Facebook Libra Is Architecturally Unsound - <AUTHOR> http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/libra.html <comment><USER4> The answer to the question implied in the article -- why does Libra make such unjustified design decisions -- is simple. Some people have become enamored with blockchain despite it having almost no good use cases, and this certainly isn't one. It seems like a classic example of focusing on the technology rather than on the problem.

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Regardless of the other, far more important sections of this article, I find the section about the programming language misleading. Programming language theory does not study the quality of programming languages or their suitability to certain tasks. It is simply outside the purview of the discipline. PLT does not have any tools whatsoever to determine which language is more or less suitable and it is not interested in that question. The theory studies the properties of formal systems and the _internal_ implications of their design. Much like mathematics can deduce from the Peano axioms that 10 > 5, but it says absolutely nothing about whether 10 is "better" than 5 because the answer to that depends on context (are we talking cookies or tumors?) that is simply outside the purview of mathematics. Similarly, PLT can say whether a certain formal system is sound or not, but it says nothing whatsoever about whether soundness is "good", "bad" or neutral, and certainly not _how_ good or bad it is. Of course, programming language theorists have opinions on the matter, but those opinions are not supported by the theory.

Also, given the other glaring flaws, there is nothing to suggest that a formal definition of the programming language would improve matters in any perceptible way. After all, we do entrust the world's monetary system, and sometimes even our lives, to software written in programming languages that don't have a formal definition. As someone who studies the issue of software correctness, a formal definition of a programming language is certainly of interest to theorists, but it has not been shown to be a particularly worthwhile means of increasing correctness.

<comment><USER5> If you may spare a minute, I'd like to know your opinion on mission-critical software in dangerous-prone contexts (such as avionics, life support, even just economically for permanently-written "ROM" software, etc). Formal methods seem required in such projects, but your final paragraph seems to imply the formalism isn't key to end quality?

(my agenda, for transparency: I want to send SOC's in space on tiny RISC-V satellites, and the lowest layers of those should be 100% error-free because there's no going physically there to reboot a working shell, remote is all we have.)

Regarding 'love' for blockchain, I think it's the basic proposition of "100% accurate data that cannot be controlled by anyone" that seduces. The 'cost' of that in performance becomes a nagging second concern. It gives people a feeling of safety if no other party, not their bank nor family nor employer nor anyone can alter their data, their transactions (whatever the kind, financial is but one use).

Whether blockchain is the only way to achieve that is another matter, but (afaik?) so far it's the only working implementation of the concept of perfectly secured data. I think that's what drove people nuts. I also think Bitcoin or currency in general is but one use case and a very impractical one in the current financial environment, i.e. Earth circa 2019. I'd wager there are much better avenues to explore, eminently non-financial in nature, such as peer-to-peer 'free' communication, or formal (law, contracts) codification (anything official and 'forever' until 'revoked'). No coin, no market, no whatever but the benefits of a slow but 100% truthful database, for small data (text fits quite well).

<comment><USER4> > but your final paragraph seems to imply the formalism isn't key to end > quality?

That's not what I said. I said that merely creating a verified formal specification of a language is not in itself a good path to increasing correctness, and I wouldn't focus on that as a significant cause for concern given all others. But even when you use formal methods in the development of your software -- and I'm certainly a proponent -- there are many formal methods with widely different guarantees and costs, and some of them don't require a formal specification of the programming language. Moreover, no system can be 100% error free, regardless of verification method used. Systems rely on hardware whose actual behavior can never be "proven" correct, and, at best, only probabilistically matches the spec.

I personally believe that some formal methods can greatly improve correctness, and do so affordably, but the question of which formal methods are worthwhile when and by how much each of them improves correctness is very much an open question.

> it's the only working implementation of the concept of perfectly secured > data.

I strongly disagree. There is no such thing as "perfectly secure." Security is defined with respect to certain threats (e.g. a hazmat suit can protect you from poisonous gas but gives you no defense from bullets, whereas a bullet- proof vest is the opposite), and blockchain is rarely the most secure with respect to the most relevant threats in a monetary system.

<comment><USER6> > Security is defined with respect to certain threats, and blockchain is > rarely the most secure with respect to the threats in a monetary system.

Wow, this is a great way to frame this! What do you see as the largest threats to the effective operation of a monetary system?

<comment><USER4> I think this question is best answered by economists, and I'm certainly not one. But blockchain does seem to interfere with some of the best regulatory defenses against economic disasters.

<comment><USER7> Blockchain gives the impression that the primary threat it is designed to defend against, is a government deciding (like Germany between world wars) to inflate their currency for whatever reason. So, not surprisingly, in order to defend a currency against being decreased in value by a central authority, it is vulnerable to all of the threats that a central monetary authority might help you with.

Which of these threats you think is the more salient is, of course, a matter on which people may disagree. I personally find the risk of a central monetary authority devaluing my money, to be not one of my top concerns, but I could understand why others might think differently (especially if they were in a different country, that used a different currency).

<comment><USER8> Right, here in Argentina our currency has lost more than half its value this year, and the US dollar has lost 96% of its value since the end of the gold standard in 1973. I carry a Zimbabwe 100 trillion dollar bill in my wallet to remind people what real hyperinflation is.

I don't think that's the main threat Bitcoin is designed to defend against, though; I think there's a whole spectrum of confiscation threats, ranging from thieves tunneling into bank vaults (I know a woman here who lost her savings that way), to immigration authorities confiscating jewelry, to pirates, to trumped-up "money laundering" charges. And of course if we're mentioning Germany and World Wars, we must not forget the confiscation of Holocaust victims' entire possessions, including jewelry and fillings after the gas chambers. Bitcoin can't make genocide impossible but maybe at least it can make it unprofitable.

<comment><USER9> > the US dollar has lost 96% of its value since the end of the gold standard > in 1973

It is more like 80-85%, not 96%. $1 in 1972 is $6-$6.5 in 2019. A 96% loss of value would mean $1 in 1972 is more like $25 in 2019, which is not the case.

Also to phrase it in context you should probably say "the US dollar has had an average annual inflation rate of 4% per year over the last 5 decades". Also for additional context you should point out that bonds slightly exceeded, and that $1 of stock in 1972 in the US market became ~$104 in 2019.

Context matters a lot here.

<comment><USER8> It depends on which particular data series you use for deflation. There are definitely things for which US$1 in 1972 is more like US$25 in 2019, such as gold and energy. To take one example among many, oil cost US$3 per barrel at the beginning of 1973, and despite the fracking boom in the US, it costs US$63 today, 21× as much. And, as you yourself point out, you need over US$100 today to buy shares of stock that cost US$1 in 1972. (And there are other things which are cheap in 2019 that were unavailable at any price in 1972, and vice versa; and there are borderline cases like videotape recorders and microcontrollers, on one hand; and 1963 Buicks, ivory, old-growth redwood lumber, and quaaludes, on the other.)

I agree that "an average annual inflation rate of 7.1%" (or, using your US$6 number, 3.9%) sounds much milder than "lost 96% of its value since 1973" (or 83%). Where I differ is on whether the milder presentation or the more dramatic presentation is more informative. I think that, except to financial traders, "3.9%" or even "7.1%" is a misleadingly insignificant number.

Consider that throughout the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s, there were families that lived on the interest income from government bonds, both in the US and in England. Even throughout the 20th century, people would buy "savings bonds" as presents for children or as a means to save up for college or retirement; the bonds would reach maturity decades in the future, providing a healthy reward for the prudent and patriotic purchase. Since the end of Bretton Woods, that 3.9% or 7.1% has made nonsense of such ideas. Despite what you might think, this hasn't eliminated plutocracy or increased social mobility — rather the opposite has happened in the post-Bretton-Woods years, in fact. I think it's hard to obtain the historical perspective necessary to appreciate the importance of this radical experiment. But it is, I assure you, a worthwhile effort. I recommend it.

Perhaps inflationary monetary policy is a necessary instrument for avoiding financial panics; it's a plausible idea. But the evidence against it — particularly the 1970s stagflation in the US — suggests that, though plausible, it isn't such a clearly open-and-shut conclusion that we should deny everyone access to alternative, non-inflationary currencies. Moreover, in most scenarios, attempting to institute such a policy would only deny such access to everyone but the well-connected and influential.

<comment><USER9> Certain things outpace inflation, yes. Certain things are drastically cheaper. That's why we use an inflation measure that's sort of an aggregate, not pinned to one or two commodities. You don't spend 100% of your money on oil and gold.

Oil now is 3x more expensive even after a more average inflation of ~4% compared to the bottom of 1973 (though in the mid 90s it wasn't so bad). Energy as a whole though, is not 3x more expensive. Petrol is only about a third of energy consumption. Consumer electricity prices for instance are relatively constant from the 70s through now. Slight increase in the 80s, slight decrease in the 00s, but within say <5% of prices.

I'm not making assertions about the change to bond markets (which I agree are historically fascinating, and will continue to be so in the future too).

<comment><USER8> There isn't an objectively correct basket of goods that is obviously the correct deflator to use, which seems to be a significant underlying assumption of your line of reasoning. The debate about which ones are the important ones to include in statistics like the US BLS CPI is a politically charged debate resolved in part by political means, not purely by the disinterested pursuit of truth. The CPI in particular eminently susceptible to drift over the years, since the goods in it change over time according to the Consumer Expenditure Survey — in 1973 people in the US were buying washing machines that are still in use today and Saran Wrap made of actual Saran, for example, and today they're buying washing machines that wear out in five years and Saran-free Saran Wrap. And of course it measures the prices of only mass-market consumer goods, not services (such as the essentials, child care and elder care) or custom or unique goods such as hand-tailored suits or buildings — a political decision, not an objective one.

