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Comment by mrfenk | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people in this thread don't distinct between Libra the currency and Calibra the Facebook wallet. A wallet controlled by Facebook is indeed worrying, and I hope that there will be enough worthy competing alternatives. The Libra network on the other hand looks very solid.

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Anything controlled by Facebook is suspect by definition.

Libra will also be controlled by Facebook. This is a private blockchain. They can block your account no matter what your wallet is.

While I have zero interest in Libra/Calibra/whatever, Libra specifically _isnt_ controlled by Facebook. It's, at least legally, controlled by a non-profit consortium that Facebook is a part of, but I do not think is a controlling owner of.

Their interests can surely be aligned with a minor amount of high-level bargaining.

Unless this whole project is one big conspiracy, I don't see how this is true. Libra will be governed by at least a couple of dozen big corporations, some of which are in direct conflict with FB's agenda. FB will have to convince 67% of the nodes to make any non standard action and keep it a secret. That's a huge business risk. And from my reading of the white paper I don't see how you can actually block an address from submitting or receiving transactions. Am I missing something?

In the first release for 2020, it sounds like #corporatecoin will just be centrally run by one entity funded by FB- They "promise" in future versions to open it up to the full consortium.

That may be the protocol at launch but the protocol can always be changed/hardforked, including (as an extreme example) to just centralize the system into VISA/MC style db at FB after achieving wide adoption.

AFAICT power ultimately rests with whoever can modify the most widely-used consumer SW implementation, which would probably be FB here. Though Apple and Google may have considerable veto power over updates pushed through their app stores, iff FB makes this primarily a cell phone app instead of a web app.

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