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Comment by henriquez | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg’s original aspiration with Libra before he had to walk it back was enough for any reasonable person to nope out: a world currency controlled by a cartel of multinational corporations accountable not to the citizens of their constituent countries, but to shareholders and capital owners.

If anyone seriously thinks this sounds like a good idea I’m truly curious to hear your reasoning.

In my view this was always a cynical ploy by Zuckerberg. He would love to control a huge piece of the world economy, but I believe he knows that the outcry from real governments would never allow that - so he could hedge by trying to have his project regulated out of existence and taking decentralized tech with it. Decentralized tech is the greatest long term competitive threat to Facebook. Zuckerberg knows it and would love to see it incidentally banned as a casualty of taking down Libra, but his mistake was overplaying his hand too early.

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I think the thought process is that paper money is already controlled by world governments, so this isn't meant to be a replacement for paper money, but rather just an intermediary so the transfer of money can be done more easily and cheaper.

I think another point is that if you want a truly decentralized, no government involved, cryptocurrency, those still exist, go buy and use some bitcoin.

>If anyone seriously thinks this sounds like a good idea I’m truly curious to hear your reasoning.

I generally feel positive about something like Libra and I'm not in favour of decentralised currency. Decentralised currency is hard to tax, threatens the sovereignty of nation states, the ability to enact sanctions, enables crime and I'm not really on board with that.

Libra (or something like it) looks like a way to built a cheap, frictionless payment that in any practical sense mostly seems to illemininate costs of transaction if it scales up well enough, and I think that's where most utility comes from in a currency. I don't see the value in some slow network that changes its value twenty times per month for the average person just so that you can stick it to the man or whatever.

As to 'controlling the world economy'. I've never really understood how this is supposed to be the result of Libra. At the end of the day it's basically a Paypal without the middleman. The Libra owners will at some point earn some money on interest but otherwise I don't really see how this confers any monstrous powers to them. As far as that goes I'm more concerned about the Facebook platform itself.

The precaution for control seems the custodial operations, where currency cummulates under the operators' trust, ie. in FB&col. The little step for keeping what you obtain in the platform inside it for further use within it is what agregates significant risk.

"If anyone seriously thinks this sounds like a good idea I’m truly curious to hear your reasoning."

I don't know if it is a good idea, but I don not share the view that being a private entity makes it lesser than government entities.

I see governments and private entities as being built by people, and those are flawed just the same, governments even more so, since they are the perpetrators of the greatest evils of modern times.

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