If we want to be skeptical of carefully tailored metrics with thousands of parameters produced by political appointees, what standard should we use to measure the value of the dollar? Precious metals have been the standard against which currencies have been measured for several thousand years — the _gold standard_ for measuring the value of currencies, you could say — and by that standard the dollar's loss of value since 1973 is about a factor of 25. This compares to about a factor of 2 over the previous 40 years, since 1933, and a factor of about 1.1 over the previous 140 or so years since the dollar was introduced.

I suspect that if you compare other goods which are, like gold and crude oil, verifiably produced to the same standard of quality in 1973 and today, you will find a similar factor of 16–32 in their dollar prices. I'm thinking of the most common grades of steel, aluminum, brass, portland cement, window glass, industrial electric motors, and so on. There will definitely be some exceptions — ±1% resistors are _much_ cheaper now, to the point where you can't even get the ±20% kind that were the norm in 1973, and I imagine the same is true of specialty steels, synthetic sapphire, and a number of other things that were barely feasible at the time; and presumably photographic film has become more expensive, as it has ceased to be a mass-market item. If you're right about the cost of electricity "staying the same" — by which I assume you mean that, in the US, it increases in line with the BLS CPI? — this suggests that my hypothesis _won 't_ be true of _coal_. Do you have any other ideas?

Let's take anthracite, because it's the purest grade of coal, so it should be less vulnerable to variation in value from drift in grading standards. [https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/showtext.php?t=p...](https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/showtext.php?t=ptb0709) suggests that nominal anthracite coal prices have risen from US$13.65 per short ton in 1973 to US$70.99 in 2011; [https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/prices-and- outlook....](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/prices-and-outlook.php) says that in 2017 they were US$93.17 per short ton, FOB the mine. That's a factor of 6.8, which is a lot closer to 6 than to 25.

<comment><USER9> > If you're right about the cost of electricity "staying the same" — by which > I assume you mean that, in the US, it increases in line with the BLS CPI?

Yes I meant real price, not nominal.

US electricity is somewhere around a third from coal.

I would be interested in a study showing a 15-30x increase in similar-quality construction materials.

The fixation on gold makes no sense to me. It's just a commodity, not a super useful one either. Gold's price floats wildly based on people's fears. It's not like everything became 4x more expensive between 2000 and 2015.

<comment><USER8> > Yes I meant real price, not nominal.

We were debating precisely which data series is best for computing the "real price" from the nominal prices. But it seems you take me for a fool and beg the question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't disagree with the article per se, but I think many technologists are missing the forest for the trees when it comes to the motivations here. Or perhaps they're being charitable and are evaluating Libra on purely on its stated motivations rather than the ulterior motive that Libra can't name out loud. For example, take this quote:

"The possibility that a Libra node run by Mastercard or Andressen Horrowitz would suddenly start running malicious code is such a bizarre scenario to plan for and is better solved by simply enforcing protocol integrity and through non-technical (i.e. legal) means."

It goes without saying that Libra isn't concerned about any sort of security event at Mastercard or a16z. The purpose here is simply to evade and arbitrage different regulatory regimes. The plan is to build a ledger that no single party (or coalition of parties in a single legal jurisdiction) has the capacity to edit or alter, and to make such alterations so technically challenging that it's beyond the capacity of any single court or legislature to do so. Once this chain is up and running, it becomes a "fact of nature" that courts and policymakers will simply have to deal with.

It's a brilliant strategy from that perspective. It's going to be alternately fascinating and horrifying to see if it works.

<comment><USER11> > The plan is to build a ledger that no single party (or coalition of parties > in a single legal jurisdiction) has the capacity to edit or alter, and to > make such alterations so technically challenging that it's beyond the > capacity of any single court or legislature to do so.

I'm not seeing why they need a new cryptocurrency for this. If you grow Bitcoin (or any other existing cryptocurrency) to be "too big to fail", it would also have all these properties. Is starting from scratch with zero users easier?

<comment><USER12> I think the idea is to have a US-controlled currency before some chinese- controlled currency catches on , particularly in Africa

<comment><USER13> If the US supported cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin, instead of considering regulation, we could keep up with innovation at least, instead of having other countries leave us in the dust in terms of developing the technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Libra has no capacity for consumer protection mechanisms.

You can replace Libra quote above with your favorite cryptocurrency and that pretty much sums up what I feel on the crypto space.

<comment><USER15> What are you talking about? Fiat currency isn't reprogrammable--how would you implement a consumer protection mechanism on it?

Pick your favorite consumer protection mechanism, and I'll pick my favorite cryptocurrency and let's compare:

A) the up front implemention cost of the protection mechanism in fiat currency

B) the up front implemention cost of the protection mechanism in the crypto

C) the year-over-year cost in fiat

D) the year over year cost in crypto

I bet A and C are going to be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, while B is going to be in the tens of millions and D is going to be in the thousands of dollars.

Here's an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about:

[https://www.ccn.com/cardano-to-help-ethiopia-grow-coffee- usi...](https://www.ccn.com/cardano-to-help-ethiopia-grow-coffee-using- blockchain-tech/)

Consider the recent news regarding contaminated black market vape cartridges-- that's going to be insanely expensive to fix, because there's nothing about high schoolers passing around dollars after school that gives those students any insight into the supply chain of the cartridges they're buying. But if some vape company did with their supply chain what Cardano is trying to do with coffee, they could provide consumers (and authorities) a way to trace their products back to their origins, a capability that already would have saved several lives.

It's not surprising that Libra is a dumpster fire, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

<comment><USER16> You've made some assumptions here about the impact of a verified supply chain for vape cartridges, and it sounds like you're proposing a solution to a non- existent problem.

A reputable supplier of vape cartridges gains nothing from having a verified supply chain - people trust them anyway and they maintain a supply of good cartridges to protect that reputation.

A non-reputable supplier of vape cartridges doesn't care, and only sells to people who don't care what they're buying. Their lack of good reputation doesn't matter, and their lack of a verifiable supply chain won't matter either.

If the customer wants a dodgy black market vape cartridge, that's what they'll buy. If they want a quality one from a reputable source, they can already do this.

<comment><USER15> That's a fair point. But I mentioned high schoolers in my example because they can't buy from a reputable source since they're not old enough (not that I think they should be vaping at all, but supply and demand...).

But still, the perpetrators here are not technically capable of pulling off a convincing forgery, so if the kids were sensitive to this issue in the first place then I guess there would indeed be no reason to insert a blockchain into the situation.

So let's take a scenario where the middle men are indeed capable of convincing forgeries: sneakers. Cardano is working on a supply chain integration there too:

[https://beincrypto.com/new-balance-to-use-cardano- technology...](https://beincrypto.com/new-balance-to-use-cardano-technology- to-fight-counterfeits/amp/)

And my wife's students (she's a teacher) are really into their sneakers. They're also largely unaware that chain/web of trust type measures exist at all for validation of product authenticity--but if Nike started doing this, they'd become experts overnight. And then, after school, when offered a sketchy vape product, they might think twice.

Maybe that's a weak argument too. Still, I like the ability to use the same channels you money would flow through to determine if your upcoming purchase came from where you think it did, and I think that that's a capability that's going to be hard for fiat currency to mimic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This post is nonsense. 1) FB claims they want to eventually make it a public network. Therefore, they'll need BFT sooner or later. 2) No blockchain can match a centralized system (WeChat, Visa, et al). 3) Very few languages have a formal semantics written in Coq. 4) So what if the crypto lib has additional functions? Algorand has VRF code in their repo. Is the whole project doomed now? And it would take a huge effort to verify a crypto lib ala Everest. Even cryptographers don't do it. 5) In the US many banks are in a consortium called Zelle which allows retail customers to send money around. It has finality; can't be reversed.

I don't give 2 shits about Libra. Gov'ts will clobber it anyway. But these criticisms are mostly "why didn't Libra do the latest bleeding edge researchy thing that no-one else does?" Because they had to ship this century, that's why.

</comment><comment><USER18> > It is a pivot from a company whose advertising business is so embroiled in > scandal and corruption that it has no choice but to try to diversify into > payments and credit scoring to survive.

It's amazing to me that nearly every single expert that weighs in on this topic completely misses the intention behind Libra. Facebook wants to make money off of it's massive user gains in the developing world (like hundreds of millions of users massive), but many of those people don't have digital money right now. Libra wants to be their digital money so Facebook can sell more expensive ads.

It's really as simple as that. Move on from the "why" and talk about the rest of it which is the actually problematic part.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm confused about this article. I've read it, and it's skeptical of libra (which is fine) but makes handwavy and non concrete arguments about it's soundness. Can anyone tell me why it's so popular, besides just bashing Facebook?

<comment><USER20> It's bashing both Facebook AND blockchains using handwavy faux-intellectual arguments, and is thus in the exact sweet spot of Hacker News upvotability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been thinking and it actually makes a lot of sense for new ways to be created to transfer money and pay for things (though I'm highly skeptical of having it operated by Facebook and of the ad-hoc pump-and-dump-prone and whitewashing-and-tax-avoidance-friendly properties of cryptocurrencies). But when you think about it, it's insane that transferring money is something credit cards and payment processors can regularly charge a fee of 1.5-3.0% on. In order to change some numbers in a couple databases... The marginal cost of this ought to be less than pennies. The only reason they can even partially justify this is because of fraud and credit, and the costs associated with dealing with that. But what if we had a way to transfer money between entities that mandated two factor authentication to prevent fraud, and sidestepped the whole credit thing by only working if you had the money? (or required that you took the loan elsewhere, so the account that actually transfers the money does not have to deal with credit at all). Verify that the person is who they claim to be, and that they have the money needed, then do the transaction - no more, no less. No chargebacks, no credit checks, no fraud checks. Why isn't this a thing?

