Digital currency Libra needs the global reach of Facebook to thrive, but its opposition is also driven by the social network. Controversy reigns as regulators assemble
By June 2019, there were more than 2,400 cryptocurrencies in circulation, with occasional daily launches. Most of them were almost useless, virtually no one knew of them, and they would never be. So when another –called Libra –was announced on June 18 in a white paper, you might have expected that it would not attract more attention than any of the others.
Yet Libra has received a huge amount of attention from the moment of its launch. The project made many of the same promises for most new digital currencies to venture: it would work more efficiently than existing payment technologies, avoiding the enormous spikes and falling in value that made Bitcoin, the first and best-known cryptocurrency, such a roulette wheel. More eye-catching was his pledge to reach billions of unbanked people around the world–people with little or no exposure to the global financial system–to open up vast new business and work opportunities for at least some of the world’s poor and revolutionize the global financial system.
One of the biggest supporters was the main reason people heard this time: Twitter. Freshly emerging from a seemingly endless series of data privacy controversies, the social media giant now emerged as the lead partner in a plan to create a new global currency alongside a consortium of other major tech, finance, and business firms, and vowed to carry it out in early 2020.
Clearly, Libra was attacked from all sides in the weeks and months following its launch. Cryptocurrency fans said that Libra was not a true cryptocurrency because it violates some of the basic principles advocated by the sometimes techno-anarchic fan base in the community–including the important distinction that Libra transactions still depend on confidence rather than mathematical proof.
Others attacked Libra as an accumulation of corporate power. Economists cautioned that it might challenge the influence of countries over their own monetary policy, thus undermining democracy. And lawmakers and regulators around the world came together to say they would launch investigations or take action against the fledgling currency before it even started.
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