MIT Fellow Says Facebook ‘Lifted’ His Ideas for Libra Cryptocurrency

[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.

[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.

[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.

[RobLach]

You can also be working on something and a paper comes along that fills in some gaps in your concept you may or may not have been aware of.

[yodaml]

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

[ejwessel]

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

[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

[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

[m-i-l]

The idea of a supranational currency goes back to at least 1940 and Keynes - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor .

[anbop]

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

[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/events/lisa11/tech/full_papers...

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

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)

[Animats]

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

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

[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" ?

[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.

[Causality1]

To quote Thomas Jefferson,

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."

[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.

[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.

[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.

[malicioususer11]

mark zuckerberg stole something? call the Police! :3

[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.

[sincerely]

>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.

I don't keep up with tech press leaks. What products/features were they?

[skybrian]

Which products/features do you mean?

[dymk]

> But he will have the last laugh: People already don't want to work at Facebook.

This is one of the most HN-bubbled statements I’ve ever seen