<comment><USER22> The actual cost of processing payment is far less than 1.5-3% - <USER2> with debit cards (which actually implement most of what you think "is not a thing") but even when dealing with credit cards and the necessity to include some overhead for countering card fraud and chargeback costs and whatnot, the total cost is far lower, below 1%.

How can I know this? Well, how do all these credit cards that offer cashback bonuses in the realm of typically 1-2% make this unbelievable feat of paying you for paying stuff happen? They pay for it out of the 2-3% that they get for the transaction. Let's take 2.5% as a middle ground and deduce 2% cashback, that leaves us with 0.5% from which the actual costs of doing the payment have to be covered - and the profits to be paid to shareholders, of course.

Also, Europe has this nice regulation in place limiting credit and debit card interchange fees to 0.3% for credit and 0.2% for debit cards. This regulation has been in effect for a few years already, and the only thing that disappeared were these 2%-cashback-on-every-payment cards (or similar offerings, like granting airplane miles of about the same value). Debit and credit card issuers seem to be entirely able to operate under these conditions, which means that their actual costs of doing business must be under these fractions of a percent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> >The possibility that a Libra node run by Mastercard or Andressen Horrowitz would suddenly start running malicious code is such a bizarre scenario to plan for and is better solved by simply enforcing protocol integrity and through _non-technical_ (i.e. _legal_ ) means.

Refusing to rely on _legal_ means of enforcement suggests the project views itself supreme over all national policies, laws and regulations. On the one hand, such a concept is usually the domain of autocrats, despots, and organized crime-- odd for a tech startup. On the _other_ hand, it would suggest a system more secure from outside legal interference than, say, MasterCard. This detail tends to add a datapoint explaining the lack of support from global ministers of finance....

</comment><comment><USER24> Would like to point that the work done by the curve25519 team is solid, Henry is also behind the ristretto RFC. The reason Facebook used the BFT algorithm is for pure regulatory purposes (they needed a Blockchain therefore a solid consensus algorithm with failure tolerance). The cryptographic constructions used are quite solid unlike OP claims.

<comment><USER25> The article also incorrectly claims that curve25519-dalek has never had security audits. It's had at least two by reputable cryptography auditing firms (Quarkslab and NCC), the former of which is public (the NCC audit was done at the request of my former employer and is private, but like the Quarkslab audit only found minor issues):

[https://blog.quarkslab.com/security-audit-of-dalek- libraries...](https://blog.quarkslab.com/security-audit-of-dalek- libraries.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This post is filled with a large number of factual inaccuracies, so numerous I wrote a blog post in response: [https://tonyarcieri.com/factual-inaccuracies- of-facebook-lib...](https://tonyarcieri.com/factual-inaccuracies-of-facebook- libra-is-architecturally-unsound)

<comment><USER12> You should submit that

<comment><USER25> Someone else already did. You can find it here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest)

<comment><USER26> Direct link to the submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21455739](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21455739)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think the start problem of Libra was to go with the ideas that: 1\. One globally _uniform_ payment system is needed/wanted/makes sense. (It doesn't make sense due to regulation, is not needed, as long as a non uniform system still can make cross area transactions reasonable fast. It is not wanted (by some) as it put consumers at additional risk wrt. data protection and international conflicts). 2\. Blockchain makes sense and "fixes everything", somehow, magically

Sure the current payment systems have a lot of problems. But many come from complicated regulations which makes building such systems harder not incompetent bank IT. I fear a single company can't do to much here. Especially because banking software has to be reliable from the get-to-go.

</comment><comment><USER28> There are many valid criticisms of Libra, even if we restrict our view to the code. This article contains none of them.

However, use of a BFT consensus algorithm, newish crypto libraries, and missing but promised features in an unlaunched product are not reasonable criticisms.

BFT algorithms that scale well (Libra's will, that's one thing Facebook is good at) are great for public financial networks. All large companies end up implementing their own crypto libraries and for some (Google, Facebook) this ends up a net positive for the open source community.

Consumer protection will be there, Facebook is not going to knowingly violate local regulations in such an obvious way.

</comment><comment><USER29> The author seems to have done no actual research beyond skimming the code. E.g., "none of these libraries have had security audits"

When in fact there has been a review, and probably more internal audits that haven't been published: [https://blog.quarkslab.com/security-audit-of-dalek- libraries...](https://blog.quarkslab.com/security-audit-of-dalek- libraries.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> > smart contracts refer to logic deployed on public networks which allows > escrowing, laundering money, and the issuance of extralegal securities and > gambling products

I'm a blockchain skeptic but come on

</comment><comment><USER31> An alternative company which actually seems to do good work w.r.t. safe languages is Alacris/LegiLogic. Though I haven't found the operational semantics of the language there is a public compiler that can be found here: [https://alacrity-lang.org/codeeditor](https://alacrity-lang.org/codeeditor)

</comment><comment><USER32> This ignores the big problems in Facebook's Libra:

1) It charges ECONOMIC RENTS. The ethical asset backed and currency backed stable coin needs to pass profits from revenue generating assets to the currency holder. The member companies should only take a tiny slice of the profits. This is the MASSIVE problem.

2) Libra is designed that ECONOMIC RENTS will be sharecropped and sent to the member companies. This will be the economic incentives for them to force it on their customer base and create incredibly fast adoption. This is a good thing, except it turns evil by the economic rents from #1.

<comment><USER33> I'm no fan of FB or Libra, but I don't get it, how is that any worse than existing system? Banks charge huge interest rents and pass only a tiny (or zero) on to customers, credit cards charge even bigger interest rates _in addition_ to fees that make all our products more expensive, ...

<comment><USER34> Interest rates are lower than at almost any time in history. They're usually strongly linked to default risk, which is why mortgages are about 2% but credit cards in the 10-20% range. But none of that is applicable to cryptocurrency, which doesn't really have a credit infrastructure at all and instead is trying to replicate something closer to negotiable bearer instruments.

Transaction fees are a real thing, but essentially that covers keeping fraud out of the system. In cryptocurrency that's your problem, and many of the "solutions" are riskier and in the end more expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's the profit potential for Facebook here, especially above using an existing cryptocurrency for payments on their platforms?

Having low friction payments on Facebook makes sense, it build value into the platform and Facebook can capture some of that. But can't they do that with an existing cryptocurrency?

It doesn't seem like Facebook will maintain full control of the currency due to the consensus algorithm. There is power and control if Facebook continues to control the fork of the code base that everyone uses, but presumably nodes could choose to switch away from Facebook's fork. So I'm not seeing "control a currency" as a long term benefit.

It makes sense that anyone running a Libra node would make money, but anyone else running a node would make similar profit.

The article mentions that a long term goal could be "act as a data broker and mediate consumers access to credit", although again, doesn't the decentralized nature permit any node from taking those steps? That doesn't seem to uniquely advantage Facebook.

As others mention, once a cryptocurrency is "too big to fail", regulators are locked out. Is Libra really an easier approach to getting a cryptocurrency to that point, versus adopting and accelerating the growth of an existing coin (like Bitcoin)?

Does Facebook just think they can build a better cryptocurrency? I don't doubt that they can hire good engineers, but with all the politics and marketing focus on the code now, development is probably getting stressful and chaotic.

<comment><USER35> > What's the profit potential for Facebook here

In a world where "everyone" uses Libra, they need a FB account to access their wallet, and FB will see every consumer decision at its most valuable - <USER3> point of exchanging money for goods and services. This is immensely valuable for an ad company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> > Not many people who work on financial infrastructure speak publicly about > their work...

This was a bit of a throw away line, but I found it insightful. As someone who isn't in this space, my question is: why is this? Is it contractual, or is that just not part of the space's ethos?

Feels like we need to overcome this some how to achieve progress?

<comment><USER37> Why would you give away any details, when each one of them might end up being a secret that is causing your firm to make millions of dollars?

The financial sector is many things, it's a lubricant of the economy, it is a prediction machine, it's a fascilitator of markets, but not least important it is setup as a game, where every player tries to outsmart the others. Why would you talk about how you are playing and give your opponents a chance to outplay you?

<comment><USER38> I wish superior innovation were more responsible for the bulk of profits. Weighted by volume, in more cases it is simple market power.

(Fun fact: Statistics was invented many times throughout history. Minus the last time, it was always hidden to make someone money.)

Even when you've got awesome secrets, you've still got other parts of the business. Open research moves faster. Libraries of books have been written about investment, or running a business, or writing software, or other profitable things. Granted, some of that comes from people teaching without acting -- but a lot of it too comes from actors with serious skin in the game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > The possibility that a Libra node run by Mastercard or Andressen Horrowitz > would suddenly start running malicious code is such a bizarre scenario to > plan for and is better solved by simply enforcing protocol integrity and > through non-technical (i.e. legal) means.

Hmm, I'm not sure I'm convinced. While "Mastercard as an entity turns into a malicious actor" doesn't seem like an important threat model, it seems to me maybe guarding against mailicious actors within (eg) Mastercard, as well as external attacks on Mastercard is? And justifies this stuff?

