Facebook is the last company I’d want to see dominate the coming global corporate currencies. They are unscrupulous, dishonest to the core, and willing to cheat partners and customers alike to get what they want.

IMO banks rather than currencies will be the first area tech companies can push into, then payment networks, then eventually currencies as nation states wither away.

There are some tech companies competing with banks and payment networks already, with some success, particularly in the UK. It will take a while for them to supplant traditional banks but I see it as inevitable and, for the reasons you point out, not too difficult, as the incumbents are sclerotic and unable to grasp the importance of software.

It's not inevitable at all. This is because (retail) banks operate more or less in the same way in their back office. The change is the front office - retail branches are being replaced with apps. But they have seen this before - with telephone and online banking. And the current generation of apps from the big banks is catching up (mainly UX). The only thing that really stands-out for the startups is the onboarding process.

This is going to end in a completely different way than the retail wars, because there, it was a revolution in both the front (storefront) and back (logistics of getting the product to the customers) office.

Tech/IT is seen as a cost centre, often outsourced, and if not outsourced performed by disillusioned teams with neither influence nor autonomy. The back end of big banks is a huge mess of legacy systems, they had to be forced to adopt open banking, and the leadership don’t recognise that everything will be software soon. They are the antithesis of tech companies.

> Tech/IT is seen as a cost centre, often outsourced, and if not outsourced performed by disillusioned teams with neither influence nor autonomy.

That may be true, but how people work is beside the point. That's a question of culture and dependent on the industry and it's maturity. Yes, it may make or break individual companies, but on the scale of industries it's not relevant.

The truth is that tech companies don't "win" by working better, they "win" by playing a different game and the game here isn't too different to the incumbents.

> The back end of big banks is a huge mess of legacy systems

Yes and no, as big banks are not monolithic nor homogenous. But this doesn't make the jobs of startups any easier either because the interfaces to existing platforms are just as necessary for them in order to interoperate.

>the leadership don’t recognise that everything will be software soon

Actually they do and they are betting on that to cut costs by automating legacy and inefficient functions.

> They are the antithesis of big tech.

They are not the antithesis, they are just at a different stage on the maturity curve. It's up to the disruptors to find enough gaps in their armour to usurp them. But I don't think that there is that much room for disruption in the retail market apart from niches players, because fundamentally their models are not that different.

I disagree.

It's true banks don't work like tech companies, it is also true that tech companies don't work like bank and the 100% of them failed to replace banks, because banks are more trustworthy when it's about client'money safety.

legacy systems are a good thing, it means they already solved a lot of edge cases and been working good enough for years (or tens of years)

The new shiny toy might look good, but if it does 1/20 of what's needed by the business, it's useless.

I work now in insurance, evolving legacy systems to new technologies, legacy systems suck, but they are also rock solid and a lot of things they do are vital for the company and, more often than not, save people's jobs.

A lot of rules we don't understand are there to avoid abuses

I'm working on a system that's offline from 11pm to 7am to avoid that agents created insurance policies over night making unfair competition to real agencies with offices, employees and regulated opening hours.

It's been put there probably 20 years ago, it looks silly now, but it served a purpose

In one year I've been able to replace alone maybe 1/30 of what the main legacy system does. Which, btw, sometimes still calls an even more legacy system on the backend, just like my system exposes what the new system still doesn't handle as a safer wrapper to the legacy one. It's a good pace, we have proved it can be done without breaking the workflow, now it's time to accelerate and build a little team around the project.

Evolution is layered, disruption is a jouvenile sin and usually it is bad for company's workers more than for companies.

I do think established banks have a lot of baggage and entirely the wrong emphasis for a world which runs on software. Some of their old rules still encode useful information, many don't, and it will be hard to disentangle the essential from the moribund.

I am fully in favour of the various new banking services and apps that are springing up, services to manage, transfer, save and invest better etc. That's an appropriate place for the market. Even there it's needed regulation to ensure the most marginal in society can get a basic bank account, or not get stiffed on fees.

I can never tell when discussing matters like this if the other party is expressing legitimate concerns poorly considered, or if I’m witnessing some astroturfing campaign.

JBoss was the first astroturfing campaign I learned about (and if you’re reading this, Marc, fuck you. Yeah people still remember.)

I know these sorts of things have been going on forever but it feels like it’s getting worse over time. To the point I’m not sure I know who to believe anymore.

