Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
Ok, so let&#x27;s focus on the underlying idea, without the &quot;Facebook is trying to rebrand their evil brand&quot; cruft.<p>Basically, I think the underlying idea is valuable - low-cost, fast, reliable, accessible money transfers - clearly something missing right now in this world, <i>even for</i> the &quot;global rich&quot; (citizens of first-world countries), let alone for the &quot;unbanked&quot;. It could even scale even more to a money <i>store</i> but that&#x27;s basically being a bank, which is related but somewhat orthogonal (e.g. both Revolut and TransferWise started as mostly money-sending services and are now moving towards the &quot;bank&quot; stage).<p>So, my thoughts &#x2F; questions are the following:<p>1) Is there a reason this is tied to the blockchain? For most purposes, blockchain without proof of work is just a glorified git repository, and I&#x27;m pretty sure that not even the most law-abiding citizens want all their transactions to be public.<p>2) Is there a reason this would be tied to a company, instead of being run by e.g. a charity? I understand why Facebook &#x2F; Apple might be more successful with launching this than e.g. TransferWise (they can utilize their platform to push this (or any other) idea to a massive userbase), but really there&#x27;s no underlying reason why you&#x27;d  want this to be run by a non-financial company (and an ad (&quot;use people&#x27;s data to manipulate them&quot;) company) and many reasons why you <i>wouldn&#x27;t</i> want to comingle your financial data with the likes of Facebook &#x2F; Google &#x2F; Apple.<p>3) Why a &quot;new currency&quot; (&quot;stablecoin&quot;)? I understand that it might have some desirable properties but I&#x27;m pretty sure that most people would be negatively surprised if their &quot;stable&quot; coins started losing value (in terms of their local currency). Also, I&#x27;d say that most people don&#x27;t even care&#x2F;think about &quot;FX rates&quot; etc. and those that do are mainly currency traders &#x2F; &quot;speculators&quot;. So I envision the &quot;ideal&quot; system to be basically just an app displaying &quot;sending 100EUR to person A in country Z will cost you 0.3% and the payment will arrive in 20 minutes&quot; and the other person seeing &quot;person B sent you 8919 INR&quot;.<p>4) I&#x27;m sure there are many issues with fraud&#x2F;reversible transactions&#x2F;KYC&#x2F;anti-terrorism&#x2F;anti-money-laundering that would need to be resolved somehow.<p>I think this is an ideal case scenario for a charity - an almost-government (non-profit, &quot;for the people&quot;) organisation handling an area of &quot;social tech&quot; that global governments aren&#x27;t tackling (because they aren&#x27;t incentivized to) but fundamentally all the pieces of technology are there.<p>If anyone is interested in funding &#x2F; founding such an organization, let me know.