The possibliity that a node run by Mastercard would suddenly start running malcicious code doesn't seem that bizarre a scenario to me, if we remember it can happen not just cause the CEO of Mastercard directs it to, but because of criminal activities from hackers as well as employees for their own gain.

Am I wrong?

<comment><USER40> The author didn't say that we should trust MasterCard but he was saying that this trust issue can be solved much more efficiently via the legal system. And in practice the current system already works as billions entrust their financial transactions in these institutions.

Some people have the tendency to think that technology could solve anything and should be allowed to solve everything. This Libra thing is no better than the crypto-currencies.

<comment><USER41> Ok, now what if the legal system is the one trying to get them to run the malicious code?

For example, governments, in the past, have tried to prevent bank transactions from being sent to wiki leaks, even though they were never charged with any crimes.

The credit card transactions failed to go through, but the crypto transactions DID succeed.

Crypto currencies seem to have done a pretty good job so far, of preventing this attack vector.

I can think of no examples where a government has taken over a crypto currency yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I strongly agree with him on transaction privacy, though not for the reasons he lists.

Some issues, however:

1\. His argument against BFT is "legal systems are efficient" (lmao). Also, the whole point of HotStuff (vs. PBFT etc...) is linear O(N) communication complexity outside of cascading proposer failures...

2\. He clearly didn't investigate move bytecode-verifier, which asserts linearity.

3\. Strong disagree on the untested crypto-primitives argument. curve25519-dalek is audited (x2) and written in Rust; simple and minimal; not a bloated, unauditable mess like TLS.

4\. Consumer protection can be built on top via the wallet providers.

</comment><comment><USER43> <Reading through the publications released, it is clear there is a fundamental deception in the stated goal and implementation of the project. Put concisely, this project will not empower anyone. It is a pivot from a company whose advertising business is so embroiled in scandal and corruption that it has no choice but to try to diversify into payments and credit scoring to survive. The clear long term goal is to act as a data broker and mediate consumers access to credit based on their private social media data. This is such an utterly terrifying and dystopian story that should cause more alarm than it does.>

<The overhead from the consensus algorithm serves no purpose and will only limit throughput of the whole system, and appears to be there here no reason other than apparently cargo culting public blockchain technology which is not designed for this use case.>

<Libra has no transaction privacy>

<The system is designed to be a very large way of replicating transactions to a number of external parties who under existing European and US bank secrecy laws should not be privy to the economic details.>

<Libra HotStuff BFT is not capable of achieving the throughput necessary for a payment rail.>

<Libra's Move language is not sound.>

<Libra's cryptography engineering is unsound.>

<Libra has no capacity for consumer protection mechanisms.>

<comment><USER44> > " It is a pivot from a company whose advertising business is so embroiled in > scandal and corruption that it has no choice but to try to diversify into > payments and credit scoring to survive. The clear long term goal is to act > as a data broker and mediate consumers access to credit based on their > private social media data. This is such an utterly terrifying and dystopian > story that should cause more alarm than it does."

^ This. The rest is moot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Facebook and a variation of "libre" in the same sentence makes so little sense to me that by definition I would refuse to use this product if it would ever reach market. Companies which main purpose is aggregation and selling of data to advertisers should simply not be trusted with financial transactions because in the end, this data will be used to make your financial transactions greater and more tailored to the advertiser paying the most for your data.

</comment><comment><USER46> _> For a system that is designed to be run in a consortia of highly regulated multinational corporates, all running Facebook signed code and access controlled by Facebook it simply makes no sense to deal with malicious actors at the consensus level. Why is this system designed to be byzantine tolerant at all rather than just maintaining a consistent audit log for compliance checks. The possibility that a Libra node run by Mastercard or Andressen Horrowitz would suddenly start running malicious code is such a bizarre scenario to plan for and is better solved by simply enforcing protocol integrity and through non-technical (i.e. legal) means._

BFT is still useful in that scenario as part of a defense-in-depth against compromise of some of the validators/nodes, yes even ones run by Mastercard or A16Z.

It's certainly more difficult for that to happen in these settings, but given the state of the world with nation states rampantly hacking each other in any way they can of varying levels of sophistication, from social engineering to stealing user databases to stuxnet, having an extra layer defenses against that in a global currency is not superflous.

And that's what Libra is, a global currency, not a mere payment system.

</comment><comment><USER47> I am always amazed at the concept that blockchain is private at any level. The architecture is built specifically to share transactional data. It is useful for creating a digital entity that is unique and can be treated as currency, but the shared transactional nature is a huge, huge privacy flaw, as far as I understand blockchain (at least Bitcoin). Please correct me if I am wrong about the public nature of transactions - I haven't seen anything discussing the encryption of transactions but I am by no means an expert on this.

So assuming the transactions are accessible to anyone (and even encrypted is somewhat worrisome), what are the implications? Well, for a while Whole Foods was accepting payment by Bitcoin. That means if you know Whole Foods' Bitcoin account number you could simply look up all transactions to Whole Foods to see how much money they were making through Bitcoin, how many unique accounts paid them as well was when and how much. Does every business want their detailed transaction history to be public?

And on a personal level, I remember when Netflix released anonymized data of movie ratings with ratings and date stamps. From this alone, some people were identified by looking at other personalizing data: [https://www.wired.com/2007/12/why-anonymous-data- sometimes-i...](https://www.wired.com/2007/12/why-anonymous-data-sometimes- isnt/)

All it would take is one data harvesting company to pair your account to your transactions and then could track everything you do through it. I really hope this isn't how all of this works... and even if there are protections to prevent this, it seems like a viable attack vector to consider for any blockchain technology.

<comment><USER48> > Well, for a while Whole Foods was accepting payment by Bitcoin. That means > if you know Whole Foods' Bitcoin account number...

They wouldn't have just one "account number". Standard practice is to use a different address for each transaction, both for privacy and for increased security. (An attacker only has the public key hash to work from for any unspent transactions, not the full public key.) Now, these funds would probably be consolidated into a smaller number of holding accounts, and you might be able to deduce some other likely payments to Whole Foods by looking at which inputs were combined together in later transactions, but obtaining their complete ledger is nowhere near as simple as looking at one payment to Whole Foods and finding all the other transactions involving the same address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wouldn't worry as much about Libra's byzantine tolerance architecture. Sure it is O(n^2) now, but it can be replaced. That can be optimized away, if the economics cause companies to push it into the market and make it have mass adoption.

Bitcoin, Ethereum and EOS have optimized away the exponential problem of O(n^2) byzantine tolerance. I'd be careful that that is just a short-term artifact of getting an early version running.

</comment><comment><USER49> I have only studied Move by reading the whitepaper, but there's a gaping architectural hole that I found in five minutes:

        public withdraw_from_sender(amount:u64): Coin {
           let transaction_sender_address: address = GetTxnSenderAddress();
           ...
        }

Checking the global txn sender address is not a sound way to authorize a transaction in a smart contract language. Consider that a buggy or malicious function in a different smart contract could call withdraw(). Linear type theory might prevent the resulting stolen coins from being _duplicated_ , but they're still stolen.

I don't know if there is a clean theoretically sound way to do this, but here's an idea based on linear types:

The main function in a transaction is given a Sender object as one of its arguments. The Sender has a method that generates an assertion (an object) that the transaction intends to perform a specific action, e.g. withdraw 10 coins of type A. The withdraw() function takes an assertion as a parameter and calls a method that _consumes_ the assertion before withdrawing the coins.

<comment><USER50> It sounds like what you're describing is passing a capability to withdraw balance (which is implicitly captured in an erc20's internal state via `approve` [0]). Of course, cap handling is probably a bit unwieldy for a snippet in a whitepaper, so they're likely making the assumption of "don't call untrusted code." I don't see a construction for sender delegation, so at least it reduces the TCB to the immediate callee.

[0] [https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-20](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-20)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Typical blockchain and Libra hatchet job, except this time under the veneer of someone with software skills. I will make some counterpoints.

> _Byzantine fault tolerance is a fairly niche area of distributed systems > research that concerns the ability of a networked system to endure arbitrary > failures of its components while taking corrective actions critical to the > system's operation. Networks that are byzantine tolerant must resist several > types of attacks including restarts, crashes, malicious payloads, and > malicious voting in leader elections. This design decision is central to > Libra and it makes zero sense._

BFT consensus is standard in blockchain. Libra is building a protocol and reference implementation but anyone can build their own implementation, just as Bitcoin and Ethereum have several clients written independently as separate open source projects. As Facebook intends to be just one member of the Libra consortium, and anyone (member or not) can write software to the protocol spec, BFT is the logical choice.

If Libra was trying to be a centralized entity owned by Facebook, then BFT consensus would make no sense. But it's not - Libra is supposed to be a decentralized blockchain payment system, similar to Bitcoin, so BFT is the logical (and standard!) choice.

> _Libra has no transaction privacy. By the admission of the whitepaper the > system is designed to be pseudonymous meaning the addresses used at the > protocol are derived from elliptic curve public keys and contain no metadata > about the accounts._

This means the same level of anonymity as provided by Bitcoin. Post- transaction analysis may identify the owners of keys by cross-referencing known addresses, but onchain it is unknown. Again, very standard in blockchain. There are various techniques to improve privacy, such as how SiaCoin generates new addresses for every transaction by default, but again I want to emphasize that the shrill language used by the author is coming from someone who doesn't understand the technology. I agree with him that Facebook could (and probably will) improve on Bitcoin's pseudo-anonymity, but claiming outright that this is some sort of grand oversight is just plain wrong.

