Facebook Libra

Couple days ago Facebook finally released the details of its cryptocurrency, Tech Crunch put a great article about it but the good bites are:

• Low transfer fees (as reference PayPal and others are 3% or more, international transfers are about 7% and may take days to get the money)
• Is not Facebook alone, but a group of up to 100 other big companies, based on Switzerland. Big companies meaning funding and infrastructure, or in other words no need to depend on cryptocurrency mining and all that energy waste
• Stable value currency! probably the main difference with other cryptocurrencies. The value is meant to stay stable. Today Bitcoin is basically gambling
• Speed, 100+ times faster than Bitcoin/Ethereum. Can you believe Bitcoin speed is 7 transactions per second?
• Includes a new developer language (more below)

It may not make much sense in developed areas but in theory it could make a great impact in areas where access to credit/card/bank is difficult: people in Kenya/Philippines already transfer money using phones (since 2007), but opening it a bit more would be great!

Privacy concerns aside (it will roll whether you like it or not) there is already some code to get started with it so I tried it last night

All steps are really easy to follow and available here

Currently it works on MacOSX & Linux. On a recent MacBook Pro it took few minutes to compile everything. Side note is if you want to try it on a Mac is best to install (if not already) the developer tools/XCode

All operations are quick but the only issue I found was using two sessions. Transferring money worked fine, balances worked fine, but somehow one session was unable to get the details of all accounts

So in regards of the new language, Move, it makes sense, I would just prefer to have a clean/simple API to use it from C# or Angular/NodeJS, because at the end of the day … for a normal user or developer, any platform will do (or stated otherwise, won’t really care about theory, internal virtual machine states etc.)

More to be added soon, but so far it looks very promising!