
Facebook Novi and Surveillance Finance - tenslisi
https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/novi.html
======
ve55
It is worth remember that the current state of finance is already surveillance
finance. Credit card records are sold and purchased, all large chains and
stores do significant customer tracking on their own, more than just every
item you purchase, when, and where. Even services like Gmail scrape
information from your email for every receipt that you receive, although they
purchase CC data either way.

~~~
Maxion
Don't forget that due to increasingly heavy financial regulations adopted by
FATF require financial institutions to have extreme surveillance data on all
financial transactions and to report anything they themselves deem to be
suspicious to the authorities. This includes things such as cross-border
activity (logging in from a foreign ip) to using a VPN.

~~~
ve55
Yup, and of course there's also FinCEN, the IRS, the BSA which includes
reporting of currency transactions, suspicious transactions, FBAR where you
have to disclose all foreign holdings, and many other reports. I think similar
regulations will hit cryptocurrency eventually, requiring holders to report
their addresses they have the private keys of, sadly.

~~~
ethbro
> requiring holders to report their addresses they have the private keys of,
> sadly.

This might become the law, but how would it be enforced?

I thought the world leaning on Swiss banks for data was effectively an
admission that anonymous accounts were unlinkable from the client side.

~~~
cinquemb
> This might become the law, but how would it be enforced?

By a few token measure that wont scale, just like current existing income tax
structure. The main enforcement mechanism now is heavily reliant upon
employers withholding on the behalf of employees and banks reporting on their
accounts (the same entities that consider fines for felonious dealings just a
cost of doing business); without it, existing tax enforcement would be
toothless to most.

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theboywho
"...rebranding of their Libra cryptocurrency project into the new Facebook
brand Novi."

That is technically not true. Novi is a wallet Facebook is making for Libra.
The wallet used to be named Calibra and caused confusion. Libra has not been
rebranded by Facebook.

------
companyhen
Reminds me of this article from yesterday: Coinbase wants to sell blockchain
analysis software to the IRS and DEA a year after its Neutrino acquisition
[https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/67551/coinbase-irs-
dea-a...](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/67551/coinbase-irs-dea-
analytics-neutrino)

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christiansakai
Off topic, but this is so so so so smart!!!

> To contact me via email run one of the following scripts to generate my
> contact information. I find this is an effective filter against the deluge
> of emails from recruiters.

> Recruiters who do contact me will be named and shamed publicly.

~~~
rootsudo
Yes, run a script from someone...smart.

And wow, tbf that haskell script is simple enough to read w/o compiling. Never
knew it was that easy to read. If you know a ceaser cipher then you can
literally do it in your head.

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vosper
There’s a fair amount of speculation in this article, some of which is
presented with a bit too much certainty, IMO.

But it’s mixed in with some pretty interesting details and references. It’s
worth a read.

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z3t4
Cant wait for facebook to disrupt fintech with zero fee micro transactions.
Been waiting for Mozilla/Firefox to do it as they are in a better middleman
position.

~~~
Barrin92
wechat has been doing free transfers forever. Venmo too. Personal transfers on
Paypal and Square cash are free too I think. Not too sure where the big
disruption is.

~~~
baby
Do this worldwide and you indeed have disruption.

~~~
dgellow
Isn’t PayPal worldwide?

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bogomipz
>"After the initial announcement and code drop last year, the Libra name has
been dragged through the mud by the press due to the project’s complete
disdain for compliance and their bizarre code drop."

Could someone who is familiar with this event say what was actually "bizarre"
about the way the code was delivered?

~~~
wmf
They were ostensibly just getting Libra started and open to feedback from the
consortium but a lot of work had already been done on the code. This is often
a sign of openwashing.

~~~
baby
For what is worth, what was released was a state of the art implementation of
a consensus protocol with different technological opinionated choices (what
signature algorithm, what hash function, how to store account state, etc.)

This did not have (and should not) have any impact on discussions around
regulations. The development has also been ongoing in the open for a year
since the announcement, so contributions and discussions are (and have been)
welcome.

~~~
wmf
Is the "don't even use a blockchain" discussion welcome? It's hard for people
to escape sunk costs.

~~~
baby
Of course! We even did release a payment protocol based not on a consensus
protocol but on a broadcast protocol:
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.11506.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.11506.pdf)

------
aritraghosh007
Crypto finance should be, in general, run as open source, non-profit if it
really wants to bring any societal change and democratize establishments. For-
profit corporations running these programs under the garb of friendly
deceptive branding can at most influence a behavior which is the only real
positive.

~~~
salawat
It cannot be run as any traditional incorporated entity if it doesn't want to
get essentially turned into one of the already existing financial services
companies.

------
michaelmrose
Is there reason to believe that their foray into the financial sector will be
treated differently under a democratic president/legislators vs republican
ones?

Basically do they have a dog in this fight?

~~~
johannes1234321
Crypto currencies generally are more popular with people who have less trust
in the state, while people who trust states and their currencies are more
sceptical. The same line exists in the Democratic/Republican divide.

The question is how Facebook will market and promote their wallet and efforts.
My assumption is that for end users this will be promoted as a way to buy and
sell things and services via Facebook platforms (pay my cab driver via
WhatsApp while travelling etc.) and the fact it's a crypto currency underneath
is an attempt to reassure other financial players that Facebook won't take
over their business, but allows interacting (in the end users have to convert
from/to local currency, which requires banks etc.)

And with that it's less a topic in that political divide.

~~~
baby
Note that there are also people like me, who trust their government for the
most part but want a more transparency system.

~~~
johannes1234321
It's not one dimensional. I simplified.

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WFHRenaissance
Is Facebook + what’s left of their coalition allowed to set emergency monetary
policy for Libra?

~~~
wmf
Libra doesn't really have monetary policy since it's supposed to be 1:1 backed
by real money, but now that you mention it I wonder what they would do if
(purely hypothetically) one of their backing bank accounts got seized.

------
tempodox
Very much appreciated. This post tells it like it is, without equivocation.

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justicezyx
This is an open secret when Chinese government started heavily pushing for
digital currency on top of blockchain. But everyone is smart enough to not
talk about that...

Edit: Interestingly enough, the sensitivity surrounding block-chain (and AI,
in the context of mass surveillance) is showing the effect of significantly
slow down the mass adoption of the technology.

AI mass surveillance has already become an mass market in China. It however is
still "a solution looking for problem" in US.

How this can play out in the longer term? For example, what would happen if
the relinquish of privacy in the short term, allowed China to secure its
strategic upper hand in economy size and technologies, through the value
unlocked through Blockchain and AI?

From the perspective of US economy and technology development, it's a very
challenging problem to figure out how to apply these technologies _quickly_.
As there is literally zero resistance in China.

This issue is more urgent for AI. In addition to the fact that AI surveillance
is already used everywhere in China, it's also super effective in the near
term. For example, I can imagine AI can easily enhance the effectiveness of
war machines to an entirely higher level.

Disclaimer: Intentionally putting moral judgement aside.

~~~
dntbnmpls
A thread having nothing to do with nice. Oh lets see if I can squeeze some
silly propaganda into it. You could have just as easily made your point
without the old trite propaganda about china. The propaganda gets boring and
ineffective after a while. Why not try something different?