> _Libra HotStuff BFT is not capable of achieving the throughput necessary for > a payment rail... There is no technical reason that cross border payments > could also not settle instantly, except for the differences in rules and > requirements across the jurisdictions involved._

This is more about the philosophy of our payments infrastructure. Let's assume Facebook solves scaling, which is a problem many blockchains have solved (or are solving) in various ways. For example, Bitcoin's lightning network moves small transactions off-chain to settle later in one transaction that batches them. I'm not saying that's a good solution, either for Bitcoin or for Libra, I'm just saying the scaling problem can be solved even if the consensus algorithm is limiting.

On the question of "why use blockchain for payments at all", this is more philosophical. You have monopoly-controlled payment systems that tightly control who can integrate with them and improvements to the core level take years / decades (see ACH in the USA). Blockchain is one major way that software is eating finance - companies and individuals will be able to hack away at the system and build novel innovations with much less friction. Whether you think this is a good thing is a matter of philosophy.

> _Libra's Move language is not sound... In the public blockchains, smart > contracts refer to logic deployed on public networks which allows escrowing, > laundering money, and the issuance of extralegal securities and gambling > products. These are typically done in a shockingly badly designed language > called Solidity, which from an academic PL perspective, makes PHP look like > a work of genius._

Clearly biased, Solidity has its warts but it is successfully being used for billions of dollars in real-world transactions per day. The author is something of a compiler hacker according to his Github so I assume he feels qualified and passionate to speak on this. But Move has not been battle-tested yet so I would at least let it get finished and deployed before claiming it's dead-on-arrival.

> _Libra's cryptography engineering is unsound._

Facebook, like many other companies, can pay for audits and formal verification of crypto libraries. As Libra will not be production-ready for years (it isn't live today!), I think we can give Facebook the benefit of the doubt on this. They are a massive company with near-limitless resources.

I want to conclude by saying that blockchain and cryptocurrency are knee-jerk hated by Hacker News, and have been so for years. You typically won't find positive (or even neutral) opinions on it, nor casual HN comments discussing the minutiae of the underlying tech the way you would for (say) Rust.

People who are deep into this scene are posting on other websites that aren't as negative on the subject. There are indeed highly technical and competent people who work in this space. However it remains quite niche given its outsized mindshare in society. I encourage people to keep an open mind, there are very interesting problems to be solved if you can avoid the overwhelming criticism.

<comment><USER52> What are some good websites for discussing technical aspects of blockchain?

<comment><USER53> Check out Andreas Antonopoulos

[https://aantonop.com/books/](https://aantonop.com/books/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Genuine question: how do I share code with other parties in the industry?

Suppose that I'm working in the insurance industry and I want my company A to share the ownership of some code (and its execution) with company B. It's a redundant piece of code that would otherwise be implemented in both companies internally.

We may share a repository. That's simple and clear. But who is going to run this code? How do I know that the code running is the one shown in the shared repository?

When I see things like Hyperledger Fabric, I see a possible solution to this problem (although I don't know about the downsides of Fabric). I can ensure that, given the same inputs, all parties will produce the same outputs. This seems like a fair use for a permissioned blockchain and smart contracts.

But what else is out there? How would you approach this problem?

</comment><comment><USER55> Aside from perhaps lack of developers / competency, I wonder why central banks don't issue digital currencies themselves?

Mark Carney (current Bank of England governor) has been warming up to the idea - [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/20/mark- carney...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/20/mark-carney-bank- of-england-lend-digital-business-sme-cryptocurrency)

Not sure if that because he is setting himself up for a new job at Libra after his BoE gig finishes in 2 months, or is there merit to the idea and appetite from central bankers?

<comment><USER56> > Aside from the perhaps lack of developers / competency, I wonder why central > banks don't issue digital currencies themselves?

Why would they though ? I can transfer money worldwide in a few hours for very little fees already. Normal currencies are good for 99.99% of use cases. Aren't most currencies already mostly digital, they're literally integers in databases around the world, most of it isn't backed by any physical currency.

Facebook wants its own currency because it would allow granular tracking and profiling like never before. What would banks gain from it ?

<comment><USER55> I can think of a few reasons

1) Geopolitical - if there was a widely accepted, regulated global currency that is relatively non-volatile, pegged on a basket of assets, I think many countries would gladly do cross-border trade in that rather than USD. I don't think Libra will be it, because it's perceived as being Facebook coin. But an effort from central banks could be it.

2) mainstream programmable money doesn't really exist, neither do microtransactions, or access to the financial system for many of the world's poor

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> This whole article sounded like he started with a conclusion and then found reasons to support it. It doesn't look objective. I am no supporter of Libra but increasingly media and influencers are about starting with a belief/conclusion based on their bias and then finding proofs for it. Perhaps that's how any human mind works!?

</comment><comment><USER58> For the TLDR crowd, here are some juicy quotes:

> The possibility that a Libra node run by Mastercard or Andressen Horrowitz > would suddenly start running malicious code is such a bizarre scenario to > plan for and is better solved by simply enforcing protocol integrity and > through non-technical (i.e. legal) means.

> The overhead from the consensus algorithm serves no purpose and will only > limit throughput of the whole system, and appears to be there here no reason > other than apparently cargo culting public blockchain technology which is > not designed for this use case.

> ... the model as proposed is hundreds of person-years away from being able > to handle global transaction throughput and would likely have to be > completely redesigned from first principles.

> Enterprise software consultants generally thrive on ambiguity and smart > contracts are the apotheosis of enterprise obscurantism because they can be > defined to mean literally anything.

> It should be assumed this entire crypto stack is vulnerable to a variety of > attacks until proven otherwise. The "move fast and break things" model > should not apply to cryptographic tools handling consumer financial data.

> The final conclusion one must take away after doing technical due diligence > on this project is this simply that it would not pass muster in any > respected journal on distributed systems research or financial engineering. > Before trying to disrupt global monetary policy there is a massive amount of > a technical work needed to build a reliable network the public and > regulators could trust to securely handle user data.

> I see no reason to believe that Facebook has done the technical work needed > to overcome these technical issues in their project, not does it have any > technical advantage over existing infrastructure that already works. > Claiming one's company needs regulatory flexibility to explore innovation is > not an excuse for not doing it in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER59> > The overhead from the consensus algorithm serves no purpose and will only > limit throughput of the whole system, and appears to be there here no reason > other than apparently cargo culting public blockchain technology which is > not designed for this use case.

I may be behind on Libra news, but my understanding was that the permissioned blockchain governance model would only exist during the bootstrapping phase to launch Libra and would eventually evolve into a public blockchain once it reaches some arbitrary point of stability. If that is still the case, then wouldn't Byzantine fault tolerance be required from the get-go, assuming Facebook wants to avoid a hard fork of Libra?

</comment><comment><USER60> Crypto in general still have a ton of security flaws. To call out a specific currency is silly. Lets acknowledge that there is still tons of security to fix with crypto in general.

</comment><comment><USER61> When you make a oversea money transaction the banks take up to 20%. For every electronic transaction a bunch of middle-men takes a percentage. Maybe there need to be a payout for those that keep the system running? Like in Bitcoin mining ... But the thing is, transactions can be highly automated, with almost zero marginal cost (the cost of making yet a transaction when you already process millions per second). So the transaction fees for the middle-men is almost pure profit after a certain level. So there will be efforts to make sure any joint solution fails.

<comment><USER35> > When you make a oversea money transaction the banks take up to 20%.

You need to comparison-shop the price of remittance: [https://www.saveonsend.com/blog/welcome/#more-1](https://www.saveonsend.com/blog/welcome/#more-1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> The author correctly states that BFT algorithms are meant to handle arbitrary failures, but then explains how that is the wrong choice because one shouldn't handle malicious actors at the consensus level. Yet there are categories of faults that cannot be handled by basic FT systems, that BFT systems can handle, and are not due to malice. So all in all, BFT _is_ the right choice.

</comment><comment><USER63> There have been a lot of posts and responses about Libra. The core of it is that FB wants to be an _unregulated_ bank. That is all this whole thing is about. Given the current (and post 2020 political realities?), it is no wonder all the established payment companies tapped out. This effort will be delayed until their is a government structure willing to look the other way. It will also be really interesting to see how this gets rolled out against GDPR and other European laws.

<comment><USER64> As time goes on, it's increasingly looking likely that it won't be rolled out in Europe[0].

> "Libra is not welcome on European soil," French Economy Minister Bruno Le > Maire told reporters the sidelines of the annual meetings of the World Bank > and International Monetary Fund

> "Do we want to put monetary policy in the hands of a private company like > Facebook? My answer is clearly no," he said

[0]: [https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti- stories/paris-...](https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti- stories/paris-rome-berlin-preparing-to-block-facebook-s-libra-in-europe- french-minister-119101801388_1.html)

<comment><USER5> Worth noting however that Facebook could register some entity as a bank and operate the Libra service from there (even sharing offices with Fb, that's not illegal afaik).

They would fall under all possible kinds and manners of banking regulation, but it's viable; many companies originally outside of the fin sector are offering financial services now (notably Orange, the French leading and historical ISP, formerly a state-owned public company).

This would likely result in some tiny fee when crossing in/out of the traditional banking sector (from/to Libra and some regular account or merchant paying system), and maybe when entering/leaving Europe, but would remain largely free for Libra transactions _within_ the EU.

