Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra
Ok, so let's focus on the underlying idea, without the "Facebook is trying to rebrand their evil brand" 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 "global rich" (citizens of first-world countries), let alone for the "unbanked". It could even scale even more to a money <i>store</i> but that'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 "bank" stage).<p>So, my thoughts / 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'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 / 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's no underlying reason why you'd  want this to be run by a non-financial company (and an ad ("use people's data to manipulate them") company) and many reasons why you <i>wouldn't</i> want to comingle your financial data with the likes of Facebook / Google / Apple.<p>3) Why a "new currency" ("stablecoin")? I understand that it might have some desirable properties but I'm pretty sure that most people would be negatively surprised if their "stable" coins started losing value (in terms of their local currency). Also, I'd say that most people don't even care/think about "FX rates" etc. and those that do are mainly currency traders / "speculators". So I envision the "ideal" system to be basically just an app displaying "sending 100EUR to person A in country Z will cost you 0.3% and the payment will arrive in 20 minutes" and the other person seeing "person B sent you 8919 INR".<p>4) I'm sure there are many issues with fraud/reversible transactions/KYC/anti-terrorism/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, "for the people") organisation handling an area of "social tech" that global governments aren't tackling (because they aren't incentivized to) but fundamentally all the pieces of technology are there.<p>If anyone is interested in funding / founding such an organization, let me know.