I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by being tasked with making financial Rube Goldberg machines.
Meanwhile when you pay with a credit card, merchant has access to very little data.
There are also various cryptocurrency backed cards which offer varying levels of anonymity.
2. Libra is actually operated by the libra association. Facebook only has a minority voting share in that association.
3. Transaction throughput of libra is 1,000 transactions per second compared to bitcoin's 7 transactions per second. In comparison visa does about 1,400 transactions per second currently. In theory, it would be possible to increase the transactions per second of libra if it gains widespread use.
For (2), I look at it this way: A swimming pool can be 99% pure water, but if it's 1% poop I don't want to dip my feet in it.
As for (3), Visa can do something like 250k transactions per second. The blockchain aspect of this system unnecessarily hobbles it, and it seems like really the blockchain aspect just tacks on a techy buzzword that offers no compelling features that a purely centralized database can't do better.
Not sure how much you swim but
7.14*10^-6% of every swimming pool is per, atleast.
Regarding your second point, of course they're gonna abstract it. There's no way in hell people would trust it if it were labeled as Facebook Libra. The only way for it to get any momentum is by people being tricked into thinking it's some sort of an independent entity that happens to be supported by Facebook and others.
I don't buy it, and neither should anyone else. Even if they make just 5% of the profit that Libra generates... somehow, that's still 5% more than Facebook would receive otherwise. It ain't even released yet, and I already know that I'll go out of my way to avoid ever touching it. I assume most of HN readers will do the same.