There’s no financial advantage to Facebook – whether they use cryptocurrency or a Western Union type setup, they will have to comply with a bunch of regulation everywhere they operate.
For users, the difference is that it will be easier to violate local laws (including inadvertently). In most cases you are free to transfer as much cash between countries as you want, though you usually have to report transactions over a certain amount, and some countries (e.g. China) do have other restrictions. In any case, the rules apply just the same whether you’re transferring paper dollars, electronic euros, BitCoins or whatever. If you do it through your bank, they will automatically report it, whereas with a cryptocurrency transfer it’s up to you to comply with the law. Taxes don’t enter into it per se; that’s a matter of why you received money, not how. Though, again, it is easier to evade taxes when the government can’t see your money.
It is very hard to think of a good reason for this cryptocurrency. There are a few plausible bad reasons:
- it reassures users that Facebook can’t see who they’re paying; except that you’re still taking Facebook’s word for that since it’s their app
- it reassures users that the government can’t see that info, but see above, plus, this is an inherently dubious thing to want
- if your local currency collapses, you have ready access to fungible dollar-denominated currency to buy food. Also: you are now dependent on Facebook to be able to buy food
- it has the meaningless, mystical cachet of being cryptocurrency, which is a ridiculous thing to say, but then you hear about, like, ice cream companies doubling their stock price by putting “crypto” in their name and I can’t even
In short, this sounds like a shitshow and I wish they just wouldn’t
