Wayfair another example of late stage capitalism. A company that continues to go up in value despite having never turned a profit. Last year they lost more than half a billion dollars. They’re like the Uber of furniture - no viable business model and no plans to change that fact, but apparently it doesn’t matter.

Hahah it also goes 0-60 in less than one second. Somehow it takes 4 seconds to go 0-60-0 which is not really how physics works.

This is easy to say in the US where we don't worry about inflation. Tell someone in Venezuela that libra is dangerous because it won't let their government manage their money supply and see what they say. 

Do you not see how having the ability to buy things without cash is good? Imagine paying all of your bills in person, or not being able to buy anything online. Think about sending a relative money and paying a 5% fee, or having to cash your check in person.

I read his book before I knew that he was a fucking lunatic and it left me with the impression that he was a fucking lunatic. And it was an autobiography...

Yeah this seems like not a Japanese thing, other than they may be slightly more orderly. Everywhere you go you stand on the right and leave the left open for people who want to walk. It’s like driving - the left lane is for passing.

If you lose your wallet don’t do it at Starbucks. A friend of mine lost his at a Starbucks about six months ago and just got it in the mail last week. Apparently they keep them in a huge box and turn them into the police station like twice a decade. When we was talking to the police officer who was calling to return…

Here’s a much smaller example where someone lost 10 wallets in a bunch of different US cities:

Yeah for about a fifth of the price I have a vivoactive3. It does everything I want - and I have no complaints about the screen for about $300.

Interesting - how do you get fiat into your PayPal account? I agree that they won’t be doing business with #1 and in general they shouldn’t be. The people in group #2 are too poor to make money off of in a retail banking operation, but if you can cut costs enough (and scale enough) I don’t think it’s impossible to…

I'm not a fan of PayPal either. I'm not sure this compares though. As far as I know (to be fair I haven't used PayPal in like a decade) there's no fiat gateway to using PayPal, so if you don't have a bank account already you're out of luck. My reading of this was Libra wanted to enable people to use fiat to purchase…

It’s silly if you have a bank. If you have no access to formal banking and are doing everything in cash right now (but you do have a cell phone) this could be life changing. Imagine if every time you wanted to pay your bills you had to go to a physical location. You have to cash your paycheck manually (and pay a fee).…

This is a private network so that argument is unrelated. Bitcoin mining is distributed - anyone can do it. Only specific members are allowed to run the mining software for Libra. It didn’t make the cut because it is irrelevant for this project.

Correct. It is tied to a wallet address. With Bitcoin in particular (not every cryptocurrency works the same way) every time you make a transaction you also get a new wallet address. This adds to the anonymity. For example, if I have 10 BTC in address 1 (it actually looks like this: 34nU388mB3hPNcC9CZVHZqLvQE2TTPDhnQ)…

Yes - it also says they plan on 100 partners for launch.

This is true. However, a lot of people don’t have other conventional options available to them. If you are unbanked you are already jumping through a lot of hoops just to pay bills or get a loan. 

There isn’t that much variance in the core of banking regulations across countries. In order to do business with US banks most countries align pretty closely with US AML / KYC laws which include what information needs to be collected and what is reported to the regulator.

They will likely have merchants that act as a bank by accepting fiat and loading your wallet with Libra. You can do this currently in Barbados. 

Apparently Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Coinbase, Stripe, Mercy Corps.... And if you consider people “dumb” because they don’t have access to banking services you can include them in that list.

Find someone who has no access to a bank account and ask them those questions. Just because a product isn’t for you doesn’t mean it can’t be useful.