
Facebook is reportedly planning its own stablecoin - Supermighty
https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/21/facebook-stablecoin/
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CoolGuySteve
This is a dupe of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18730778](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18730778)

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mattdeboard
Am I wrong in being suspicious this is a plan for economic colonialism by
Facebook? Can they use the custody assets as capital for lending?

Like if they have (e.g.) $100mil to back Zuckcoin, would it make any sense (or
even be legal in the US) for them to start using this to start issuing, for
example, microloans to rural farmers in India? I hope not but I'm interested
in the answer.

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dvtrn
_Am I wrong in being suspicious this is a plan for economic colonialism by
Facebook_

Personally, my brain went in the direction of "is Facebook taking the Google
approach to developing products?" i.e. they have a huge engineering team that
needs to work on _something_ , so you end up with a lot of products coming out
of their dev organization, thrown at a wall, some stick and become popular in
their own right (Messenger), some don't and die, and some are extensions of
acquisitions (instagram).

Pure speculation and supposition, but that's the sensation I get, specifically
reading this headline. _shrug_

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akhilcacharya
“Engineer driven product development”?

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dvtrn
Yeah something like that. I'm sure lots of teams do it, seems like a worthy
practice to help build a culture of continuous learning when you're at the
scale that you can just build "extracurricular"[1] features on your platform,
provided you have product managers who can balance that with meeting core
product objectives.

[1] there may be a better phrase for this which eludes me right now

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fipple
This is how blockchain nerds report about Facebook cloning PayPal.

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jameslevy
Presumably there's a reason they have a few dozen blockchain engineers working
on this beyond just Venmo/Paypal functionality, such as this stablecoin
actually being an ERC-20 token that can be transferred to your own wallet.

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fipple
If this is an ERC 20 token I will eat my hat.

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RobLach
Controlled by Facebook? Why not just throw a ledger onto a relational
database. Surely they trust their own servers.

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snr
Meh. If a single organization is controlling the block chain, they might as
well make it a _surprise surprise_ relational database.

