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Facebook Is Working On a New Cryptocurrency For WhatsApp Payments (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Some of the world's biggest internet messaging companies are hoping to succeed where cryptocurrency start-ups have failed by introducing mainstream consumers to the alternative world of digital coins. The internet outfits, including Facebook, Telegram and Signal, are planning to roll out new cryptocurrencies over the next year that are meant to allow users to send money to contacts on their messaging systems, like a Venmo or PayPal that can move across international borders. The most anticipated but secretive project is underway at Facebook. The company is working on a coin that users of WhatsApp, which Facebook owns, could send to friends and family instantly.
The Facebook project is far enough along that the social networking giant has held conversations with cryptocurrency exchanges about selling the Facebook coin to consumers. Telegram, which has an estimated 300 million users worldwide, is also working on a digital coin. Signal, an encrypted messaging service that is popular among technologists and privacy advocates, has its own coin in the works. And so do the biggest messaging applications in South Korea and Japan, Kakao and Line. The messaging companies have a reach that dwarfs the backers of earlier cryptocurrencies. Facebook and Telegram can make the digital wallets used for cryptocurrencies available, in an instant, to hundreds of millions of users. Most of them appear to be working on digital coins that could exist on a decentralized network of computers, independent to some degree of the companies that created them. Facebook reportedly has more than 50 engineers working on their cryptocurrency. Their project is being run by former president of PayPal, David Marcus, and started last year after Telegram raised $1.7 billion to fund its cryptocurrency project. "The five people who have been briefed on the Facebook team's work said the company's most immediate product was likely to be a coin that would be pegged to the value of traditional currencies," NYT reports, citing a report from Bloomberg. "A digital token with a stable value would not be attractive to speculators -- the main audience for cryptocurrencies so far -- but it would allow consumers to hold it and pay for things without worrying about the value of the coin rising and falling." The coin should come out in the first half of the year.
The Facebook project is far enough along that the social networking giant has held conversations with cryptocurrency exchanges about selling the Facebook coin to consumers. Telegram, which has an estimated 300 million users worldwide, is also working on a digital coin. Signal, an encrypted messaging service that is popular among technologists and privacy advocates, has its own coin in the works. And so do the biggest messaging applications in South Korea and Japan, Kakao and Line. The messaging companies have a reach that dwarfs the backers of earlier cryptocurrencies. Facebook and Telegram can make the digital wallets used for cryptocurrencies available, in an instant, to hundreds of millions of users. Most of them appear to be working on digital coins that could exist on a decentralized network of computers, independent to some degree of the companies that created them. Facebook reportedly has more than 50 engineers working on their cryptocurrency. Their project is being run by former president of PayPal, David Marcus, and started last year after Telegram raised $1.7 billion to fund its cryptocurrency project. "The five people who have been briefed on the Facebook team's work said the company's most immediate product was likely to be a coin that would be pegged to the value of traditional currencies," NYT reports, citing a report from Bloomberg. "A digital token with a stable value would not be attractive to speculators -- the main audience for cryptocurrencies so far -- but it would allow consumers to hold it and pay for things without worrying about the value of the coin rising and falling." The coin should come out in the first half of the year.
Good luck with all of that, Facebook.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies aren't pegged to other currencies and are treated like an asset (because they are). Most cryptocurrencies anyone cares about are also decentralized and not under the control of any one company or group.
Trying to establish and run your own currency is one of the fastest ways to get a lot of guns pointed at you.
Facebook wants to stick their nose into your finances as well as everything else
Ungodly and unnecessary. Can this stupid fad die already?
Maybe we can have Kim K. on the back? Southpark must have some funny character somewhere.
After 25 years posting on slashdot, Sexconker can't get it up anymore.
Don't go on a tinder/grinder date with Sexconker unless you want to be seriously disappointed.
FaceBook! The Trusted brand of the internet - what could possibly go wrong?
No, they won't sell your purchase history to anyone...
I miss Cremier. He's the only fag who made this shithole dead website interesting.
Notice how everyone wants their own crypto. The jp Morgan coin the Facebook coin etc. They all want total control of the entire block chain so that the can run 51% attacks and roll back transactions. They also get the issue ipo coins for the Most wealth too.
No one wants to use an existing chain but everyone wants their own gift card currency they can manipulate.
And that is what will kill crypto. Incompatible coins that need constant conversions to from dollars to be useful.
Like instant messaging incompatibility will make life miserable and medicore
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Can I get so show of hands of people that will trust people with their money? Anyone? Anyone......
