Mister Monster @mister_monster@social.privacytools.io

@Wetrix They cannot stop it. It is like gunpowder. The pandora's box has been opened.

@nikolal I am with you on cryptocurrencies becoming the dominant money. But I do not see nation states adopting them. The main power that most nation states have is currency creation. I believe we are entering a world where state governments will be as important to people as the company they work for, and that individuals rather than states will dominate global finance. Corporate money will play a role in that, but i think open currencies will be much more important. We shall see.
@Wetrix

@nikolal All I am really saying is that Libra will not be the first corporate money, and it will continue to exist in whatever form it can legally exist in. It will even have a significant user base. But it cannot take the place of open money because it cannot serve all the needs of all the people like open money can.
@Wetrix

@nikolal That is not exactly true. Libra is going to be backed by a "basket of currencies", similar to World Bank SDRs. In the US, asset backed securities must be compliant or they face massive fines. I do not expect them to print Libra without purchasing the backing because they know that if they do they will get shut down by the FEC in the US. You might be able to get away with this with an ERC20 ICO on Ethereum, but a corporate structure cannot avoid the law, they exist in law only.
@Wetrix

@nikolal Yup, China will probably implement a currency in WeChat or AliPay or something else, they already give preference to Chinese products like this. Russia does this as well to some degree. In the US if FB continues to exist under current regulations and they abide the financial services regulations they can do it, nothing is stopping them. I do expect some changes to how FB is regulated in the US before the Libra launch, but it might not be an obstacle to Libra itself.

@Wetrix

@nikolal You can expect their plans to change to the whim of governments based on the profitability of the approach. They won't launch a product that will tank, they will adapt it to maximize the number of people who use it so they can make money, just like they do with FB. If they can't get users in a country with a Libra bank they will turn off that feature in that country. The fact that anyone can do this shows you that this isn't actual money, it is a financial service.
@Wetrix

@nikolal @Wetrix So corporate money will exist, it will be used by some people in some places for some reason or other, but it cannot be as flexible as open money and so it cannot displace it long term.

@Wetrix @nikolal The great thing about social networks is the network effect. Money is social in nature as well. The network effect may work against these FOSS protocols in the short run, but once critical mass is reached (~10% of people who use FB/libra use AP/bitcoin) people who don't care about privacy or FOSS start to use them just because their friends do.

@nikolal @Wetrix Yup. But corporate money is nothing new in this world. Company stores were a big thing in the US for a long time. The obstacle that corporate money faces is that corporations are legal entities that exist solely within the scope of government regulatory framework. They are always susceptible to government regulation. Cryptocurrency does not have that obstacle to overcome. At the end of the day, the user can ignore laws and the protocol doesn't care if they do or not.

@Wetrix @nikolal Well it kind of has to be. For profit silo "networks" cannot sustain themselves because they must break UX for monetization reasons. A network like Mastodon can live indefinitely with 2 users and still be useful because there's no pressure to be profitable. The long term trend will be towards tools that work for the people that use them because thats what people will gravitate towards in the long run. This applies to currency and social networks and anything really. Look at AOL.