Facebook Novi and Surveillance Finance

https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/novi.html

by tenslisi • 6 years ago

150 49 6 years ago

companyhen• 6 years ago

Reminds me of this article from yesterday: Coinbase wants to sell blockchain analysis software to the IRS and DEA a year after its Neutrino acquisition https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/67551/coinbase-irs-dea-a...

theboywho• 6 years ago

"...rebranding of their Libra cryptocurrency project into the new Facebook brand Novi."

That is technically not true. Novi is a wallet Facebook is making for Libra. The wallet used to be named Calibra and caused confusion. Libra has not been rebranded by Facebook.

tempodox• 6 years ago

Very much appreciated. This post tells it like it is, without equivocation.

z3t44• 6 years ago

Cant wait for facebook to disrupt fintech with zero fee micro transactions. Been waiting for Mozilla/Firefox to do it as they are in a better middleman position.

j88439h842• 6 years ago

Venmo has no fee for bank/debit card transactions. Or do you mean something else?

z3t44• 6 years ago

Is it free for merchants?

baby6• 6 years ago

Who uses Venmo outside the US?

Barrin92• 6 years ago

wechat has been doing free transfers forever. Venmo too. Personal transfers on Paypal and Square cash are free too I think. Not too sure where the big disruption is.

baby6• 6 years ago

Do this worldwide and you indeed have disruption.

damnyou• 6 years ago

international remittances.

jfoster2• 6 years ago

Are you looking forward to it as a consumer or a business?

I think it will be great for businesses that are struggling with revenue due to the internet. Newspapers that don't have paywalls are going to re-evaluate considering that paywalls could now feasibly have a "day pass" option. Even sites like Reddit could adopt this model.

Could get a bit more annoying for consumers, though; constantly making purchase decisions when trying to browse the web.

z3t44• 6 years ago

First i have to pay up to 5% to receive the money, then I have to pay 5% again to get the money out of the platform. And if that wasn't enough, my purchase info and metadata is then sold to Google and Facebook. Now Facebook will get that for free and in return they can afford zero fees. With micro transactions the fees can be 90% of the total. With all social data Facebook has it will also be easier to deal with fraud and credit.

michaelmrose• 6 years ago

Is there reason to believe that their foray into the financial sector will be treated differently under a democratic president/legislators vs republican ones?

Basically do they have a dog in this fight?

johannes12343212• 6 years ago

Crypto currencies generally are more popular with people who have less trust in the state, while people who trust states and their currencies are more sceptical. The same line exists in the Democratic/Republican divide.

The question is how Facebook will market and promote their wallet and efforts. My assumption is that for end users this will be promoted as a way to buy and sell things and services via Facebook platforms (pay my cab driver via WhatsApp while travelling etc.) and the fact it's a crypto currency underneath is an attempt to reassure other financial players that Facebook won't take over their business, but allows interacting (in the end users have to convert from/to local currency, which requires banks etc.)

And with that it's less a topic in that political divide.

baby6• 6 years ago

Note that there are also people like me, who trust their government for the most part but want a more transparency system.

WFHRenaissance• 6 years ago

Is Facebook + what’s left of their coalition allowed to set emergency monetary policy for Libra?

wmf4• 6 years ago

Libra doesn't really have monetary policy since it's supposed to be 1:1 backed by real money, but now that you mention it I wonder what they would do if (purely hypothetically) one of their backing bank accounts got seized.

vosper• 6 years ago

There’s a fair amount of speculation in this article, some of which is presented with a bit too much certainty, IMO.

But it’s mixed in with some pretty interesting details and references. It’s worth a read.

ve552• 6 years ago

It is worth remember that the current state of finance is already surveillance finance. Credit card records are sold and purchased, all large chains and stores do significant customer tracking on their own, more than just every item you purchase, when, and where. Even services like Gmail scrape information from your email for every receipt that you receive, although they purchase CC data either way.

cinquemb2• 6 years ago

I think a lot of the push back is from current banking TBTF group tbh (there was a talk about financial innovation at pearsons school in nyc a couple months ago, where folks from global central banks were pretty much just laughing)… and as someone who doesn't use FB/IG/etc, if they can chip away at the hold of existing king of the hills, they will make the rest crypto currency landscape more approachable in the future after FB eventually poisons the waters for some subset of users who prior to using what facebook cooks up and shoves down its useds throats, wern't interested in cryptocurrencies (or anything related) at all… which I'd call a win for the BCH/XMR/etc crowd.

Let the tech/banking giants duke it out, and everyone else can come it an clean what's left of their carcasses eventually.

