seconds of security checks, and visa holds all the risks for me. Easy choice.

    • There is some simplicity with FB payments.

      If they decide the entity you are doing with is guilty of wrong think you wonâ(TM)t be able to purchase goods or services from them. You no longer need to worry about being guilty of wrong think!

    • 1000% agree. However, I don't have a Fakebook account, so it would be difficult for them to do.

    • Re:don't care (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cob666 ( 656740 ) on Friday November 06, 2020 @08:16PM (#60693692)
      Right on!
      The last I would do is let a company with ZERO financial regulation or accountability have access to ANY of my finances.
    • by Chas ( 5144 )

      Exactly.

  • by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Friday November 06, 2020 @04:42PM (#60692976)

    I think it's time for a disruption of the credit card markets, they use gimmicky points systems to entice consumers to use their cards. The credit card processors take a cut of 1 to 3.5% of the sale (which is like a tax on consumers and businesses, merchants usually price this in so you pick up the cost). I'd hope someone would disrupt this market, because the actual cost of processing transactions is probably much much less than 1%, so there is money to be made. Especially since transactions aren't tied to a credit card anymore.

    • by Entrope ( 68843 )

      The cost of processing a transaction is very low nowadays. The cost of handling fraud is not.

    • by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Friday November 06, 2020 @04:56PM (#60693024)
      transaction handling is only a tiny part of the cost. The biggest costs are fraud and defaults, especially as a lot of countries put the liability partially or sometimes entirely on the credit card company rather than the user or store regardless of who is at fault.
    • Well, the creditcard offer a lot of services too ... and all the administration for chargeback costs a lot of money.

      Obviously a non chargeback electronic currency can be done far cheaper, but it's also more fraud sensitive. That said, the censorship power of creditcard companies is annoying so I do hope Libra is successful.

      • That said, the censorship power of creditcard companies is annoying so I do hope Libra is successful.

        OK, now look up what the face book is.

    • Sure, if it was anyone but facebook. Can you imagine them shutting down access to your bank accounts for violating their policy on posting on FB?

      • Sure, if it was anyone but facebook. Can you imagine them shutting down access to your bank accounts for violating their policy on posting on FB?

        What I can imagine is that my name is on the news by mistake, and before I even know it happened, access to my non-bank electronic-wealth-storage-mechanism has been frozen because a bunch of trolls reported different sarcastic posts from years ago that look really bad in whatever country the outsourced reviewer is in, but are obvious jokes to westerners.

    • I don't have points or anything, I just get n% back and risk-free transactions.

      And receiving payments, 3.5% is similar to what you might spend counting, storing, protecting, depositing, and sometimes losing to theft when you're using cash.

      Nobody is even trying to disrupt the industry in the direction of lower processing fees. The fees are already competitive, which is why some cards offer "points" and other gimmicks for people who like that shit.

      • Downvote for self-reply to myself, but to expand the point, if I used a regular non-cash-back visa, the retailer would only pay 2.5%. And yet there is no push-back at all from retailers about the "premium" cards and the extra percent that they pay that I get back that is really just a subsidy that cash-paying (read:poor or minority) customers support.

        If the retailers don't care, and the only people it hurts don't even use a credit card, then how can you disrupt the fee downwards?

        • by AvitarX ( 172628 )
          1) retailers do pushback (asking for debit vs credit transactions when they can)
          2) for small purchases it's a lot more than 2.5%

          The credit card companies have failed in the sense that you can't make small transactions.
          • Maybe in a podunk market in the boonies with some hayseed owner, but I stopped seeing it over 10 years ago.

            The credit card companies have not failed, because there is no widespread need for micro transactions. Nobody sells penny candies anymore. Stores don't want you to come in and make a 25 cent purchase. Arcades prefer to sell tokens by round numbers of dollars. Keep some fucking change in your car, wow.

    • by anegg ( 1390659 )

      I'd hope someone would disrupt this market, because the actual cost of processing transactions is probably much much less than 1%, so there is money to be made. Especially since transactions aren't tied to a credit card anymore.

