
China Should Launch a Libra Competitor – Huawei CEO - iafrikan
https://www.iafrikan.com/2019/07/28/huawei-ceo-libra-china-facebook-cryptocurrency-digital/
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chvid
China should start by making WeChat available for non-Chinese - for example
tourists traveling in China.

Whether it runs on a blockchain is less important. Adoption and good user
interface is what is important and that WeChat already has in a major way.

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cmurf
Is there such a thing as a Chinese debit (pre-paid) card, and would that be
accepted by either WeChat or Alipay? Or a Hong Kong debit card?

Alternatively, they could have a 2nd class foreigner version of WeChat and
Alipay with whatever restrictions on it they want. The status quo is more of
an imposition on Chinese vendors than on tourists.

~~~
fbi-director
You can connect it to a regular (debit) bank card. Or a credit card. But not a
prepaid credit card if they even have those anymore in the mainland.

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z33k
China should decentralize weixin (wechat pay) which is already in massive use
all across China. That would disrupt Libra.

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derefr
You (should) mean _centralize_ , not _decentralize_.

The innovation of Libra is that having "100 major corporations mostly large
enough to not be bossed around by governments" do consensus to run a USD
stablecoin, is about as close as you can get in trustworthiness to having the
American government itself run a USD stablecoin.

 _But_ , despite being the next best thing, it's still strictly inferior. If
the American government itself issued (minted?) a USD stablecoin, it would
have an extra tool in its toolbelt that these corporations wouldn't: monetary
policy. The American government would be free to inflate/deflate USD itself to
control the tether of their stablecoin. (The probably wouldn't _do_ that, but
the fact that they _can_ would keep the coin much more stable.) As well, they
wouldn't have to hold any liquidity at all—they would just have the mint issue
digital fiat US dollars (i.e. the cryptocurrency) in place of regular physical
fiat US dollars it was planning to issue.

All of which is to say, given that China doesn't have 100 major corporations
large enough to not be beholden to the Chinese government, _de_ centralizing
an existing corporate digital currency would just be silly. But _centralizing_
one into a Chinese-government-issued RMB stablecoin, would make complete
sense.

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roenxi
> having the American government itself run a USD stablecoin.

They could call it "The American Dollar". It is hard to forsee a practical
difference between a government sponsored crypto and a regular currency.

If the crypto couldn't inflate that would be pretty major, but governments can
already do that with their own currencies and choose not to. If they had a
crypto that technically was unable to increase supply, sooner or later (that
is to say, sooner) they would replace it with a crypto that they _could_
inflate

Ditto near-instant, secure exchange with anyone in the world. It isn't like
sub-minute network communication is a secret technology; the delays that exist
are probably more to do with currency controls and regulatory compliance.

It is meaningless to have a trustless distributed currency that is pegged to a
large, untrustworthy centrally controlled currency. Its only purpose is to
skirt around the edges of financial law. Governments do not support that.

~~~
derefr
> They could call it "The American Dollar".

Yes, that is what I was suggesting—that the US Mint just mint USD as tokens
into a blockchain's Central Bank account, instead of as greenbacks into a
Central Bank's physical vaults. They're dollars either way.

> It is hard to forsee a practical difference between a government sponsored
> crypto and a regular currency.

I mean, yes, that's the point of stablecoins.

> It is meaningless to have a trustless distributed currency that is pegged to
> a large, untrustworthy centrally controlled currency.

No, it's not.

A stablecoin is "a regular currency"—i.e. fiat money—and _also_ a
cryptocurrency—i.e. something that you can move around on a blockchain in
fancy ways using smart contracts, with everything staying provable and
deterministic such that mutually-distrusting parties (i.e. private citizens of
countries that are at war with one-another) are forced to agree on what
happened.

> Its only purpose is to skirt around the edges of financial law. Governments
> do not support that.

Have you been paying attention to what has been happening in the
cryptocurrency space for the last two years? A whole infrastructure is being
established to allow governments to regulate and control crypto instruments,
like security tokens. Crypto companies (or, at least, the ones everyone's
investing in now) are no longer attempting to work _despite_ governments;
instead, they're now attempting to take advantage of the properties
blockchains give you (e.g. "money you can't sweep under the rug"; "contracts
that execute automatically and can be proven to have executed"; etc.) while
still allowing governments to butt into transactions.

Essentially, the modern business-investor's interpretation of a blockchain is
that it's just the same kind of thing as a securities exchange: a government-
regulated platform making novel types of trades liquid by decreasing the costs
of those trades. A blockchain is just a securities exchange with lower
barriers-to-entry for developers of new types of tradable securities.

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buboard
I thought they were already running Bitcoin?