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
If it doesn't have a value pegged to a major currency, it's going to be useless, like Bitcoin.
It's also going to be useless if there isn't a cheap, global means of converting "Facebook coins" into real money.
krypto kurrency, like facebook, is for suckers. you deserve each other. MAKE 'MERKA GREEDY AGAIN.
Bitcoin & all its cryptocurrency offspring are DYING!!!
What to do???
How about more cryptocurrency hype/advertisement attempt on Slashdot???
"A digital token with a stable value would not be attractive to speculators -- the main audience for cryptocurrencies so far -- but it would allow consumers to hold it and pay for things without worrying about the value of the coin rising and falling."
Bullshit. That means inflation will have an effect on its value.
These people failed basic economics. You're a fucking fool if you give them any money for this cryptocurrency shit.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The growing distrust of WhatsApp due to Facebook's ongoing integration with Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp puts a mighty big barrier for the desired security/privacy. We already know Facebook is reading WhatsApp so that last thing the community needs is a cryptocurrency run by Facebook. The alternatives of Signal and Telgram are considerably more appealing and are not tied to Facebook.
is to function as a sort of bank where they can trade money between people without transaction fees right up until the users need the cash to buy some real world good. It'd be a nice scheme if they could make it work.
I'm guessing government will keep that from happening, and not necessarily for bad reasons. Banks are heavily regulated to prevent large ones from crashing the economy (well, heavily regulated for about 8 years until we put a batch of neo-cons in office long enough to strip away the repairs from the last recession, but I digress).
Facebook is likely to end up in a rock and a hard place. The lefties won't let them operate without the heavy duty oversight that makes banking expensive. The righties won't want Facebook musclin' in on their territory.
I predict the whole thing will fizzle out under the weight of regulations meant to protect consumers and regulations just plain meant to kill it.
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Fuck me, signal is falling into this shit too? And here I thought it was merely an end-to-end encrypted chat service...
Just start using Ethereum and be done with it already!
Sounds like they want GNU Taler.
Whatever they will try, they will find that nChain already holds patents for it..
But people can buy drugs, guns, and sex using crypto.
People can also buy drugs and sex using plain simple money.
It all depends if the country you're in considers it as something fundamentally evil that needs to be banned no matter what, or if it's just yet another market that at most needs to be regulated.
But those countries just happen to be mostly on the other side of the Atlantic pond, on our "evil-euro-communist" side...
It's easier to conduct business off the books that needs to be kept off the books.
Wha.. ?!?... no !
What part of "distributed trust" and "public ledger" don't you get?!
Well, okay. The cryptographics concepts might be a little too complex.
But the core idea that drove the development of Bitcoin is to avoid a central authority responsible for them. Instead, it relies on every node of the network holding its local copy of the transaction history and agreeing together (so no central authority could try to take over).
That also mean that *every single node* on the network has a copy of the books. So it's quite the opposite of conducting business off the books.
Bitcoin is *not* anonymous, by design. At best it's pseudonymous: the transaction aren't stored together with your real identity, they're instead linked to the cryptography key pair used to sign them. (But that won't prevent any big player to eventually manage to match a collection of keys with some real world identity. At the end of the day, those wares you mentions needs to be shipped somewhere).
But the thing is, as there are no central authority, there's no single stop to *prevent* those exchange from happening. You can freeze the credit cards or paypal account of some controversial enterprise, but you can't go and ask some "Bitcoin, Inc" to freeze the transactions.
(That's in fact part of the rose of popularity of the concept, after controversial websites like Wikileaks got heir donation request mecanism frozen).
(Though nowadays, there's probably a couple of giant chinese mining pool which more or less work as a "bitcoin, inc" simply because together they deal more than 51% of all transaction mining).
TL;DR: You're not *off the books*. You're off from someone knocking on your bank's door and saying "he's not allowed to do that, please block the transaction".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
how are we supposed to make money off this garbage.
When you hear the phrase "new cryptocurrency" it will be hacked. The end. It is going to be hacked with a >50% attack because it will be too small to prevent random miners from out-processing the rest of the network and forging false transactions. Use an existing, established currency or don't bother because it won't work.
Come check out coincircle! You can earn up to $200 USD a day in ETH https://coincircle.com/l/qL4kP...
WeChat has had mobile payments for yonks.
I beats pointless cryptocurrencies i.e. wastes of electricity.
That really is interesting. I like the fact that there are so many new crypto projects. I mean, just visit ICOPulse, you can find dozens of them on the website. And a few ones are really perspective.