Which, as I see it, is the purpose of said regulation: to protect EU citizens (account insurance up to €100K, rights to certain features like free inter- bank transfers within the EU, etc). Libra unregulated would basically fall to Facebook's unilateral rules for protection and features, and that just isn't acceptable to the EU.

<comment><USER65> So far as I can tell, (a) Calibra will be a "custodial wallet", i.e. it'll hold the Libra tokens and present to the user a bit like PayPal; (b) they're talking up a Libra-per-currency, rather than the synthetic basket; (c) they're actively at work developing Calibra, in some sense.

To me, it's increasingly looking like they're heading for Calibra as PayPal- but-it's-Facebook. This is a more sane and comprehensible business idea, at least.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, and thanks for the info. Makes sense, definitely.

Basically just a layer of abstraction like in-game currency in virtual worlds, only this one has some 2.2b 'players' so the in-world PayPal is one hell of an easy way to transfer money?

That's much less sexy from a technological and social standpoint, but it might just be the simplest way to both reach a solution and seduce just enough blockchain lovers for the 'buzz' (best fueled by Controvery®).

When you think about it, people use items as secondary currency to exchange real-world money since forever and a day. E.g casino chips (physical), in-game assets ("virtual" but really we just mean software i.e. codified text, like we'd write score cards in tabletop RPG, or... computer punched cards). Colibra, fundamentally, would be just that...

So much ado about nothing if it turns out to be such a custodial abstraction. Now I expect Colibra lootboxes and gift shops in WhatsApp and Instagram! — once you've seen people spend hundreds on pixels in games, cosmetic shaders to embellish their avatar, you know there's no limit to human commerce. Probably Facebook's endgame with Libra if you ask me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> The article is so confused about the underlying reasons for choosing a decentralized (among Libra members) ledger that it boggles the mind.

It's a legal move. Not a technical one.

Regarding privacy — it seemed obvious to me that privacy solutions for Libra would be build on top of Libra (the so-called "Layer 2") and not within the core protocol.

Stephen's critique here is bizarre and lacks context.

</comment><comment><USER67> As soon as blockchain is even mentioned on HN, everyone loses their freaking minds. For some people that tout themselves as intellectuals, they just seem to parrot that 'blockchains are useless' without even taking a cursory look into the technology. It seems to me that a lot of people here fall into the category of ultracrepidarianism.

<comment><USER68> Or maybe after much research and some testing they conclude (correctly) that "blockchain is useless."

<comment><USER67> If that were true, then they would come to a different conclusion. There are several examples of useful applications that are live today that would be otherwise impossible without a public programmable blockchain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Bitcoin launched with crypto that was replaced later. Yes, the algorithm, key length and similar things need to be right at the start (or back compat is harder). But the cypher and cryptography library implementation can be wholesale replaced, without a problem. Just as you pointed out, Microsoft did with a new TLS library.

</comment><comment><USER32> Not being able to reserve payments is a FEATURE and not a BUG. That inherintly breaks a currency that is fast and removed of human transaction approvals. My thesis is that refunds will need to operate at a business level at a higher level. Their KYC and AML can be effective at backing that up.

<comment><USER69> It is a mis-feature - it is done intentionally, but it is a bad idea. Having to go through the legal system to reverse a fraudulent transaction is a huge hurdle compared to the current state of affairs, and it will significantly impact the use of Libra for internet payments.

<comment><USER70> Its a feature for avoiding facebook holding the bag when it is invaribly used for fraud. Let the little guy eat the risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> This is a well-written post, although obviously carrying some confirmation bias against the idea of a cryptocurrency.

I'm also obviously biased, but if people are interested in my opinion (and only my own) here it goes.

> Libra's byzantine tolerance on a permissioned network is an incoherent > design.

There are two aspects here that the author seems to forget:

* The next best system, that a consortium of very different companies (think from different countries) would agree to run together is probably a protocol like Certificate Transparency which would be too slow and would have no mechanism to prevent double spending. If you're not doing this, then you're probably using a protocol that doesn't tolerate faults and the first time you have a fault your protocol collapses. There's probably a reason that Venmo cannot talk to Paypal which cannot talk to Square.

* Libra will eventually move to a permissionless setting, which means it has to be designed from scratch to support this evolutionary change. You can agree or not with this, but this is the way it was planned.

> Libra HotStuff BFT is not capable of achieving the throughput necessary for > a payment rail.

Two things again:

* The number of people in the world who uses GBP vs the number of people who will use Libra at launch is probably not comparable. This means that Libra will be perfectly fine to carry the load for a number of years.

* Current research has shown that the largest throughput improvements are hidden in layer 2. If you don't know what layer 2 is: basically you do transactions off-chain, with whatever protocol you have, and only sometimes do you confirm the current state on the chain.

> Libra's Move language is not sound.

I believe the type checking (and other checks) are done by the VM, (but that's not my domain so I might be wrong). Indeed, why would you trust the compiler to do the right thing?

> Libra's cryptography engineering is unsound.

There are two things in this section that are completely wrong:

* No, dalek is not the "wild west" and is actually written by some of the few people who you could trust to write such a library. Yet, audits are planned. Also: we do actually use formally verified code! We have integrated fiat-crypto (a formally verified library, not a cryptocurrency :D) into dalek in order to use formally verified field operations.

* Neither do we use VRFs, bilinear pairings, and threshold signatures (they are just experimentations at this point) nor are these new tools or techniques. I don't have to say much at this point but I would take the author "It should be assumed this entire crypto stack is vulnerable to a variety of attacks" with a huge grain of salt.

> Libra has no capacity for consumer protection mechanisms.

Of course, it is a financial backbone, not a financial service.

</comment><comment><USER72> >For a system that is designed to be run in a consortia of highly regulated multinational corporates, all running Facebook signed code and access controlled by Facebook it simply makes no sense to deal with malicious actors at the consensus level. Why is this system designed to be byzantine tolerant at all rather than just maintaining a consistent audit log for compliance checks. The possibility that a Libra node run by Mastercard or Andressen Horrowitz would suddenly start running malicious code is such a bizarre scenario to plan for and is better solved by simply enforcing protocol integrity and through non-technical (i.e. legal) means.

Eh, I'm not so sure about that. It seems like a good feature that hackers successfully targeting a single node don't take down the whole system.

>In congressional testimony the product was stated as a challenger to emerging international payment protocols such as WeChat, Alipay and M-Pesa. Yet none of these systems are designed to run on byzantine tolerant pools of validators. They are simply designed in the traditional high-throughput bus that orders ledger transactions according to a fixed set of rules. This is the natural approach to designing a payment system. Preventing double-spends and forks is simply not an issue that a properly designed payment rails should ever have to deal with by design.

I would assume these systems are each run by a single company though, no? Which makes them fundamentally different from what Libra seems to be aiming at.

>The overhead from the consensus algorithm serves no purpose and will only limit throughput of the whole system, and appears to be there here no reason other than apparently cargo culting public blockchain technology which is not designed for this use case.

On the contrary, running byzantine fault tolerant consensus on a small number of node partners (which each submit aggregations of transactions from their clients) seems like exactly the kind of system that blockchain technology is best suited for. Not the kind of highly distributed consensus we see in e.g. bitcoin.

>A defining feature of a payment rail is the ability to reverse transaction in case payments need to be undone by legal action or if they result in accidental or system malfunction. The Libra system is designed to have "total finality" and does not include a transaction type to reverse a payment.

I don't know that this is necessary? A transaction can of course be reversed simply by making the inverse transfer. I don't know what kinds of annotations / metadata they would be storing in the ledger for audit trails, but it doesn't seem to me like a reverse transaction should be treated extra special.

Disclosure: I work for Facebook in a totally unrelated initiative (Facebook Connectivity) but have only cursorily followed Libra news in news media. I'm generally highly skeptical of cryptocurrencies, but less skeptical of distributed byzantine fault tolerant ledgers as a general technology for some niches. My comments are completely my own personal views.

<comment><USER73> For the case of "A transaction can of course be reversed simply by making the inverse transfer." the equivalence is broken by the technical authorisation required - in most systems if I'm able to make a transfer, I'm not able to simply make the inverse transfer, _that other person_ is able to make the inverse transfer. So the question of reversals essentially is whether the inverse transfer can be made (and if so, under what conditions) against the wishes of the original recipient.

And when there's a good answer to that, the next question is what are the exact consequences to reversals (or attempted reversals) of money that's "not there anymore" \- e.g. there's a valid transfer from A to B; followed by a transfer from B to C; followed by a need/decision to reverse the A to B transaction (which is a very, very common scenario in e.g. scam resolution). For systems that treat money as the conceptual equivalent of "stuff" (e.g. Bitcoin) that's a very hard question; most of our financial infrastructure (probably for millenia) treats money as the conceptual equivalent of "debt relationship" i.e. a metric of who owes whom how much, and then it's a bit easier but still not trivial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> A long boring read lacking arguments.

</comment><comment><USER75> I am not affiliated with Libra in any way, but I cannot agree with this article. Let me respond point by point.

 _Libra's byzantine tolerance on a permissioned network is an incoherent design._

The criticism here is that byzantine tolerance is not needed, when every participant is a regulated multinational company. But it certainly isn't a _bad_ thing to have byzantine tolerance. Maybe a set of the regulated multinational companies will have backdoors put in place by a malicious entity - that has certainly happened before.