Here's the issue, well my issue. I've read more than enough history to know what happens with company currency or scrip. It doesn't have to be the mining town paying the miner in mining dollars to use at a variable rate solely at the overpriced mining store, valid only whilst they work at the mine and don't upset the foreman or his wife. Each step and use gave opportunity, gladly taken, for the mine to extract more profit.

Currency regulators permit local dollars and pounds which are an attempt to keep money in a local economy. Their constraint is fair to both the public and the market, they are purely parallel to cash, and they are tiny enough not to matter - crucially there is no profit in and of themselves. A "local California dollar" might well deservedly get a different reaction.

With Libra, well it's not hard to create a Company Scrip 2.0 scenario. In fact it's disturbingly easy. Actually, to imagine dozens upon dozens of them. Then a few dozen more purely because it's supra-national. Then a few dozen more because they are large enough to squeeze out cash without needing to be a remote company town. Yeah actually I want regulators to squish that before birth, with extreme malice.

Just one example: Facebook and Ford do a deal for FB advertising and a bit of personal data swapping, in return for Ford F150s, or maybe just a particular model to start, solely being available for Libra. You want that Ford truck, well convert some dollars into Libra. You don't see how it's disturbingly easy to create an inevitable and easily manipulated stronghold down that route? What about if the local supermarket does the same deal? Breach the licence, well you're not shopping in these stores... Even stealing universal currencies, such as dollars, does not remove your future use of or right to use dollars. Only the stolen loot is taken from you.

I'm perfectly comfortable with the anarchistic cryptocurrencies such as BTC as there is no threat to the universality of exchange, even if it did take off more than BTC yet has. Even though BTC's main use seems as medium of speculation until the bubble bursts. They can reasonably be a currency. Libra feels more universality of control than of exchange.

A currency as product - that's inherently a bad thing, as I wrote in my other reply. Even if the company is not Facebook but is behind the crypto currency alone, with a built in route to profit just by the "currency" existing. That's diametrically opposed to the needs of a currency - a universal token of exchange and legal tender. It rather removes the ability to be a currency. It should not be a product in and of itself. I expect, and pray, that regulators will erase any that have chance of becoming widespread enough to be real alternative currency beyond speculative toy. Otherwise everyone except shareholders is worse off. Now a central bank backing a cryptocurrency - held as universal and legal tender - that's an entirely different, and interesting thing.

> that's diametrically opposed to the needs of a currency - a universal token

Currencies dont need to be universal, at least they were not until maybe the gold standard. It's government enforcement that made them look universal, but until then , a currency was of equal holding value as any commodity like gold. That was a good hedge against government misuse imho. And , looking at the manipulation of central govt rates, there is misuse today, worldwide. That doesnt mean the only alternative is FB of course, but it could be one, and i dont see a danger in it being one.

> such as BTC as there is no threat to the universality of exchange

BTC is a direct threat to any government that prints fiat money. It's just too small yet, so your theory gives it a pass.

Universality and confidence came long, long before the 19th century gold standard - to the early Middle Ages and beyond, a state, or king, set the purity of coin, the penalty for clipping, mutilating the coin and so on. The gold standard developed from, and long after coinage standard and assaying.

Again in the early ME, particularly during the Viking age, and with some overlap with coin, people used hacksilver and similar as preferred medium of exchange because there was inherent value to the commodity. Hacksilver goes long back into the dim and distant ancient past, beyond other universal coins and currencies that achieved confidence, such as Roman. So yes, it was the ultimate - and very effective - hedge, particularly as towns fell, were raided or found themselves repeatedly changing side.

Of course government can abuse rates, but the scope is amplified orders of magnitude with a Company Scrip. Libra is a company scrip that risks destabilising proper currencies, and creating islands of inclusion and exclusion. By contrast, BTC is not, and does not. The difference in regulatory response seems clear, and warranted.

People trusted gold at least as much as their king though, even if the roman emperor or king tried hard to push his coin. The Florin was very popular in europe but florence was a small territory. Taxes were often paid via barter. Silver and gold were not made by any government / even aluminum was once more precious than gold. You can have all of those, because people understand the value of monetary tokens as mediums of exchange, and money doesn't have to be universal. It's only in very recent decades that people have lost all control and voice about their money. With increased coordination, regulation and data exchange between central banks around the world, having choice is what cryptocurrencies bring back.

