You pass a law. Most people don't break the law.
You make it illegal for banks to transfer to known Libra things. You audit people. You apply big fines.
Murder is illegal but that doesn't mean nobody can commit murder.
Libra is hardly morally questionable. If you want a better comparison take (software) piracy.
Piracy is illegal and while I'm sure Steam, Spotify, and Netflix has reduced it a lot it is still thriving and many people break the law if not daily at least monthly.
Best thing you can do is to make a law that forces banks to prevent payments to known Libra sellers, but again if there is value in Libra this hardly makes a difference.
For one unless there is official list of every entity that sells them and they get instantly blocked you could just buy them before they get blocked. Secondly you could just use PayPal to transfer the money (first to your PayPal wallet and then to the seller), EU is not crazy enough to block PayPal without an alternative in sight.
Secondly take any gray-market on the Internet. On these markets you can already use a range of payment methods starting with freaking Starbucks Gift Cards to just plain old cash.
Yes, yes, just like most laws it will keep the honest people honest and we can assume that at least in the start that will be most of the population, but such a law would be so trivial to bypass that if there is any benefit of having some Libra people will have it and outside of completely breaking privacy of EU citizens there is nothing they can do about it.
>Best thing you can do is to make a law that forces banks to prevent payments to known Libra sellers, but again if there is value in Libra this hardly makes a difference.
It does make a gigantic difference. They don't need to ban all of the Libra exchanges, just the big and knowledgeable ones, and go around banning anything that goes too big, so that people who want to retrieve EUR from Libra need to search a lot and comb through exchanges to see who's trustworthy. That makes using Libra a hassle, and if there's not a lot of adoption of Libra and it doesn't reach a critical mass, the currency becomes useless.
> if there is any benefit of having some Libra people will have it
That's a big if.
You skipped the part where I detail how underground markets already get past this. To reiterate here: banks can ban money transfers to the biggest exchange, but people can simply use PayPal, Bitcoin, Cash, or even gift cards to transfer the money.
Sure this will drop the most casual of users off, but again if there is value in Libra that hardly matters.
>That's a big if.
You need to realize that because someone is poking holes in what you believe doesn't mean they are completely against you. I have and probably will not advocate for anyone to use Libra. I have no Libra and I probably never will have any. I don't trade with any currency, I'm only interested in Bitcoin and other blockchain currencies as technology enthusiast.
I feel like people on the Internet often forget that the world isn't black and white. Just because I don't agree with one of your views doesn't mean I don't agree with the rest.
With digital goods such restrictions aren't nearly as big of an issue. You can trade (semi-)anonymously with very little fear of getting caught. You can easily disguise your country of origin and even hold the money off shore, all of which would have required a lot of capital to setup with actual gold in the 1930s.
Besides the context (and the legal aspect), they are the same act, homicide with intent. Their morality seem to be different depending who you ask.
And as for Libra being made illegal, I don't see what value it provides in EU to make it worth breaking the law.
Death penalty is not moral. How you got this out of my message is beyond me.
Killing enemy soldiers to defend your life or land is justifiable. They are trying to destroy you. But I guess this is weird from American point of view (I'm just assuming since I don't think anywhere else has death penalty still in use and other countries haven't been involved in war in foreign countries for past two decades), but killing people who don't look like you in their own land because they are firing at you because you have invaded them is actually immoral in more ways than one.
Maybe in Germany, most people will stay away from it but in Bulgaria, Spain, Italy etc. - in places where people are more "relaxed" about the law enforcement will not miss business opportunities just because their rich neighbours can afford to miss it.
If audits materialize they, the users will simply set-up or use proxies to deal with it. Someone in the USA will set-up an Libra-Bitcoin-Euro-USD exchange for example and the transactions will go through these. I can already see an Ukrainian-Russian-Bulgarian-Romanian-Turkish partnerships to run these operations. Europe is a mess, laws and enfrcement capacity is very different in every country and countries are in multiple clubs(in EU, in EEA, in customs union, in Eurozone, in schengen, not in EU but confirms to EU, not in Eurozone but the currency is pegged to Euro, in EU but not NATO, in NATO but not in the EU. It doesn't have an end) giving differnt rights and different obligations to people in each country and even messier when they are not in their own country or hold multiple citizenships.
The forming of a financial underworld in the Eurozone is pretty doubtful in my mind. Sure, enforcement varies country by country but if this would get a big enough problem we also have international efforts in the EU to get rid of it. Worst case somebody gets a data dump in lieu of Swiss tax evasion dumps on CDs a few years in and the laws against it get even stricter.
Not true. It depends on the country, in the UK you can buy SIM cards from wending machines that work straight out of the package and it's not he only country that does not require ID for SIM cards.
Anyway, even if your identity is tied to your Facebook account, what stops you from creating an American or a Filipino Facebook account? Phone number? You can buy a phone number online. You can also buy a verified Facebook account too.
Let's say that Facebook somehow starts operating as strict as a governmental body and checks everything, what stops you from buying Libra from an American or a Mexican? I haven't checked the details but this Libra thing doesn sound like Steam game money but like cryptocurrency, so they probably cannot do whatever they want just like that.
The theme here is that Facebook has lost the trust of too many important people, and maybe they just want to hurt what looks like another enormous American tech company that has been too careless and too aggressive.
They would just have conclusively proven that they ignore KYC regulations and are running the biggest money laundring operation ever
Let's not forget that the euro is a stable currency compared to most other markets libra wants to compete in (the developing world). What is in it for me as a consumer? Atleast the Eurozone has rules in place to protect my savings (up to 10.000 euro[0]).
Libra brings nothing to the table in terms of transaction speed or costs either (for the consumer atleast).
1 https://www.ecb.europa.eu/explainers/tell-me-more/html/depos...
(No, I don't get it either)
Not quite, in the case of Libra. Only a handful of companies control the nodes. Which makes it relatively easy to enforce a ban.
Sadly it is not uncommon to see people going to jail for stealing a few chicken because they were hungry, while many company owners and politicians hardly face any jail time for their proven corruption affairs.
Being popular and law seldom come hand in hand.
Stealing a chicken has a clearly defined victim and stealing, not even piracy or patent infringement is well understood and universally condemned action.
It's about time we all disabused ourselves of the libertarian utopian dream that just because cryptocurrency is on a distributed ledger than governments can't control it. "How do you stop people obtaining it and using it through their buddies on the internet" - quite simply, by telling them they'd go to jail, or get a hefty fine, for doing that.
Companies are even easier to control than people because their whole existence is made possible by laws and regulations of governments.
And this is how we know the "small government" slogan is an absolute sham.
That method does not work very well for e.g. weed.