The Libra white paper was recently released by Facebook and my reaction is pretty much the same as anyone else who has been into bitcoin for a couple of years now. It uses all the pc buzzwords to try to convince you that they are aligned with the trend that has been developing since bitcoin’s repudiation of the atrocious behavior of the banks as indicated in the genesis block by the statement “03/Jan/2009, The Times, Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” shortly after the 2008 banking crisis.
While those of us in the crypto community aren’t fooled by this, future newcomers will be overwhelmed by the information overload and most people who are not currently into bitcoin won’t understand the difference. Those differences are critical to the cause of freedom and financial sovereignty. Facebook will simply play a numbers game favored by its massive network effect of 2.3 billion users which will censor what is likely to be minimal dissent to allow adoption of Libra on its platform.
Facebook has already proven capable of censorship under the guise of “hate speech” and “fake news” and mission creep will allow it to censor “hate values” when the issue of “fake money” begins to crop up as Andreas Antonopoulos has predicted. China is already ahead in this regard with a similar social media app known as WeChat Pay that is used pretty much universally in the region, but has all the bad qualities such as censorship insistence, bordered KYC, far from neutral, etc…
I left Facebook and Twitter almost 2 years ago now and I did so while running my own software business. I used to use FB’s advertising platform and I know for certain that FB was the platform that allowed my card information to become compromised because I got that card specifically for that single purpose. It was used in a fraudulent attempt to deduct more than $300 USD from my bank in the first month of existence. I caught this and submitted a dispute on the charges and they were reversed. But I also cut up that card. Somehow FB failed to protect that payment information.
None of the above surprised me, but I had finally had enough by early 2017 and closed nearly all of my centralized social media accounts. While I had already been a voluntarist at heart for many years at that point, the discovery of the bitcoin white paper made me realize that we finally had a practical solution to sustain a social state of disordered decentralized consensus. Anarchy is potentially no longer a temporary “treasured” state between regime collapses, but can be mathematically enforced in accord with natural law (which is law that humans have no control over). However, we are still in the very early stages of the visions proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik Buterin. We are (at least in the west) headed for digital “panopticopia” first.
Caitlin Long seems to think that this development will become a gateway drug to bitcoin adoption. To some extent this may be true, but I think the chance of decentralized cryptocurrencies being overshadowed in the near term is far greater. What is most likely to happen is after a near term legal challenge, Facebook will be forced to secretly settle on full KYC and AML regulations. Their white paper says that transactions and social media accounts won’t be linked, but if they were really to do that, they would be in violation of securities laws. As a centralized entity running a global currency, they will have no choice but to submit to authority.
I think it’s very likely that regulators will see this as their best chance to stave off the threat bitcoin and other truly decentralized crypto’s to their power, so I think that an agreement of some sort between FB and the US government to allow for its existence is practically certain. The list of current “validators” (what Facebook is calling their fake decentralized entities validating transactions) will probably grow and include such entities as Amazon and Google which will seize the world’s means of production using capital controls.
These entities will likely attempt to form a world government in the next decade where capital controls will make bitcoin and other “unsanctioned” crypto’s useless for buying anything tangible in the physical world. Black markets of course won’t be going away, but that means a premium on those kinds of services which will likely make decentralized crypto’s even more difficult to work with than they are now.
I think this next year is going to be absolutely critical in this industry. A showdown is likely to happen next spring between the old powers that shouldn’t be and the new rising tech oligarch’s. They won’t be fighting for “our freedom” though it is likely to be presented that way. They will be fighting for control.
This internal government conflict over cryptocurrencies, along with the issue of deep fakes capable of cracking their mind control algorithms offer the public the best chance for prosperity. These parasites have numbed the masses by injecting toxins through the control of mass media and centralized social media, but deep fakes, especially video, damage the intoxication effect of social media dopamine highs by forcing reality to come into question. Too much of that and nobody will be able to function without truly thinking for themselves, and that’s not something TPTSB will allow to happen.
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