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by swordsmith 2560 days ago
> I'm pretty sure that this type of data collection tool is in use today by the Chinese government.

Yeah US is a bit slow to that party. Alipay and Wechat-pay has roughly a billion users (conservative estimate) in China. It's widely socially accepted.

Makes more sense in the case of China, which never had wide adoption of credit cards. In Libra's case...why should I ever use it instead of sticking with credit cards?

2 comments

> In Libra's case...why should I ever use it instead of sticking with credit cards?

Given that both VISA and Mastercard are on board, I assume that you might not have a choice in the long run.

Rather than straight cash, using it as a more-secure credit card would be enough to sign me up. It would prevent card skimmers, people copying numbers, etc. They could generate one-time card numbers for online purchases at existing merchants. Despite lots of mitigations, VISA/MC still have huge fraud problems. This would give them a new tool to lock things down.
In the US, you already lose your credit card if you speak out politically.