      I think this battle was lost a long time ago. I used to avoid using my credit card except when it made sense to use it, opting for paying cash. I did this because I thought the cost of having the payment processor inserted into all of my business was ridiculous, and many people offered cash discounts. Time has passed, and now there are very few cash discounts offered, so the price of the credit card processing is baked into the cost of goods. I don't see how you will get a disruption of the credit card

  • by aRTeeNLCH ( 6256058 ) on Friday November 06, 2020 @04:44PM (#60692986)
    To me, 2 things are of utmost importance when it comes to digital payments: 1) security, and 2) Facebook has nothing to do with it.
    • I'm waiting for the US Treasury to come out with a Digital Dollar fiat consortium blockchain currency.

      Transactions will be anonymous to everybody but the IRS.

  • when Visa tells banks not to do business with them.
    • Visa has 93.23% institutional stock ownership, higher than any of their competitors.

      It is likely that the banks who own Visa are telling them who to do business with, rather than the other way around. ;)

      • The banks who own Visa are making 2% per transaction plus Visa's big interest rate. They aren't signing up any new competitors. All the non - owner banks will likely be forced to choose Visa or any new competing service, not both.
  • by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Friday November 06, 2020 @04:53PM (#60693016)

    FB will leverage its social media monopoly to compel users and sellers to use its service.

  • by zkiwi34 ( 974563 ) on Friday November 06, 2020 @05:03PM (#60693048)

    Facebook has proved itself far less trustworthy than Microsoft or even Trump.

    • Facebook has proved itself far less trustworthy than Microsoft or even Trump.

      Agreed, Microsoft are consistent front-stabbers. Much better than back-stabbers like the face book.

  • Maybe they are using an eventually consistent document database for replication. Just hope your transaction doesnâ(TM)t become an eventuality :)
  • "Facebook Claims Its Proposed Payments Network is 7 Times Faster Than Visa's"

    So what? Most CC networks are already running on the fastest available path(s) and no one seems to have a problem with them. Are we expecting a 50-fold increase in transactions?

    • Micropayments have taken off in China, so it is very much possible to have a 50-fold increase ... though obviously not with a chargeback system.

    • Yeah this doesn't seem like a real problem. In Australia we have instantaneous bank transfers, everyone uses them all the time. We also do everything with contactless payment. Including for really small micro-transactions like simply buying a pack of chewing gum from a local store.

      I haven't carried any cash in the last four years. My kids use their debit cards to buy things with their pocket money. We pay their pocket money directly into their bank accounts via a transfer.

      Everyone business has a EFPos termi

  • People pay with their card and ignore it till the end of the month. We trust the companies to do it reasonably fast.

    And it usually clears in a day or two anyway.

    It is PRIVACY we want. You'd have to be a fool to use Facebook for financial transactions.

  • Really? millisecond transactions? who the flying hell wants or needs that?? Oh yeah, money launderers!!
  • by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Friday November 06, 2020 @06:14PM (#60693306) Journal
    Why would you do that? Why would you want Facebook to know about everything you ever buy?
  • hard pass. I'm also in works to delete my FB business page and once enough people get my phone as a contact, time to dump FB. Too bad that so many groups and forums moved to FB as locally its the only way to find out about local events.

  • by TigerPlish ( 174064 ) on Friday November 06, 2020 @06:33PM (#60693384)

    Novi. No Vi.

    Didn't See, in Spanish.

    I'd rethink the name.

    This is high on my Do Not Want list, anyway.

  • The 100ms transaction is 7 times faster, which means the standard transaction is 700ms. I can't see how that extra 600ms would make a bit of difference in anyone's life. Who would really notice the difference in a sub-second part of the transaction?

    If you're worried about it, you could gain more than 600ms just by making a conscious effort to type your PIN quicker or take your card out of your wallet slightly faster.

    • The 100ms transaction is 7 times faster, which means the standard transaction is 700ms. I can't see how that extra 600ms would make a bit of difference in anyone's life.

      Because I want to buy some shit RIGHT THE FUCK NOW.

      If you're worried about it, you could gain more than 600ms just by making a conscious effort to type your PIN quicker or take your card out of your wallet slightly faster.

      NOW I SAID NOW!!11one

      Oh hang on a mo I just fumbled my phone.

  • Yes, but all payments go to Russia. Drink!

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