Choice is what some cryptocurrencies bring - the anarchistic ones. Even there I see little to no chance of surpassing central bank backed currencies - that's just a pipe dream. Of the corporate backed cryptocurrencies, the "with profit" currencies, they're simply Company Scrip, and an entirely different species apart.

Libra was designed as a currency to take over the world, replacing the rest.

You do not want a for-profit company to run a global currency. Sure, let them run banks, one bank won't rule the world. But the one who holds all the money, will.

"hundreds of global currencies" sounds like a good idea to me too, as long as they are out of the hands of for-profit companies.

The Federal Reserve is just about as close to a private company as any, running your entire economy. Certainly it's a for profit venture. But then that's profits funneled away from public coffers, and not to it.

Sure, the Fed has a pretty clear mandate from the Congress, deputizing them into a certain public role, but other than that, they receive little to no ‘advice’ on how to do things, and stand free to make private profit for a small cartel of privately owned banks.

The reason for this non-public setup is so that Congress won't simply print more money at will, which would be far worse.

True, but exactly the same applies to a state running the currency, with even more evidence of malfeasance and manipulation. State currency loses significant value every year by design, and the management of it is really opaque.

I’d rather a cooperative mutually owned currency to either corporate or state control.

Of course if you’re rich or privileged there are many options.

Practically every store that took bitcoin used bitpay as an intermediary so they never actually held any btc. They just had someone else turn it into USD and send them the money.

Also those businesses also didn't need to use bitpay to receive anything but they could for convenience.

Does Libra solve this problem?

Also some centralized cryptocurrencies still use keys and random addresses, which means they work by default unless the addresses are blacklisted.

https://localbitcoins.com/blog/id-verification-update/

I'm being slightly facetious, but there are banks here that are better at all of these.

1. In the UK at least bank accounts are completely free, as long as you don't borrow money (you can use a credit card for free as long as you pay it off every month).

2. Not really in my experience. The worst thing they do is constantly make new types of savings accounts with decent interest rates and then sneakily drop them to 0.1% a couple of years later.

3. Hasn't been an issue for me travelling around Europe and Asia. The new breed of banks don't charge you insane fees either. E.g. check out Transferwise's debit card.

4. How would Libra solve this?

5. It's actually not too bad now - more and more online shops support 2 factor authentication for credit card purchases. Plus because of the fees merchants pay you have pretty good protection against fraud.

> It feels like banks have mostly given up on making their product better.

Disagree. They finally have competition: Monzo, Revolut, Starling Bank, Metro Bank, etc.

Well, they provide a service and charge for that. Seems legit to me. Specifically in the context of European banks (including Iceland, Norway and Switzerland) that charge virtually nothing for basically instantaneous transfers within those countries. If US banks suck, maybe have a word with your congressperson.

2. They try to upsell me stupid financial products

If so, change your bank.

3. They are not easy to use in other countries

Uhh, just about any bank I know of issues an ATM card, which is either attached to the Plus, or Cirrus networks. My Swiss Postfinance ATM card work mighty fine at ATMs in Bangkok, Burundi, or Bangalore. Or just about in any damn place in the world. In other words: This reasoning is total bullshit.

4. Typing in my credit card number sucks

Yeah, well. You may prefer to trust a company, which lies a lot and shuts down your account for any and all resaon, without any recourse. Let alone get hold of a real life person to rectify the issue. Frankly, I prefer the "hardship" to type my credit card number (which I know by heart anyway) than to trust Mr. Zuckerberg or Mr. Marcus. Which, in my opinion, always seem pretty much full of shit whenever they open their mouth. To each his own, I guess.

5. Typing in my credit card number isn't secure

Er, not my problem. I let my bank sort that out. They're obliged to do that and whenever I had that (rare) problem it was sorted out in a jiffy. Best of luck sorting this out with just about any major tech company.

you should check out "online" banks like Charles Schwab. they don't do any of this fancy retail bs. they've never charged me a fee (not even when I overdrew my checking account), and they reimburse me the full ATM fee whenever I use one, no matter how bad it is.

the only thing they "upsell" you on is their trading platform, which is quite good imo. they have a bunch of great inhouse ETFs and it's now free to trade other stuff anyway.

not sure which country you are in but for me, UK based Transferwise largely fixes 1-3 and Paypal 4 and 5