Been saying this was going to happen for a long time. Massive mixed feelings. Watch out for large tech companies now vying to become central banks.
It’s still all about Bitcoin and hopefully this will be an onramp for continued Bitcoin adoption.
Analysis below not my own:
“Libra whitepaper initial analysis: The only digital currency other than bitcoin that matters, and it could succeed massively. But it does not compete with bitcoin, it reinforces bitcoin’s value proposition, and will likely need to rely on bitcoin if it succeeds.
Facebook has some 2 billion accounts, and extremely detailed data on them. Its extensive data mining & identity verification capabilities mean it has the potential to build by far the largest platform by user number of any financial institution.
To on-board billions, Visa or Paypal need to go through people’s banks to verify their identity, which is highly expensive, manual and unscalable. FB tracks your every move & knows you better than you or your mom do. They don’t need a bank & can scale much faster.
An international transaction on the Visa network has to go through clearance & settlement through many financial institutions and central banks, entailing costs & risks. On Libra, users can transact peer-to-peer through only one institution. The perks of 2b+ users!
Libra being backed by national currencies means it is backed by the USD, since all other national currencies at this point are backed by USD and managed by central banks to try to stay stable against the dollar. Other government coins are just dollars + issuer risk.
For billions of people, a dollar-backed Libra on your phone globally is infinitely superior to national currency in market depth & maintaining value. If it succeeds, Libra will likely destroy most 3rd world currencies, or force them to be fully pegged to & backed by the US dollar
For billions of people, a FB-based payment network will offer more and cheaper transactions than any other KYC/AML platforms. If it succeeds, Libra will likely eat most fiat payment processors like Visa, Paypal, and Western Union, particularly those functioning in the third world
Dot not underestimate how powerful and beneficial such a network could be. If access to global finance & the USD were as easy as access to a FB account, billions of people’s lives would be improved drastically.
In the short-run, Libra will only survive by being subservient to the USD & pegged to it. In the long-run, it will only survive by being subservient to bitcoin and pegged to it. The only other fate possible is the life & inevitable death of yet another irrelevant stupid shitcoin.”