“…but instead get just a single vote in its governance like other founding members of the Libra Association, including Visa, Uber and Andreessen Horowitz, which have invested at least $10 million each into the project’s operations.”
Furthermore, efforts are being made to address concerns over privacy and control of user data:
“Facebook is launching a subsidiary company also called Calibra that handles its crypto dealings and protects users’ privacy by never mingling your Libra payments with your Facebook data so it can’t be used for ad targeting. Your real identity won’t be tied to your publicly visible transactions.”
Even better, the underlying software is open source. So, conspiracy theories aside, this really doesn’t look like an attempt to establish top-control over the global economy.
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So, nothing to worry about, then. In fact, something to look forward to – a super-efficient payments system minus the rip-off merchants. But before we see Zuckerberg as a Christ-like figure, over-turning the money-changers’ tables, here are three little things that might just cause concern:
Firstly, Facebook doesn’t need exclusive control over Libra to become enormously more powerful. Consider the World Wide Web, which established a user-friendly and seamless means of exchanging information. The Web is governed on a model that is even more ‘open’ than Libra, yet that didn’t stop the tech giants (including Facebook) from establishing a dominant position.
Libra, if it succeeds, would establish a user-friendly and seamless means of financial exchange. The world apart that is Chinese internet provides a model of what happens when the distinction between the tech and finance industries is erased. For instance, the Chinese mobile payments market is fifty times bigger than in America and WeChat (the closest equivalent to Facebook) has a commanding position as the “app for everything.” Libra could create similar conditions in the west and Facebook would be ideally positioned to take advantage.
Secondly, the fact that Libra itself is designed to keep information about individual payments secure, anonymous and decentralised is not necessarily good news. One way of getting the notoriously undertaxed tech sector to pay its fair share is to use levies to target it’s revenues at source – e.g. as generated by advertising clicks or online sales. That could prove more effective than trying to apply corporation tax to the industry’s well-massaged and footloose profits. All the time that the tech giants know exactly where each dribble of revenue comes from, the law can be used to verify the taxes that ought to be paid on it.
That however could be rendered impossible by a completely anonymised and opaque transactional system. Expect tech-savvy governments to pay very close attention to how the technology evolves – privacy must not become the enemy of transparency.
Thirdly, what if those controlling Libra decided to behave really, really badly – i.e. like the monetary authority of a sovereign state? The early indications are that the system is intended to operate within very strict limits. As described above, Libra will only be issued in exchange for an equivalent amount in a hard currency like US Dollars. This is to create confidence in Libra as a reliable store of value, without which it is unlikely to achieve widespread acceptance.
But imagine a future in which Libra or some rival system is well on the way to becoming a de facto global currency. The closer it gets to achieving the status of a universal means of exchange, the more it will become its own guarantee of value – valuable not because it is exchangeable for other, more conventional currencies, but because enough people need and want Libra. At that point, its controllers will be tempted (or may even be pressured) to turn on the metaphorical printing presses and issue Libra backed up by nothing except public faith in the system.
One method might be to set up a Libra bank that creates currency out of thin air, lends it out and then destroys the money when it is repaid (but pockets the interest paid by the borrower). That might seem completely bizarre, but this is how conventional fiat currencies and conventional banks already work – in the modern world, that’s where money comes from.
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To be clear, there’s zero evidence that this is the Libra masterplan. The objective is to create a cheap, easy and reliable way of buying and selling, giving and receiving, just about anywhere in the world – a bridge between countries and their currencies, not a rival source of monetary power. The irony is that the more Libra succeeds in its stated objectives, the more it will be seen as a potential threat to the established order.
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