The downside of byzantine tolerance is the computational overhead. Yes, there is going to be a cost in throughput. But it just doesn't make sense for Libra to optimize for transactions-per-second at this point. If they run into scaling problems, _then_ they can optimize. Right now they are quite far away from having scaling problems.

 _Libra has no transaction privacy._

It's the same privacy level as Bitcoin. Transactions are public, endpoint identities are trackable but don't have real identities attached. You can say it isn't a good set of tradeoffs for a cryptocurrency to be pseudo-anonymous. But it doesn't make the system "architecturally unsound".

 _Libra HotStuff BFT is not capable of achieving the throughput necessary for a payment rail._

Again, it doesn't make sense to criticize Libra at this point for not being able to achieve tens of thousands of transactions per second. If they start running into scaling problems, they can work on all sorts of extensions and improvements then.

 _Libra's Move language is not sound._

The criticisms here really boil down to "Move needs more work". It isn't fundamentally unsound, it just needs more work.

 _The claims seem to reduce to nothing more than handwaving and marketing rather than actual proof. This is an alarming position for a language engineering project which expects the public to trust it to handle billions of dollars._

Okay, well don't go putting a billion dollars in a Move smart contract tomorrow. Programming languages, and especially programming language documentation, can be improved a lot over time.

...

There's more in the article, but really, it reads like a rant, where the author is so biased by their hatred of Facebook that they think every little thing that Libra does is wrong.

IMO, the core mistake behind Libra is assuming that regulators would be okay with it, because it isn't very different from other permissioned cryptocurrencies, like Stellar. Instead, regulators have been quite opposed to it because Facebook is behind it, even when technologically it isn't very unique. It is certainly not "architecturally unsound".

</comment><comment><USER76> Just ignore this Facebook Libra pollution; failure from inception, as the producer cannot be trusted for shit, which is prerequisite #1 for this type of endeavor.

</comment><comment><USER77> The point of Libra is to create a consumer small purchase transaction medium with low friction. Businesses using it only care if it has enough Swiss backing so they can get a week's business or two turned into real currency.

It only has to be sound enough for those goals. As it is used more it will get hardened.

The killer use is being able to pay overseas contractors without friction. Since there is no privacy, government on the other end will levy instant income tax withholding with glee.</comment>


How would you approach this problem? - <AUTHOR>

One of my extremely ambitious friends that is rather naive about software dev (but nonetheless wants to make tech money), asked me a question that tortures me to this day: can you build me [an application] that predicts what someones face will look like at 20...60,etc? And maybe its because I haven't had any AI classes yet, or just because I am not looking at this the right way...but it was very interesting to me. Wondering if anyone had an opinion? <comment><USER2> Just require pictures of the person and their parents, then morph them together more and more to show aging. It would be far from exact, but plenty good enough for a popular Facebook app. You can send me my royalties c/o news.yc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Search for "Facial Image Morphing Algorithm" and check out some of the intro papers.

</comment><comment><USER4> It just hit me that you could also look into face averaging, and make a fantasy application that would "beautify me." Then you could use faces of other races, eye colors, hairstyles etc. It wouldn't involve as much morph algorithm development as merging of layers and transparencies after finding key points. Then you could pitch it to, I dunno, plastic surgeons, hair stylists, or contact lens makers.

I have the impression that a person nearing 30 is less likely to want to know how they would look old, than how they would look pretty, artificially or not.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes, you can predict it.

A number of game engines have face aging techniques. Those are fairly advanced. Generally, the bone structure does not change, but the cartilage expands (ears and faces never stop growing) and skin sags. Deterioration of skin with liver spots, increased transparency, etc. are fairly well known.

This doesn't sound like a very compelling business, but it could be fun.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've worked with the facegen library in a past life to create faces of various races and ages. They use a statistical model to create faces. There is also a Russian company whose name escapes me atm that also use a statistical model to generate faces. You could approach them to license their data.

</comment><comment><USER7> As cool as that might sound (and technical hurdles aside), you have to ask yourself, do users really want it? Maybe its just me but I dont think seeing what you look like as an old person is a burning desire that users need satisfied..

<comment><USER8> Seeing what your _girlfriend_ looks like as an old person, however, could be a fruitful market. I'd imagine the girls would hate it, but one would probably come up with a competitor where you put in your boyfriend's picture, food intake, and exercise habits and it shows you how much of a beer gut he'll have in 30 years.

<comment><USER9> ooh, that's a good one. Perhaps an off-shoot on a top tier dating site then?

<comment><USER8> "I'm in like with you, but only when you're young and sexy"? ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Step 1: Can _you_ predict what someone's face will morph into with age?

Step 2: Even if you can't, does the domain knowledge exist?

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Facebook app aka profit!

<comment><AUTHOR> very enlightening, and I'm not just saying that. yeah step 3, the implementation is probably all that matters, but in step 1, are you asking the user to do this?

<comment><USER10> What I wanted to express in the form of this tasteless humour was that AI isn't going to be your first problem, even though it could be part of some potential solutions. Modelling the task is the first step. Perhaps I'm wrong but my understanding of the field of AI is that it's trying to get the effects of human intelligence via computation. That is, you'd need to find a way human intelligence could solve the task.

What comes to my mind is some kind of physiological modelling and simulation of the facial tissues. But perhaps it would be enough to do something more superficial such as extract features and their statistics from a lot of young- old pairs of photos and apply the same changes to given photos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I need to come back to these old threads sometimes. I didn't realize this got any comments. Thanks</comment>


10 Corporations Control Almost Everything You Buy - <AUTHOR> http://www.policymic.com/articles/71255/10-corporations-control-almost-everything-you-buy-this-chart-shows-how <comment><USER2> Yeah, this is one of those infographics that have been circulating for quite a while. More interesting and in-depth are these stories where you learn about the interconnectedness of large corporations:

> "Three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in > Zurich have taken a database listing 37 million companies and investors > worldwide and analyzed all 43,060 transnational corporations and share > ownerships linking them. They built a model of who owns what and what their > revenues are and mapped the whole edifice of economic power."

 _The 147 Companies That Control Everything_

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2011/10/22/the-147-co...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2011/10/22/the-147-companies- that-control-everything/)

Original source, but site is currently down: " Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world" [http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed-...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed --the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html)

Full research paper here (36 pages) [http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf](http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf)

<comment><USER3> This is the study that says Vanguard is one of the most powerful companies in the world for running a bunch of people's 401(k)'s in index funds, right?

<comment><USER2> No, that's not what the study says.

<comment><USER3> Well, they're #8 on the list. What point was trying to be made?

The retort is much more relevant:

 _Most of the companies on the top 50 list are simply investment companies – they aren't operating companies. (The only obvious example is #50 China Petrochemical.) The enormous size of these companies is simply a reflection of the way most people invest in the public markets, through mutual funds, money funds and other vehicles. Disturbing? Nah. Simply a reflection of the way most people invest in the markets._

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/10/24/retort- the...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/10/24/retort- the-147-companies-that-run-the-world-theyre-you/)

<comment><USER2> I think the point was the interconnectedness and how these firms have large stakes in other large corporations.

They don't have to be "operating companies" to be controlling. Real economic power as the article states.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If I added up the sum of everything my family spends on every brand appearing in this infographic, I would be surprised if it exceeded 2% of our gross income. And by no means do we go out of our way to avoid BigCo's.

"Everything you buy"? Not even close.

EDIT: _Worldwide_ revenue for these 10 companies was around $520B last year. Total U.S. consumer spending: Something like $11T.

<comment><USER4> > If I added up the sum of everything my family spends on every brand > appearing in this infographic, I would be surprised if it exceeded 2% of our > gross income.

Same here, probably less. Not a huge fan of things that come vacuum sealed. Vegetables, fruits, meat, dairy, etc. that's the bulk of the grocery bill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Packaged sugar products, cosmetics, and toiletries, truly the linchpin of our economy.

When whoever made this finds out about Sysco they're gonna freak out.

</comment><comment><USER6> A network analysis of the ownership relations among transnational corporations shows that 147 corporations (mostly banks) control the bulk of the other ~43,000 transnational corporations: [http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025995)

Which is, probably, scarier than that other graph, though harder to understand intuitively.

<comment><USER7> It's worse - the 147 corporations on the top all own each other in a circular manner, and in significant (50%+) amounts. None of them are actually independent.

That is an _incredible_ paper. Everyone should read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Nestle — famous for chocolate, but which is the biggest food company in the > world — owns… clothing brand Diesel…

Not exactly, Diesel licenses their brand to Nestle to make perfume and has absolutely nothing to do with any of their apparel.

</comment><comment><USER9> This chart is mainly about convenience food and fashion goods.

The real companies that 'control' the market are the behemoths about which you hear little;

\- Tyco, Siemens GE that make the industrial systems that run manufacturing

\- Plastics manufacturers behind packaging, $500 billion annual market in the USA alone

\- Shipping brokers and agents that batch goods for efficient transport

\- The sea-shipping companies that move the goods

<comment><USER10> Any good links/articles about this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> GE does not own Comcast or NBC. GE and Comcast once jointly owned NBC, that changed and now Comcast owns NBC. GE has no relation to either.

</comment><comment><USER12> The banking consolidation is far more concerning to me than any of the other groups listed. The article massively overstates the control that companies like Pepsi / Coke / P&G / J&J / Mars et al. have. In the US market, they're actually a small slice of the $10.6 trillion in consumer spending (3% or so perhaps).

