Fri. 12/21 - Facebook Goes Crypto

Tech Brew Ride Home

Amalgamated Internets, LLC

Tech News, News, Technology

4.7 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 December 2018

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Facebook is developing a cryptocoin for WhatsApp, Blind was not quite anonymous enough, which is the most accurate voice assistant and of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Metalab.co The Internet of Things Podcast Links: Facebook Is Developing a Cryptocurrency for WhatsApp Transfers, Sources Say (Bloomberg) At Blind, a security lapse revealed private complaints from Silicon Valley employees (TechCrunch) Apple AI Chief John Giannandrea Gets Promotion to Senior Vice President (MacRumors) Annual Smart Speaker IQ Test (LoopVentures) The Betterment Weekend Longreads: Software Defined Talk (Podcast) Apple Computers Used to Be Built in the U.S. It Was a Mess (NYTimes) Inside Shenzhen’s race to outdo Silicon Valley (Bloomberg) The 2019 IPO class headlined by Uber will create a ton of new wealth. Will the billions go to mansions or missions? (Recode) Venture Capital Blind Spots: The Top 7 Reasons Why VCs Miss Billion-Dollar Outcomes (645 Ventures) Prime and Punishment (The Verge) 7 Modern BBSes Worth Calling Today (PCMag) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the tech meme ride home for Friday December 21st, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough.
0:10.0	Today Facebook is developing a crypto coin for what's-app.
0:15.0	Blind was not quite anonymous enough.
0:19.0	Which is the most accurate voice assistant and of course the weekend long read
0:25.4	suggestions here's what you miss today in the world of tech.
0:30.4	According to Bloomberg, Facebook is developing a cryptocurrency for money transfers on its
0:39.0	WhatsApp platform with the idea to first focus on deploying this in the remittances market in India.
0:47.0	Notably, this would be a so-called Stable coin, a type of cryptocurrency pegged to an existing currency like for example the US
0:56.0	dollar. This helps minimize volatility in the currency's valuation. Quoting from Bloomberg,
1:04.0	what's app, the company's encrypted mobile messaging app is popular in India
1:09.0	with more than 200 million users.
1:11.0	The country also leads the world in remittances. People sent
1:15.1	69 billion dollars home to India in 2017, the World Bank said this year."
1:21.8	End quote.
1:23.0	Now as you can imagine, because this is Facebook, there has been a metric ton of snark about
1:28.0	this news comments to the tune of, oh sure, Facebook is exactly the company that I want to trust with my money or I want
1:36.2	to trust with the economy at large, but I got to say this actually makes a ton of sense to me. We see especially in Asia that these
1:47.5	next generation mobile and chat apps can be pretty amazingly valuable at
1:52.0	commerce and financial functions.
1:55.0	And look, for all of crypto, one of the problems is that no one has as of yet been able to graft
2:01.3	a crypto project onto a useful or productive or popular
2:06.6	platform. But look, what's app is just such a popular and useful platform.
	...

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