Globalcoin, Facebook and Surveillance Capitalism—Why Trust in Social Media Will Mean I'll Never Buy this Shit and You Shouldn't Either

in #bitcoin5 years ago (edited)

Fuck you, Mark.

From the company that has always kept your data 100% safe, never having any issues ever with censorship abuses on the platform, that isn't building censorship tools for authoritarian governments like China or Russia or anything, now asks you to keep your money with them and not to even worry your little heart about a thing.

#NotSorry

Can we talk about...

This incredibly cynical corporate fucktard wearing a human suit? Lest you forget this one...

ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how'd you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don't know why
ZUCK: they "trust me"
ZUCK: dumb fucks
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zuckerberg-ims-confirmed-by-zuckerberg-the-new-yorker-2010-9

Full disclosure...I hate facebook. I believe they are basically destroying the world through the destruction of social consensus, exposing large swaths of people to evil, preying on addictive psychological mechanisms, and are a hop skip and a jump away from being a more efficient global gestapo wittingly or unwittingly for authoritarian governments and hate groups, but let's actually break this down.

The Cynicism of the Coming Corporate Coins

A video that does a decent job of going over the high level issues about why you should never buy this as a crypto person, but also your friends and family...recommend they never touch this scam either unless you want to probably at best, make nothing. Mind you this is around the AVERAGE crypto holders' views not even the most cynical:

Basically...

  1. Facebook is fundamentally anti-privacy which is the literal antithesis of a vast majority of cryptos. Cryptography by definition means to hide something in a code...so uhhhhh
  2. Facebook is anti-decentralization which is literally the entire reason cryptos exist in the first place relative to fiat currency and all that other shit we call "money." Everything and anything that comes out about facebook coin is through a media spokesperson, or has zero objectivity because it's being shilled by someone who stands to profit directly through some deal or bribe, so the reliability and accuracy of any information coming out is at best probably at least half wrong, at worst mostly lies. The rest is in the middle with people who own facebook stock and fuck all of those people too.
  3. Facebook and Mark couldn't protect their own dick with both hands, or your data or your money EVEN IF THEY WANTED TO which see point #1. But as it is, they aren't interested in data security on a general level because if they were, they would actually inform their users of hacks, all while happily selling or giving away your data through various means wittingly or unwittingly, even if you aren't a user on their platform.
  4. Let's assume this isn't the most cynal corporate profit grab off stupid people you've ever heard off...Why would you buy this shit? It's a stable coin. Stable means no volatility, means no profit, at all. No profit means no one invests. No one buys to hold at all. No one buying this shit means there's no market for it. There might be a "banking the unbanked" argument here, but this means all of europe, the united states, australia and the entirety of the west world won't benefit from this side of the argument at all, so there's half your user base that doesn't care. And the other half already have bitcoin to protect them from shitty local currencies and hyperinflation. Tell me why / how on the planet earth you could work and have a phone or computer, phone service / internet which is a recurring bill + pay it, a place to use those devices connected to their services (because you aren't getting service in the middle of the sahara), have facebook accounts, connect some sort of service to put money onto the account which somehow doesn't involve a bank, somehow exchange your money from tangible to digital into zuckbucks...AND NOT have a bank account of any kind. There are people I'm sure who's order of operations completely ignores necessities and logic, going for pure high tech consumerism in the middle of africa, but my guess is bank account isn't the last thing in that sequence, but somewhere in the middle or towards the front. Banking the unbanked then means nothing or at best, very very little compared to the hype it gets.
  5. This is actually not a cryptocurrency at all, or new technology in any way, it's a coupon or an 'in game currency' or something to that effect that on a basic game theory fundamental level there is zero reason to buy at all...Maybe at BEST there's an as-of-yet-nonexistent deal on facebook you can't get anywhere else, but do you really think people are directly selling through facebook right now or will in the future exclusively with this crap or will they still accept actual money? Do you really think there will be a facebook store where this currency will be the only thing accepted? You think that vendor will exclusively sell on facebook, or there might be a better deal on Amazon or somewhere else online just like there is now? At best there is no reason to speculate or invest in it, there's no reason to hold it and there's no benefit from holding it, you only make payments with it. So why on earth would I put one more transaction between me and a purchase where I will probably have some sort of fee along the way.
  6. Partnering with credit cards and payment processors means facebook will have your financial data and NOTHING facebook ever does could be worth to you as a user or consumer such that this trade off would be event remotely acceptable. The average user doesn't trust facebook or Mark Zuckerberg farther than they could throw them, and the demographics are beginning to skew up because the older slower generations to social media don't yet understand the risk as facebook onboards the world, while a vast majority of their current users are increasingly aware of the social unrest and dangers facebook specifically opens the world to. Now when things go wrong in some backwater country, it won't just be genocide off of religious affiliation, it will be generations of populations in poverty based on religious and ethnic information as governments and interest groups seize this information and act on it. Let's just think about what Russia would do for a minute if they knew you were gay, not affiliated with Putin's party and made a lot of money with all your bank information tied to your identity, who you talk to, all your LGBT friends and location data...all that? If you weren't just arrested for some nonsense, terrorized or threatened for pushing gay propaganda (ie existing), you're savings would be seized without abnormally significant efforts to hide your money or sexual orientation, or you'd almost certainly leave the country if you could. We don't even have to think about places like Iran where'd they'd just toss you and everyone else you knew off a tall fucking building... Let's just think about how state level actors and rogues could target specific religious / minority ethnic groups and financially terrorize them for decades with exactly which banks they use, where they'll be at what time of day, talking and exchanging money with whom, and for what things or services, whether credit was used or not...nothing will be missed. And let's think of political dissidents who are regularly censored for their ideas, now they would also have their money censored as well.
  7. Wasn't Facebook supposed to start accepting payments with Bitcoin? How's that going? Cough Cough
  8. Competitors...there are already how many fucking stable coins already, that are viable if not safe (enough), so the market isn't saturated or anything. Granted many of the stable coins are getting sued, but where's the new shit in this?
  9. Partnerships, only 100 people who paid $10million for the privilege to run the nodes means it's not a public blockchain, it's not backed by anything or a reserve currency, and what kind of custodianship are we really talking about here? Who's holding the funds? What's stopping those people from running off with everyone's money like Bitfinex and Tether walking away with a billion dollars underneath everyone's noses.

