Yeah, let’s forget everything we’re working toward and give the power of the world’s monetary and financial systems to Facebook. Seriously, no amount of fancy talk can change the fact that this is the worst fucking idea in history.

Poor interview. No real pushback on anything. So many questions could have been asked to poke holes all over Diem, its so called member companies, and its spokesperson.

Data assets and privacy would be privet for a while, until network effect hit critical mass. Then they would monetize it and exploit it with no shame... just like with WhatsApp and every platform they own. If they need to dump Dante and change governance they can just do it... that's their strategy. Blockchain is the weapon that depowers Facebook and big Orwellian tech, not otherwise. I believe not enough top tier talent in the ecosystem will be seduced by FB's big wallet. Let the future be bright, free and decentralized.

At 10:24 left.. Note the voice crack with the 200th “That’s a good question, Raoul (of which I won’t answer except for referencing a teachable historic capitalist injustice moment..)” Of course it’s a good question; Raoul always asks good questions. Please don’t be so patronizing of the RV community with the answers. The milk-toast answers wrapped in weak-tea platitudes was unpalatable. It’s what Mr. Disparte didn’t say which spoke volumes.

Corporate suit that talks a lot while saying very little

I got a feeling that whenever he says, it is a very good question, he is not telling the truth.

Man he is really good at using all the right buzz words. Short version: We want to create a stable coin so we can get all that juicy consumer data for our owners but we will pretend it’s for the poor people in Africa. We will call it “crypto” but without any of the decentralization or privacy.

Diem blockchain is a private blockchain.....next.

This comes across as almost an inverse of the crypto ethos: centralized, top down, anti-privacy to the point of referencing biometric examples. Somehow it's "open", but confined to a walled garden network that restricts ownership to oligarchic mega-corporations. How does one disentangle such doublespeak? There can be no "token", precisely because it is not remotely decentralized and would be a security. I came in with an open mind, but how is this not techno-dystopian authoritarianism hiding behind a mask of virtue signaling about financial inclusion?

I can someone has been taking notes from Ripple, RippleNet, XRP, Bitso, Coins.ph, Interledger Protocol, CBDCs, and Quant. What's pretty clear hear is that the largest prize in the world isn't the Store of Value narrative is global payments, cross-border payments, micro-payments, payments, payments, payments. Diem participants know, just like RippleNet participants, that Tier 1 banks are stealing billions in cross border and FX float and have a chokehold on global liquidity flows. The competition will be fierce and the proof will be in the pudding if Diem will *really* be interoperable with other networks or simply *composable* in the way Ethereum has lego blocks. Prove me wrong that this isn't the playbook? Word of advice to Diem folk, beware Goldman, JPMorgan, etc. they already did a drive by on Ripple, you're next if you even get off the ground. He who has all the gold makes all the rules.

Thank YOU Raoul !! - This interview allowed me to hear "from the horses mouth" (though he seemed like a great/interesting guy) about a novel project that I would likely otherwise learn about from some marketing/hype with very little probing/questioning. There is true value to the 'concepts' discussed here, whether you agree with them or not- 'HOW' people are thinking about this. There are so many comments I could make, but many have already been stated below. I truly enjoyed the question (paraphrased) "where does the MONEY come from? i.e. how does DIEM make any money ? And, "who's actually funding the project?". RAOUL, this is why I initially loved RV, 'insights' and concepts, but also for investing ideas (like Cohodes recently with Bessecker). I cannot keep up anymore!!!! NOW, I just look for Raoul, Lyn Alden, Lacy Hunt, Jeff Snider and Booth, and a few others!!! I would guess that VERY few can keep up with RV, not to mention the exchange as well. !!!! Thanks again for teaching me and exposing me (in less than an hour) to minds and ideas that I would NEVER find easily in a single place. YOU are LEGEND in my book (though not always right in terms of 'no V shaped recovery' and 'deflation')- perhaps right soon ......of course, thus far, .(BTC was spot on!!) God Bless, BT

Question is, Do we trust FB? i dont!!