It does not however overstate the control the financial giants have. BAC + WFC + C + JPM are sitting on $8 trillion in assets. The too big to fail group has gotten dramatically bigger in the last five years.

The list also curiously misses giants like Cargill, Monsanto, Exxon, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, and Koch Industries.

Energy cartels concern me a lot more than who controls the potato chip market, for example.

Also there are far better examples of market dominance by a group of companies. Take car insurance, where six companies control nearly 60% of the entire market.

Or there's always the AT&T / Verizon duopoly. They reign over a pretty massive market.

Four auto companies control nearly 60% of the US auto market.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a bold statement of fact. And while it's certainly incredible how many of the brands we see daily in stores and advertised represent the same economic interests, I don't think the assertion is born out by the article, as it stands. In particular, _there is no data linking those brands to actual consumer buying_. Or to put it more precisely, I'd like to know how much of the total market all of those brands command when you combine them all. I'd be looking for something like:

"In the US, total food spending in 2012 was 1T. The food brands in this list made 900B in revenue in the same year. Therefore, these 6 companies control 90% of everything the average American buys."

I'm pretty sure something like this is true, but without relating that brand chart to actual revenue and market size, you can't really say much about what the chart _means_.

</comment><comment><USER14> P&G has some stuff listed that I buy. The rest of the list is a bunch of unhealthy crap.

</comment><comment><USER15> One day, it's "the excess number of choices confuses the typical consumer", therefore corporations are bad.

The next, it's "consumer industries are consolidating into fewer, better capitalized players", therefore corporations are bad.

In reality, I just think people who aren't that successful like to make infographics.

Beats working, or, you know, actually risking anything to create something in the world.

By the way, in non-capitalist countries, how many different entities providing toothpaste, or home mortgages, do you think there are, and why would you prefer it?

<comment><USER16> > One day, it's.....The next, it's....

You're right. The person who currently does the blogging for the Internet is clearly inconsistent and hypocritical. Perhaps we should get someone else to do it? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Even with the massive consolidation that has created these megacorps, its kind of amazing how many of them fail to properly utilize their brands effectively in concert with one another.

I've seen this directly in the food service industry (including at one company in that graphic) where companies don't share suppliers, shipping routes, real estate, etc. where they could be having significant cost savings and simplified logistics.

I wonder how much of this pops up in other groups.

<comment><USER18> Too much brand consolidation could have a negative market appeal.

Consolidating logistics would be another matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yum is an independent company since spinning off of PepsiCo in 1997. While it has ties to PepsiCo, it's nothing direct and there are even Yum own restaurants that don't even serve Pepsi products.

This chart is enlightening for sure, but they leave a lot out. For instance, all your Keebler products are now owned by Kellogg's, and doesn't it look like PepsiCo is much more diverse in it's holdings than Coca-Cola?

</comment><comment><USER20> Maybe I am very sheltered in my online media consumption, but if 6 companies own 90% of traditional media, it is shocking how little presence they have online.

Neither Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumbler, reddit or more traditional blogging sites like Medium, quartz.com, or the Huffington Post are (currently) owned by these 'big 6'.

<comment><USER21> reddit is owned by Advance Publications, who own a lot of properties:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications)

<comment><USER20> But according to the infographic, it is not part of the 'big six'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> With alcohol that's even worse, there'sit's similar: Diageo owns Smirnoff. Johnnie Walker, Baileys, Guinness, Moët, Hennessy, Captain Morgan, Gordon's, Zacapa,...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diageo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diageo)

</comment><comment><USER23> Why is A&W listed under both Kraft and PepsiCo?

And I don't think that it's because of the fast food stores - those are owned by one of the Berkshire companies I thought?

One last thing - are the little "$$$"'s everywhere really necessary?

<comment><USER24> Yum Brands owns the A&W Restaurant chain, Dr. Pepper owns the drink line. I remember eating at an A&W Restaurant in Santa Cruz, California as a kid in the 90s. I've lived in SoCal most of my life and haven't seen one down here.

Similarly, when I looked at the chart, I noticed 7-Up was listed next to Pepsi rather than next to Dr. Pepper. Googling around I found that's because it's only distributed by Dr. Pepper in the US. For the rest of the world it's a Pepsi Product[1].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_Up](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_Up)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Lipton appears twice on this chart. Did that slip past the editors? Makes you wonder if any other brands on the chart are in the wrong place. I don't have time to check them all.

Edit: I don't think L'Oreal is owned by Nestle either.

<comment><USER26> Sadly while the chart has significant problems and is misleading in some of the relationships, it is more accurate than the article it appears in, if you zoom in you can see some annotations in the article that give partial context to some of the claims.

Apparently Nestle is one of the largest single shareholders in L'Oreal, the chart has a 30% mark in the connection.

I assume that's the reason for Lipton showing up twice, where there are companies that are co-owned or part of a joint venture (I would guess Pepsico licenses and distributes Lipton Iced Tea)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Almost every brand mentioned here has a generic equivalent. People don't rely on these corporations exclusively for these types of products.

</comment><comment><USER28> It's not even accurate - Pringles is not owned by P&G anymore

</comment><comment><USER29> Only if all you consume is heavily pre-processed.</comment>


Show HN: Embed your AngelList Profile anywhere - <AUTHOR> http://angelsq.co/embed

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a response to: <http://twitter.com/#!/angellist/status/159451769745846272>

This embed script writes directly to the DOM so just add custom styling using scoped #angelsq_embed css selectors! Feel free to hide any of the buttons, or move things around.

Any and all feedback appreciated!</comment>


Ask HN: Who was your greatest mentor? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I've been lucky to find a mentor to work with at every job I've been at. I guess I was just really receptive to learning. I don't know if I can say I had a "greatest" mentor at any of my jobs, because I learned a great deal from each of them - through their good and bad qualities.

1) My first mentor taught me everything I knew about developing good code habits and staying humble. However, I think I learned the most about people management from him. He was extremely polarizing as a person. He would go to the ends of the earth for his people, but the moment that he felt he had been slighted, you'd be on his shit list. I learned how to foster loyalty and good rapport with your coworkers and employees from him - and also how dangerous it was to take everything at work personally. I thought he was a great manager in some ways, but he burned a lot of bridges.

2) My second mentor was one of the best engineers I ever worked with. It wasn't because he was the fastest or the best programmer. It was because he knew how to bridge the gap between engineering and product. He also knew the importance of documentation and moving at a steady pace. He cared a lot about developer sustainability and ensured that sprints were always scored and paced correctly. I really wish I had, had more time to work with him.

3) The third mentor I worked with was actually one of the most brilliant engineers I've ever met. He turned me onto a lot of new technologies and stretched me to my limits, because he moved at such a blindingly fast pace. However, I think I learned from him the most in his negative aspects. He thought planning was a waste of time, and would just dole out work as quickly as he could so he could get back to engineering. Working with him also meant toeing the line to burnout. From him, I learned how important it was to foster good relations with all departments in order to get things done, instead of just relying on one or two rockstars to pull things forward by sheer force of will.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm always curious how people _find_ mentors.

I have heard of a few services out there where you are able to book "x" amount of time with someone to talk about work or whatever (basically a mentor).

Since finishing up school I've worked with 2 developers, and both have been great and I've learned a lot.

I don't think these sort of relationships count as "mentors", or at least it just felt like co-working. So, I guess you could say I'm still looking? :)

<comment><USER4> I go further and wonder if anybody advertises themselves as mentor. I've seen requests, also on HN, "I'm looking for a mentor" but never seen an answer and never seen anybody saying they have a mentor. I mean it's a time investment for the mentor with no direct benefit. Am I overlooking something?

<comment><USER3> I've seen some people mention it in the past, but if their experiences doesn't match up to your own I'm not sure if it would work out very well.

Most instances I think people find mentors while at work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Books are great mentors, although shorter, they are a quick and condensed look at how things should be done

<comment><USER6> Real mentors do personal, 1 on 1 sessions specifically with you. Books are great but a mentor is a step up. Usually the good mentors expect you to have already read all the main books in the industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's hard to say who was the greatest. Very different. All the good mentors give you one on one time.

I would say my thesis supervisor was the best. Taught me the whole process of engineering, how to actually build an epic project. How to break down a huge project into components and how to make sure each component works.

</comment><comment><USER7> My dad. Then, surprisingly, my father in law. 2 different styles, 2 different perspectives about life. The combination of both is gold.

<comment><USER8> Care to elaborate? Polar opposites always make for a good story.

<comment><USER7> It's the same story as "rich dad poor dad" from Robert Kiyosaki. My dad is very detail oriented, not a risk taker and all about security and education. My in law is the complete opposite. Guess who made a lot of money in life ;)</comment></comment></comment>


France orders Google to pay news companies for showing article extracts - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/france-google-scraping-stories-snippets-104038211.html <comment><USER2> This is so short sighted. I'll be interested to see how it'll backfire.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think authorities are just mad that no one wants to use Qwant.</comment>


Steven Seagal - <AUTHOR> http://suzi-340.tripod.com/id18.html <comment><USER2> wow theres a holdout from the web 1.0 days! reminds me of so many geocities pages

<comment><USER3> Then you should appreciate Chris Lattner's Homepage

[http://nondot.org/sabre/](http://nondot.org/sabre/)</comment></comment>


Where Is Google's Free FTP Service? - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/06/where_is_google.html

<comment><USER2> Maybe it doesn't exist because data-mining unstructured bits is not worth the effort and there's no obvious place to attach ads?</comment>