• jonne@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    Companies will start using crypto as a way to recreate what scrip was back before it was banned. Meta made a play for that a few years back but luckily they failed.

    • cadekat@pawb.social
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      1 year ago

      Say what you want about crypto in general, but it’d be an extremely bad choice for company scrip…

      • jonne@infosec.pub
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        1 year ago

        Depends on the implementation, you can make contracts do anything, and if the bulk of the currency is premined and in the hands of the corporation, they can manipulate its value freely. Not every cryptocurrency works the way Bitcoin or Etherium work, some are quite centralised (see XRP for example).

        Meta could demand that ads on its platform are paid in metabucks, pay employees (partly) in metabucks and manipulate the market by controlling liquidity. Essentially they’d be their own sovereign corporation issuing its own currency.

        • cadekat@pawb.social
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          1 year ago

          All true!

          You should consider transaction fees though: someone’s gotta pay 'em. “Run their own chain” you might say, but then just use a database. Don’t need crypto-economic security when you’re the issuer and primary retailer.

          That leads into having a public ledger. Great for public blockchains, but if you’re issuing company scrip, you probably don’t want outsiders auditing transactions.

          • jonne@infosec.pub
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, transaction fees can go to the issuer, so the corporation could double dip.

            And as for transactions being publicly available on the ledger, SEC filings are public too, corporations openly bragged about raising prices beyond inflation and making record profits and they still had most of the populace convinced that the cause of inflation was just those darn lazy Millennials that didn’t want to work any more.

            In the modern manufacturing consent era, it doesn’t matter that the truth is publicly available as long as you control mainstream media (which a corporation like Meta can easily do, first on their own platform and secondly by buying ads in the right newspapers).