Final Grade

  • Unconfiscatability: Fail—the most confiscatable currency on the planet earth probably ever tied to the closest thing we have to online identity right now.
  • Censorability: Fail—Ever been banned from facebook for political speech? I have multiple times. Care to have that happen with your bank? "I'm sorry you have been banned from purchases for 3 days until we've decided you're allowed to use your own money again. Hope you don't need to eat" Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope...
  • Monetary Policy: Fail—stable coins by definition do not go up in value and they can print as much as they want, burn coins, whatever they want. So everything wrong with money printing and inflation like Ripple/tether and a central bank x 1,000,000.
  • Governance: Fail—can't trust the governor (facebook the company) can't trust the government (the platform). Period.
  • Game Theory: Fail—zero reason to buy, hold or invest on any level, no dividend/interest means you lose money to inflation every day of every year you hold this, on average 2-6% a year.
  • Cryptographic security: Fail—corporate in game currency running through nodes of credit card companies is possible to be functionally secure, but I wouldn't trust them with a penny and you shouldn't either
  • Centralization: Fail—makes every other actual centralized crypto like ripple look like bitcoin by comparison
  • Privacy: ULTRA FAIL—potentially most insecure currency on the planet earth from a data perspective ever devised by man
  • Blockchain: Fail—It's not a blockchain, it's a database. This is keyword buzz to get the stupid people on board: https://medium.com/@lopp/thoughts-on-libra-blockchain-49b8f6c26372
  • Custodianship: Fail—Can't trust facebook with a single penny inside their ecosystem from being stolen or censored
  • Payments: Fail—its made to track your payments, so it does that well but not in a way that's socially acceptable
  • Fungibility: literally doesn't matter with any (all) of the above

I leave you with not my opinion by a delightful thread by leading Bitcoin econonist:

But to be clear, Facebook is building a centralized payment processor on the US dollar and calling it a blockchain. Like all centralized shitcoins, they've set up a 'Foundation' to pretend the thing is independent. They're even pretending its development will be open source. As shitcoins amply demonstrate, these pretenses are far easier to maintain in the whitepaper stage. Good luck to the Libra team keeping your development and blockchain open when people try to use them to send money to Iran. The foundation will remain independent until it tries to do something against FB's wishes. Will FB just allow its billions of users to seamlessly shift to a Libra they don't like? FB users' access to Libra can be turned off by FB, utterly subjugating the foundation to FB's will. **The only functional advantage of calling this centralized system a blockchain is arguably in regulation. Easier to get things by regulators by using crypto buzzwords than admitting to just running a bank. Otherwise, everything would be more efficient if centralized.** In the short-run, Libra will only survive by being subservient to the USD & pegged to it. In the long-run, it will only survive by being subservient to bitcoin and pegged to it. The only other fate possible is the life & inevitable death of yet another irrelevant stupid shitcoin.

June 18, 2019—Saifedean Ammous (@saifedean)

*Just a random dude on the internet sharing his thoughts. Do your own research, I'm not a financial advisor or licensed in any way. I hodl bitcoin and I'm generally bullish long term but not to the point of stupidity, so take that and my thoughts as you will.

**Leave a comment, say hi, say thanks, tell me I suck. Upvote, something, shit. Is this place just bots? Or do we have real people. If you've made it this far, do something that shows you're a person roun' here. Thanks, partner.


Shills

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