@0xbitcoiner already posted about this (#1441377), but it didn't get very much attention and I'm curious what the stackers think.
I've been surprised that none of the big, western social media platforms have managed to have an even mediocre money integration so far. Mostly, I've assumed that banking and money services business regulations are so onerous that they haven't wanted to (or can't figure out how to) deal with it.
The tech giant, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram and has more than 3 billion users, wants to begin its stablecoin integration early in the second half of this year, said one of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans are not public. Meta is planning to integrate a vendor to help administer stablecoin-backed payments and implement a new wallet, the person said.
Obviously, Meta is large enough that they can get any license they want, but it still sounds pretty ugly and I'm very curious if using a stablecoin issuer will help them at all (I'm not convinced it will).
- First off, I'm pretty sure they'll have to kyc users if they want to let them use money in any kind of tight integration. Unless they can somehow argue that users are holding their own funds and Meta has no custody or control over them, I don't see how they avoid being a money services business.
- Second, I think this probably also means they have to submit the same kind of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) as banks...and that this applies to transactions once a user hits an specific total transaction value for the year (I think this number is $2000 or so).
- Third, I think this would also make Meta a Digital Asset Services Provider (DASP) under GENIUS act definitions, which means they'd have to guarantee that they can freeze, seize, burn tokens at the request of law enforcement, and that they'd have to enforce US sanctions.
- Fourth, I think the'd also have to follow the travel rule (transactions over a certain size must also include tax reporting info for both sender and receiver).
So, the question is: if Meta implements stablecoins, will it be so cucked that it's not even useful or will they do something interesting? I'm reminded that David Marcus of Lightspark (Spark) was co-creator of Libra and that Spark has implemented stablecoins.
What is there to be interesting? It's an IOU for fiat? The only thing it can do is avoid banking laws so that KYC can be avoided, because all the intrinsic bad shit gets inherited from the peg. And I doubt that Zuck can pull that off.
You know what else can avoid KYC? LN. And that doesn't inherit all the intrinsic bad shit that fiat has.
I think I would consider it very interesting if Meta implemented payments in a way that skirted banking laws, even if they did it via custodial Zuck Coin Tokenz.
Freely moving, cross-border money is so far from the traditional finance that anyway it's done on a 3 billion user scale would be interesting just because of how it would change the game for central banks and governments.
I agree with you that Meta is not going to pull this off. I suspect the end result will be a stablecoin integration that is largely useless because it won't skirt banking laws.
But I also think this is something Bitcoin (or LN) doesn't fix. The problem is Meta's size. If Meta integrated something like Spark or even if they put a ton of engineering dollars into a lightning integration and actually tried to offer no kyc borderless payments to 3 billion users, I imagine they would experience a good amount of regulatory friction. Lightning will have to be way more widespread before something like that can happen.
I wish I believed that there was something to gain from step-by-step explaining [1] why this is actually what LN (but not Bitcoin) fixes, as long as we don't have that doom scenario from a few years back of "2 networks, of which one KYC".
Either way, yes you're right. If some platform with a couple 100M MAU will expose a non-compliant means to do monetary transfer, they will be destroyed. We've seen that. Zuck has seen that. So the power is in getting the 100M MAU under the radar. And guess how we do that? One stacker at a time.
But I think that that would be putting oil on the fire so for now I will shut up about it. I have found how niche content is now discoverable to the masses with no skill involved, so I don't want to be naive. ↩
I'll ponder this.
I think we all already know the way, even the most controversial among active stackers disagree not upon the core values, but upon relatively minor details when compared to anything Zuck can put into existence versus Bitcoin.
We can disagree about things among us but save for the magnitude of Car beating Bailey up again on a podcast, we're all on this path already.
Figured it’d fly under the radar since it’s about stablecoins, but I thought the ~Stacker_Stocks crowd would vibe with it. Doesn't look like it! ahaha thanks for the FW.
@k00b, is it normal for the boost icon to show up in color even though I didn't boost?
I boosted it, so I suppose it's reflecting that.
Yeah, for sure that’s why. But shouldn't it only turn colored when I boost?