Facebook launches coin, don’t miss these details and little-known facts

With the release of the white paper of Facebook's stablecoin project Libra, the outside world's attention to Libra has reached an extremely high level, and it has even been listed on the hot search lists of Weibo and Zhihu.

In order to provide billions of people around the world with a simple, borderless currency and financial infrastructure, Facebook has detailed in its white paper what the Libra stablecoin is and what responsibilities it will shoulder. You may have read too many explanatory articles about Facebook's currency issuance, but there are more details and little-known facts worth exploring. If you don't read this little-known fact review by BlockBeats, you may really miss it.

1. Libra is so awesome, do you want to become a founding member and participate in the coin issuance? Almost no ordinary people can participate because the threshold is very high. If you are a company, you have to be in the Fortune 500 to be eligible; if you are a cryptocurrency investor, you must manage assets of more than US$1 billion; if you are a blockchain company, you must pass a security audit and publicly disclose relevant information, and hold or custody at least US$100 million in assets for your customers.

2. The Libra blockchain has been forked. 12 hours after the project library was announced, the forked project Libra Classic appeared, with the slogan "Billions of people do not lose privacy, and large American companies do not benefit." The Libra Classic consensus mechanism has been changed from Byzantine Fault Tolerance FBT to "Nakamoto Consensus", and everyone can run a node.

3. Libra's Chinese name is Libra. The twin brothers Winklevoss, who sued Facebook, bought a lot of Bitcoin after receiving compensation and became the top 10 Bitcoin richest people. Then they founded an exchange called Gemini. Gemini means Gemini, and it also issued the world's first compliant stablecoin GUSD, 1GUSD = 1 US dollar. In astrology, some people think that Libra and Gemini are a natural match.

(Image from Cointelegraph)

4. After Facebook announced the issuance of its own currency, the Winklevoss brothers, who were against Zuckerberg, said on Twitter that FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) would all issue their own currency within two years.

5. Libra stablecoin will not use gold as collateral, nor will it use cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin as collateral. Instead, it will use a basket of low-volatility assets (such as cash and government securities provided by stable and reputable central banks) as collateral. Therefore, the price of Libra can remain relatively stable.

6. Libra stablecoin can be used to send money and make payments. People working abroad can send money home in a convenient and fast way, and college students can pay rent as easily as buying coffee. Well, of course, it is more convenient to exchange for US dollars.

7. There are many Chinese people in the Move language development team. Runtian Zhou said on Zhihu that Libra Coin is a smart contract implemented by the Move language. The Move programming language was born out of the linear type system. At the beginning of its design, it did not adopt any previously used virtual machines and blockchain programming languages, because Facebook wanted to ensure the security of financial contracts. (BlockBeats verified the The Libra Blockchain paper and Runtian Zhou is indeed the developer of the Move language)

8. Is Libra controlled by Facebook? The answer is no. Libra Coin is governed by the independent, non-profit Libra Association, and Facebook is the initiator of the project. The Libra Association is an independent, non-profit membership organization headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. The association aims to coordinate and provide a management framework for the network and asset reserves, and take the lead in funding that can generate social impact and provide support for inclusive finance.

9. The server configuration of Facebook Libra validator node is very low, and Amazon's m5.24xlarge can meet the computing needs. According to the official pricing of Amazon Web Service, the price of an m5.24xlarge server is now $4.6 per hour, and only $3,312 per month. Compared with the engineers and a set of security infrastructure that need to be paired together to run, this amount of money is nothing. In Silicon Valley, the annual salary of a full-time site reliability engineer is about $100,000-150,000.

10. What are the benefits of becoming a Libra founding member? In addition to making substantial contributions to society, joining the association can also bring the following potential benefits to organizations: playing an active role in association governance, being eligible for new user rewards and transaction rebates, and receiving dividends through Libra investment tokens.

11. Connecting payment and finance has been Zuckerberg's obsession for many years. Facebook founded a company called Facebook Payment, which not only added payment functions to the chat Messenger, but also issued a virtual currency called Facebook Credits. People can use Facebook Credits to purchase items in games and non-game applications. One dollar is equivalent to 10 Facebook Credits, and there are 15 currencies to choose from, including US dollars, British pounds, and euros. But later this project failed and eventually became Libra.