Maxion• 6 years ago

Don't forget that due to increasingly heavy financial regulations adopted by FATF require financial institutions to have extreme surveillance data on all financial transactions and to report anything they themselves deem to be suspicious to the authorities. This includes things such as cross-border activity (logging in from a foreign ip) to using a VPN.

gruez• 6 years ago

This includes things such as cross-border activity (logging in from a foreign ip) to using a VPN.

This is a thing? I don’t get the point of reporting cross border logins. Cross border transactions makes sense, but what’s so nefarious about me paying my water bill while in Mexico?

ve552• 6 years ago

Yup, and of course there's also FinCEN, the IRS, the BSA which includes reporting of currency transactions, suspicious transactions, FBAR where you have to disclose all foreign holdings, and many other reports. I think similar regulations will hit cryptocurrency eventually, requiring holders to report their addresses they have the private keys of, sadly.

the-dude• 6 years ago

In the US.

In the EU local bankcards are used much more than CC and these are not mined.

In NL shops are prohibited to build customer profiles based on their purchase history.

ethbro2• 6 years ago

My general impression was that non-US credit card rewards kind of sucked.

In the US, 2-5% is the base level of cashback from credit cards.

So, a little bit of "we mine and monetize your transactions, but pay you for doing so."

kohtatsu• 6 years ago

Visa has an opt-out for some of the data sharing: https://marketingreportoptout.visa.com/OPTOUT/request.do

christiansakai• 6 years ago

Off topic, but this is so so so so smart!!!

To contact me via email run one of the following scripts to generate my contact information. I find this is an effective filter against the deluge of emails from recruiters.
Recruiters who do contact me will be named and shamed publicly.

rootsudo• 6 years ago

Yes, run a script from someone...smart.

And wow, tbf that haskell script is simple enough to read w/o compiling. Never knew it was that easy to read. If you know a ceaser cipher then you can literally do it in your head.

justicezyx• 6 years ago

This is an open secret when Chinese government started heavily pushing for digital currency on top of blockchain. But everyone is smart enough to not talk about that...

Edit: Interestingly enough, the sensitivity surrounding block-chain (and AI, in the context of mass surveillance) is showing the effect of significantly slow down the mass adoption of the technology.

AI mass surveillance has already become an mass market in China. It however is still "a solution looking for problem" in US.

How this can play out in the longer term? For example, what would happen if the relinquish of privacy in the short term, allowed China to secure its strategic upper hand in economy size and technologies, through the value unlocked through Blockchain and AI?

From the perspective of US economy and technology development, it's a very challenging problem to figure out how to apply these technologies quickly. As there is literally zero resistance in China.

This issue is more urgent for AI. In addition to the fact that AI surveillance is already used everywhere in China, it's also super effective in the near term. For example, I can imagine AI can easily enhance the effectiveness of war machines to an entirely higher level.

Disclaimer: Intentionally putting moral judgement aside.

dntbnmpls• 6 years ago

A thread having nothing to do with nice. Oh lets see if I can squeeze some silly propaganda into it. You could have just as easily made your point without the old trite propaganda about china. The propaganda gets boring and ineffective after a while. Why not try something different?

bogomipz• 6 years ago

"After the initial announcement and code drop last year, the Libra name has been dragged through the mud by the press due to the project’s complete disdain for compliance and their bizarre code drop."

Could someone who is familiar with this event say what was actually "bizarre" about the way the code was delivered?

wmf4• 6 years ago

They were ostensibly just getting Libra started and open to feedback from the consortium but a lot of work had already been done on the code. This is often a sign of openwashing.

baby6• 6 years ago

For what is worth, what was released was a state of the art implementation of a consensus protocol with different technological opinionated choices (what signature algorithm, what hash function, how to store account state, etc.)

This did not have (and should not) have any impact on discussions around regulations. The development has also been ongoing in the open for a year since the announcement, so contributions and discussions are (and have been) welcome.

baby6• 6 years ago

I honestly don't understand the "bizarre" code drop, as we followed a common pattern for a cryptocurrency (announcement with code and potentially a testnet)

aritraghosh007• 6 years ago

Crypto finance should be, in general, run as open source, non-profit if it really wants to bring any societal change and democratize establishments. For-profit corporations running these programs under the garb of friendly deceptive branding can at most influence a behavior which is the only real positive.

wmf4• 6 years ago

You might as well go straight to a CBDC run by the Federal Reserve (but even then the Fed doesn't want to upset existing banks).

salawat• 6 years ago

It cannot be run as any traditional incorporated entity if it doesn't want to get essentially turned into one of the already existing financial services companies.

Facebook Novi and Surveillance Finance

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