- But there’s a problem. Facebook doesn’t exactly know how to become functionally permissionless, because great expansions in node distribution often come at the expense of performance and efficiency. The hope is that by releasing the software under an open source license on a testnet—as well as offering lucrative research grants—Facebook will be able to convince developers to help it come up with solutions.
Good thread here with a bunch of sources to read. kleinbl00
"crypto" insert questioning emoji
Yeah, I saw that. I didn't read every fucking thing because it's an endless purity test from the more self-important corners of Crypto Twitter, who are professionally and avidly insufferable. Here's the important stuff: I mean your link, word 4 of the subtitle, is "stablecoin" in scare quotes. It's tied to a basket of currencies. It's on a blockchain. Yeah, you have to pay what? $10m to be on the blockchain? But it's on a blockchain. The same choads that will happily sell Ripple to each other want you to know just how much it isn't a "crypto" because it hurts their little brobrains. Facebook is interested in profiting off the inability of people in the developing world to easily transact. It has WhatsApp in all their pockets and is trusted more than their governments. So it rolled up its giant reputation for fucking over the little guy and invited Mastercard and Paypal to play along, while carefully crafting as SEC-proof an approach as they could come up with. Not that they were particularly effective. If they were honest they'd call it Scrip, because that's what it is. It's blockchain scrip. Pure and simple. Every panic and prognostication about what Facebook can and cannot do with their scrip is entirely irrelevant because it's a top-down EULA-driven app-dependent scrip where Facebook holds all the aces. Facebook isn't interested in unseating Bitcoin. They're interested in making money by replacing SWIFT. That's pretty much what every large banking organization wants to do. What will be interesting is seeing what Google, Microsoft and Amazon intend to do.
This is exactly wrong. Financial networks are not open due to regulation. Cash is not regulated, and that's why unbanked people can use it.“The problem with people unable to access financial services isn’t regulation,” he said. “If you look at the unbanked, the reason they don’t have access to the world economy is because of price and technology. Financial networks are not operating in an open way. The costs are prohibitive.”