Great analogy to Obama below. Intelligent, eloquent guy who seems to have been bought by the system to try and wage a war that has already been lost.

FB is past

This is frightening. I hear the platitudes of the multi member system, with facebook only putting up 10% of the cost and with privacy controlled by the on/off ramp wallets not the network. But for how many people will facebook itself be the on/off ramp ? If it has to be someone with a financial license, facebook will just acquire one in each country or a cross border one! Add to that facebook social scoring of whether people they send diem to pay the full amount of diem when they were supposed to, if they have debt, if they spend on "good things" ....what's to say you don't have a path to the chinese social scoring system? If the onramp company but not the network has the data, facebook will simply make sure it owns some on ramps. They won't be the only on ramps - it is "open to competition" - but if it offers its own on ramp seamlessly to all its users, it will be one of the main ones used He also spoke openly about SDRs . God help us if the IMF's quest for a "global reset" ends up endorsing a new SDR based system and taking some level of reserve asset away from the dollar, based on the diem platform. Is that the end goal does anyone think? Central banks wouldn't adopt it unless there were some big mega disaster or opportunity. But if you are a poor country and you somehow get offered a system for your poor - and financial assistance via the IMF? on condition you use it, maybe you cave in? The US doesn't have anything to gain my a new reserve currency based on a new basket of SDRs (since they have the dollar as the reserve currency). And the US can easily block DIEM. So something would have to happen to make them capitulate. Real vision: what macroeconimc events could make them go down a route like this? Can someone with deep macro understanding unpick the issues I'm inarticulately trying to get at in a top down scenario analysis of four ways in which the global reserve currency might change in the long term and in one of those scenarios how it is connected to the future of SDRs and what you'd have to believe to think that DIEM could play a role in this and what that would mean? I am not a bitcoin maximalist. But I abhor the idea of one of the companies writing the rules of how this works being facebook which has showed itself to be so untrustworthy: - Cambridge analytic scandal -Acquisition of wattsapp with promises they would not hoover up the wattsapp data only to now renege. The backlash has been so big that they've delayed this to April/May and will probably keep doing so until the backlash dies away. But it is clear users do not want them to have this information. - A murky world all the social media companies have entered with low transparency in how algorithms and Ad funding and profit incentives and political leanings determine truth from lies, what gets shown and to whom and what is censored, who has a voice. Carly Fiorina gave a fantastic interview where she said the FANG companies now control the equivalent of the medieval village square where people met and talked, commerce was done, rules were set. And as such they need to be regulated much more heavily. Before Facebook is allowed to play a role in the future monetary system, they and the other FANG companies need to sit down with regulators and agree what set of rules they are willing to play by so that legislators can put this into law. If they wait, laws will be passed by older generations who don't understand the tech and she points out that such laws will be badly conceived and prevent society getting the benefits of the tech. So it has to be collaborative across all the main social media/FANG companies and probably facilitated by someone outside. But facebook should not be allowed to launch DIEM (even as part of a much bigger consortium i which they only have some say) until this is in place

What this guy is describing is how the oligarchs own the future. They own the highway and everyone else can use it if they pay and behave.

I pity any soul that ends up on this platform. This isn't just about remittances, its about building a global panopticon that would make totalitarian governments drool over the possibilities of abuse. The tech oligarchs want this, because they can only intuit so much data from your facebook posts and tweets. Dipping their fingers into your transactions -- and having the ability to deplatform you if you spend money on the "wrong" things -- is what they're after. Complete oligopoly control, AML/KYC-ing its way into your most granular spending habits. No thanks. With Schnorr Signatures incoming to the Bitcoin protocol, chain analysis will become orders of magnitude harder, to nearly impossible. I'd rather interact with a crypto that is working to improve my privacy than some shambling corpChain that wants to know every iota about me. (Note the emphasis on how the virus provided this "wonderful" opportunity to ID every person on the planet, tying it to biometrics or general personal health data. This land-grab is fueled by fear, and will be abused by tech platforms.)