12. The efficiency of the Libra blockchain is not high. According to the technical white paper, the Libra protocol initially supports 1,000 TPS with a block interval of 10 seconds, which is far lower than EOS's peak of 3,996 TPS and not much better than Tron's peak of nearly 1,000 TPS.

13. Libra has just been released for one day, and it has already scared the vested interests. U.S. House of Representatives Representative Patrick McHenry requested a hearing on the Libra plan. U.S. House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Waters called on Facebook to stop developing cryptocurrency and believed that Congress and regulators should investigate it.

14. Is Libra a legal currency? At least Facebook itself believes that it is legal and can be used in all countries or regions that allow the use of cryptocurrencies. But for Chinese users, it is difficult for Facebook to enter China, let alone recognize the digital cryptocurrency it issues.

15. The Libra blockchain uses the Libra BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus protocol to prevent double-spending attacks. Even if 1/3 of the validator nodes in the entire network are attacked, the network can still process transactions normally. The Libra blockchain has 100 founder nodes when the network is launched, which means that there can be up to 33 faulty nodes and the blockchain can still operate.

16. If you can find a bug on the Libra blockchain, you can ask Zuckerberg for a reward. The Libra Association will launch a public bug bounty program as a major measure to strengthen blockchain security.

17. The head of Facebook blockchain said that Libra will exist for hundreds of years. We don’t know how much capacity a Libra transaction has now, but if we compare it to the average 20KB capacity of each transaction on the EOS.IO blockchain, in 100 years, the Libra node server will store more than: 1000 * 3600 * 24 * 365 * 100 = 3,153,600,000,000 B ≈ 2.86 TB. (1000 is TPS, 3600 is the number of seconds in an hour, 24 is the number of hours in a day, 365 is the number of days in a year, and 100 is 100 years)

18. Libra's TPS is 1,000, which means it can process 1,000 transactions per second, and 31.5 billion transactions per year. This number is very low. During the Spring Festival of the Year of the Pig, 823 million people sent and received red envelopes on WeChat. If they sent 10 red envelopes casually, that would be 8.2 billion transactions. However, Libra's blockchain processing speed can be expanded, and it can be greatly expanded in the future.

19. Facebook Libra's block confirmation time is 10 seconds, which is largely related to the geographical differences of servers scattered around the world and the long time it takes to synchronize node information. The network delay from China to the United States will definitely have a delay of 150-250ms, and the synchronization between global nodes will consume more time, so the confirmation speed of 10 seconds is not surprising.

20. The Libra blockchain can be forked after being attacked. If one-third of the validator nodes behave maliciously and cause the blockchain to fork, the Libra Association will adopt a series of strategies, including temporarily stopping the processing of transactions for the Libra Reserve, determining the extent of the damage caused by the attack, and issuing recommendations on how to use software updates to resolve the fork. In addition, the Association will also develop corresponding strategies for other situations such as discovering software vulnerabilities.

21. Don't think about using Libra to launder money, because Facebook has already cooperated with law enforcement. Like all other currencies or financial infrastructures, cyber criminals will try to gain improper benefits from the Libra network. In addition, transactions on the Libra blockchain are pseudonymous, which also creates the possibility of third-party fraud and illegal activities. However, although the Libra network is open and accessible to everyone with an Internet connection, its main endpoints need to comply with relevant laws and regulations and establish cooperation with law enforcement.

22. Justin Sun jumped on the hot topic 6 hours after Facebook Libra released its white paper. Justin Sun is famous for following hot topics. After the news was released, he did not follow the hot topics immediately, which may be related to the fact that he was abroad.

23. Users do not have the private key of Facebook Libra’s wallet. Libra is integrated into the Facebook account and is a managed wallet. It is similar to opening a bank account on Facebook, and the money is managed by the Libra Association.

24. One day after the release of Facebook Libra, its Github project library has received 3,800 stars. In the past month, 13 developers pushed 23 commits to all branches, 1,052 files were changed, 40,539 lines were added, and 13,052 lines were deleted.

25. If you lose your Libra, Facebook's Calibra wallet team will refund the user.

26. The Libra blockchain uses the BIP39 mnemonic. Its mnemonic is consistent with the mnemonic standards used by blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and it randomly selects 12-24 easy-to-remember words from a 2048-word standard vocabulary.

*BlockBeats reminds all investors to guard against the risk of chasing high prices.