What? Is this a joke? Bitcoin was created by a nobody with no money. Same with litecoin, same with ether, etc etc. In the 1890's and before most currency was created by banks, not governments, and this only changed with the introduction of the modern federal reserve. I'm honestly sort of surprised the NYT would write such a bad piece; their opinion section has really gone downhill in the last few years.
1) "Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Open Markets Institute." 2) A nobody with no money has no influence over anyone. The product has to sell itself. Bitcoin has. 3) Banks created currency for governments. You're describing scrip, which is of limited purpose. Libra is scrip, not currency, but Facebook intends to use it as currency above and beyond the currencies in its native targets (India, Nigeria, etc). 4) Governments have power over banks. Nigeria, India etc. do not have power over Facebook.
Stuck behind a paywall, but I’ll have to say I disagree with the conclusion. The idea that a company has to be any particular size to be able to start a block chain currency is bonkers. Also, it is supposed to be backed by the American dollar, so it’s really just a different way, a bit further removed, of competing with PayPal. Don’t get me wrong, Facebook starting up a pseudo decentralized cytocurrency puts up all sorts of red flags considering how much they care about privacy. Perhaps it will be a good thing that allows us to have a greater swath of the population exposed to the idea of crypto currencies. May be the users will switch over to a better, and more private currency later on.
A permissionless currency system based on a consensus of large private actors across open protocols sounds nice, but it’s not democracy. Today, American bank regulators and central bankers are hired and fired by publicly elected leaders. Libra payments regulators would be hired and fired by a self-selected council of corporations. There are ways to characterize such a system, but democratic is not one of them. Wishing that the title had focused on the stronger impacts of the article. From a glance at the headline, I assumed this would be bashing Facebook rather than the ideas it's putting forth. Glad I clicked through and read further, but I want more people to read this and I don't think the author did themselves a favor here.With the success of a private parallel currency, government sanctions could lose their bite. Should Facebook and a supermajority of venture capitalists and tech executives really be deciding whether North Korean sanctions can succeed? Of course not.
"There are four core problems with Facebook’s new currency. The first, and perhaps the simplest, is that organizing a payments system is a complicated and difficult task, one that requires enormous investment in compliance systems. Banks pay attention to details, complying with regulations to prevent money-laundering, terrorist financing, tax avoidance and counterfeiting. Recreating such a complex system is not a project that an institution with the level of privacy and technical problems like Facebook should be leading. (Or worse, failing to recreate such safeguards could facilitate money-laundering, terrorist financing, tax avoidance and counterfeiting.)" I couldn't agree more with that, but people worrying more about the personal data that Facebook could take advantage of, omitting the other possible problems.
There are so many downsides to a world using Libra and very few upsides. Payments should flow over a protocol that no one owns, not Facebook, not the US government. Governments can get involved with the on-ramps and off-ramps their citizens use, and in representative governments, the citizens ought to decide what that involvement looks like. Baking authority into the protocol itself is economic tyranny.
But wouldn't it be better to have the option? If there are no upsides then people can just not use it and it'll go out of business. If there are upsides then those who benefit can use it and everyone else can choose to use normal currency. I don't understand how having less options would be better for anyone