Wow. Sounded like a politician. Ivy League elitist poop language. He must have watched a lot of Obama speeches.

Well, this was entertaining in a no-value sort of way. A subsidiary of FB simply says it all in this day and age of ever-diminishing privacy. So many other options available; Diem so easy to dismiss.

"...because the end game has to be empowering more people with basic internet connected devices to send and receive payments in a compliant manner" Thanks but no thanks Facebook and your Diem affiliates. We've got plenty of other options. Given what Facebook and other affiliates did during 2020 why would anyone other than the established financial order give any credence to this "new technology". Walk away and never look back. Next...

We are going to disintermediate the banks. They are like walled gardens. How, do you ask. We are going to make a walled garden and connect anything with everything. Reminded me of an old commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIOqOxI0K_I

'i was a fan, now I'm a protagonist'

Mind blowing interview, very informative with the big questions being asked and answered. I see this as being the primary competitor to China’s CP/DP Program in places like Africa. Please keep following this project. Cheers

Such a shame... The libra idea was awesome, create a basket of currencies. Now we have a new blockchain yet... I don't get why people are trying to invent new blockchain while the can built on top of the strongest and oldest one, Bitcoin. I wish Raoul asked how Diem is better than Strike built by Jack Mallers using the Lightning Network and Bitcoin.

If you destroy a free market you create a black market. If you have 10,000 regulations you destroy all respect for the law. -Winston Churchill

That was a rather terrible interview: whilst Raoul’s questions were pointed and went to the bottom of Diem’s business model, the answers were mostly platitudes ("that is a very good question", thank you for the question"....) that reminded on a congressional hearing. I liked Dante Disparte on a personal level, he left a calm and friendly impression, but decoding his answers left something like "we’ll go into bed with the regulators to stamp out the competition, specifically Bitcoin and the evil ICOs, and make Mark Zuckerberg look nice on his next hearing". No Thank you.

Regarding Diem’s talk on Digital Identities & Wallets, I’d love if Real Vision was able to get members of the IOTA Foundation on to speak about their solutions to these topics. Although IOTA’s Digital Identity and new wallet are still in development, beta products are expected to be released in the next 3-6 months that will make it, as far as I know, the first GDPR digital identity compliant system which has many of the same elements that Diem are proposing (scaling transactions, near instant settlement, etc.) in addition to being a feeless and independent/decentralized system. On wallets the IOTA Foundation wrote an interesting piece on how they’ll be key for Crypto adoption on NASDAQ https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/how-can-wallets-enable-the-mass-adoption-of-cryptocurrencies-2021-01-28?amp and although not complete, a lot of their scheduled releases this year seem to overlap with problems Diem aims to solve. Regardless of who solves these issues It gets me excited thinking about the future potential crypto has to revolutionize so many of our outdated and frankly broken systems. PS: Not to mention the digital passports and health checks Dante spoke to are something that has somewhat already been implemented with IOTA in many major German airports via the UBIRCH solution. https://frankfurtvalley.app/2021/01/15/ubirch-using-iota-blockchain-technology-to-manage-passengers-health-stats-at-frankfurt-airports/

How can I short it?

First class. RV is so awesome. Under 60min, now I know what Diem is up to. Raoul’s question are outstanding

TLDR - corporate entity steals the narrative of decentralised initiatives in a blatant attempt to expand their centralised data hunt. Just imagine what this data collected through the money movement would be worth... I don't think this coorporate infomercial belongs under umbrella of crypto.

Diem copy paste Ripple's playbook, but it's ok the pie is big enough

The conversation goes mostly like this: regulation, KYC, more regulation, more KYC. BUT at the same time it's supposed to be an open inclusionary payment system for the unbanked in Africa. Very skeptical to say the least.

Will the network be open permissionless? Will there be opensource wallets without KYC?

Awesome