[mrtksn]

If Libra becomes a thing, I would guess people will start selling things with it and Europeans will sell their services with Libra if Americans ell their services with Libra.

Maybe in Germany, most people will stay away from it but in Bulgaria, Spain, Italy etc. - in places where people are more "relaxed" about the law enforcement will not miss business opportunities just because their rich neighbours can afford to miss it.

If audits materialize they, the users will simply set-up or use proxies to deal with it. Someone in the USA will set-up an Libra-Bitcoin-Euro-USD exchange for example and the transactions will go through these. I can already see an Ukrainian-Russian-Bulgarian-Romanian-Turkish partnerships to run these operations. Europe is a mess, laws and enfrcement capacity is very different in every country and countries are in multiple clubs(in EU, in EEA, in customs union, in Eurozone, in schengen, not in EU but confirms to EU, not in Eurozone but the currency is pegged to Euro, in EU but not NATO, in NATO but not in the EU. It doesn't have an end) giving differnt rights and different obligations to people in each country and even messier when they are not in their own country or hold multiple citizenships.

[tastroder]

I'm one of these European users. An American shop only offering payments via Libra would end up the same fate as American shops that don't offer PayPal or another convenient payment method do right now. Why would I even remotely want this? These crypto threads make it out like it's the second coming, we have a more or less functioning financial system and even if it's broken I would not trust Facebook of all companies to offer up a better, global, alternative.

The forming of a financial underworld in the Eurozone is pretty doubtful in my mind. Sure, enforcement varies country by country but if this would get a big enough problem we also have international efforts in the EU to get rid of it. Worst case somebody gets a data dump in lieu of Swiss tax evasion dumps on CDs a few years in and the laws against it get even stricter.

[mrtksn]

I would imagine machines doing the transactions. For example, a market for game characters where you buy and sell characters where the systems automatically keep tabs and handle the transactions without the friction of large bureaucratic institutions like banks.

[orbifold]

Just require people to provide a valid ID to Facebook in order to use it. Shouldn't be too hard to enfore, at least in the EU your phone number is tied to your passport.

[mrtksn]

>at least in the EU your phone number is tied to your passport

Not true. It depends on the country, in the UK you can buy SIM cards from wending machines that work straight out of the package and it's not he only country that does not require ID for SIM cards.

Anyway, even if your identity is tied to your Facebook account, what stops you from creating an American or a Filipino Facebook account? Phone number? You can buy a phone number online. You can also buy a verified Facebook account too.

Let's say that Facebook somehow starts operating as strict as a governmental body and checks everything, what stops you from buying Libra from an American or a Mexican? I haven't checked the details but this Libra thing doesn sound like Steam game money but like cryptocurrency, so they probably cannot do whatever they want just like that.