
MIT Fellow Says Facebook ‘Lifted’ His Ideas for Libra Cryptocurrency - espeed
https://www.coindesk.com/mit-fellow-accuses-facebook-of-lifting-his-ideas-for-libra-cryptocurrency
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paulsutter
Oh come on, neither a basket of commodities nor a basket of currencies are
original ideas. During the security token craze of 2017/2018 many similar
ideas were proposed and we don’t see those folks whining about Libra.

One example was a local currency based on a basket of goods such as real
estate so that employers could pay a salary that adjusted as rents and other
costs changed locally. Hundreds of these ideas were discussed freely in
telegram groups.

The article is just outrage porn.

~~~
blhack
Hey that’s actually a great idea.

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cameldrv
Please. Even I had this idea in 2012 and I got it from being a user of Chaum’s
digicash in the nineties and understanding parts of how the IMF works, etc. I
even helped (not successfully) launch it in 2013. These ideas have been around
for a good while by many people, it’s just that crypto is mainstream enough
and facebook has enough clout now to take it seriously. If facebook ripped off
anyone it was John Maynard Keynes. That’s not to say that it is even that good
of an idea or that facebook will be successful with it.

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vitno
I know people who were working on, what is now called, Libra at FB more than a
year ago though. The paper was published a year ago. This just looks like a
case of multiple people having the same idea.

~~~
yodaml
It may just be another case of the "adjacent possible" principle at work.

~~~
TeMPOraL
"Adjacent possible" is the case of one of the weirdest possible definition for
a very simple concept. I see people quoting this:

"The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of
the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can
reinvent itself."

(Whatever the hell that means.)

Even though the concept is much simpler: "adjacent possible" is the set of
things within reach. Or: all the things on the border between what we have,
and what we could have.

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ejwessel
In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to whom
the idea first occurs. \- Francis Darwin.

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BubRoss
This is just like when Google stole my idea to run fiber optic internet to
people's houses. I totally had that idea a long time ago when I was trying to
download a gif with a 28.8 modem. I'm not sure which of the neighborhood kids
told Google about my idea but they sure screwed me over.

~~~
jboles
Yeah, I once had an idea for auto-scrolling based off tracking eye gaze
through the webcam. I never told Microsoft or Samsung about it, but they
totally stole my idea!!1eleventyone

~~~
dmihal
Even worse: Google stole my idea for self driving cars. I was like " it would
be cool if cars drove themselves" and sure enough, Google copies me. Do you
think I have grounds for a lawsuit?

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rdl
The idea of a market-basket currency goes back to at least 1976 and Hayek.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denationalization_of_Money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denationalization_of_Money)

~~~
m-i-l
The idea of a supranational currency goes back to at least 1940 and Keynes -
see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor) .

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anbop
MIT is supposed to create ideas that are “lifted” by others. Produce your
patent or shut up.

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compsciphd
cry me a river. It happens

Docker did the same thing to me.

Compare these two papers (published in 2010 and 2011 in conferences that
docker and everyone else in the space are regular participants at, for
reference Docker was announced in March 2013)

[https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/atc10/tech/full_papers/P...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/atc10/tech/full_papers/Potter.pdf)

[https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/full_papers...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/full_papers/Potter.pdf)

It was then patented (patent filed in 2011, issued in November 2013)

[https://patents.google.com/patent/US8589947B2/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US8589947B2/en)

This was also my "job talk" to IBM Research and it got me a post doc, but
didn't get much traction in support of continuing to pursue / refine the ideas
within IBM Research (which I find sort of ironic in retrospect with their
recent strategic moves)

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Animats
It's certainly not a novel idea. Arguably, it's "E-Gold 2.0".[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold)

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codegladiator
> this paper was published as part of this free-for-all part of the Free
> Science part of the Royal Society effort

But but ... can facebook not "lift for free" ?

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quotemstr
Nobody owns ideas.

~~~
csallen
If only more people understood this. Not only does nobody own an idea, but we
really don't want to live in a world where the opposite is true.

~~~
allana
Right to Read is a good piece on this topic:
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-
read.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html)

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0xC0FFEE
The paper was published 18 July 2018. The public inital commit of libra was on
18 June 2019 and had 1,063 changed files. That could be a coincidence or not.
Fact is, only one has realized the idea.

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xwdv
No sympathy for this guy at all. Think just because you’re an “MIT fellow”
your claims to an idea carry more weight than people from other institutions
or organizations? Get out of here with this entitlement, tons of people come
up with exactly the same ideas all the time.

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gibba999
Plus, 9 times out of 10, it's the MIT types who lift ideas from others and
promote them with MIT's increasingly well-polished hype machine. Within MIT,
Media Lab is central to this problem.

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malicioususer11
mark zuckerberg stole something? call the Police! :3

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doctorpangloss
Facebook's faithful copying is the large tech corp _standard operating
procedure_. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple will start product lines based
on accurate rumors about what the others are doing, and then cancel them as
soon as their competitors do. This form of "copy thy neighbor" just happened
with something like three major R&D products/features, one of which was
cancelled and another leaked in the tech press.

Sandy Pentland cares a lot about these things and it's too bad Facebook just
ripped this stuff off.

But he will have the last laugh: People already don't want to work at
Facebook. It didn't matter so much that all those supposedly smart people
aren't really capable of meaningful innovation. There will be a lot fewer of
those smart people now.

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skybrian
Which products/features do you mean?

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petre
Google+? Personal assistants? Self driving vehicles? Cargo drones?

