Quotes from David Gerard

Developers could use the "credit_balance" interface to see how many Credits a user had309 — and Facebook confirmed that developers could use this to identify the biggest Credit holders, and squeeze them for even more money.

A "permissionless" cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is built to be out of anyone's control, wastes incredible amounts of electricity — Bitcoin uses about as much power as all of Austria45 — and would be a completely silly idea for a company to develop as an investment, unless they were maintaining control by other means.

Of course, the most common pitch for Bitcoin is much simpler: you might get rich for free. People will say and do any ridiculous thing if they might get rich for free. The one really consistent ideology in Bitcoin is: "number go up.

Governments won't let Facebook use its superpower — negligence — to disrupt their economy. Enabling genocide in Myanmar is one thing, but messing with our ability to buy Chick-fil-A and Land Rovers is another level. — Scott Galloway, NYU Stern

Let's say an unsavory app developer that's based in Pakistan utilizes an exchange that's based in Thailand to rip off an Arizonan who's using a wallet that was built in Spain, so they steal all of their Libra. And that, of course, is minted by an association based in Switzerland. So which law enforcement or government or agency in which country does the Arizonan call to seek his or her Libra and financial recourse in this situation?

was glaringly obvious that a new currency at Facebook scale would be a systemic risk — it would be big enough to break everything. Regulators and legislators had Libra's number immediately — they knew this kind of foolishness, and they knew that these Bitcoin venture capital bros were absolutely stupid and arrogant enough to do another 2008 financial crisis all by themselves.

Prospective users hear the blockchain hype and assume the hypothetical plans are real products that exist now — though "the blockchain could" is a phrase that really means "the blockchain doesn't," because if it did, they'd say that.

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. — Milton Friedman

Facebook made $50 billion from advertising in 2018 — $25 on average for each user, and $112 per North American user.1

When Silicon Valley says "disruption," this means they don't understand what they're doing, don't care to understand, and have only contempt for anyone who objects. "Move fast and break things," as Facebook used to put it.

Facebook's obvious use case for a payment system was to be yet another source of personal information on users. Every regulator and commentator noticed this immediately.

Blockchains don't solve settlement and compliance issues — they're only more efficient if they can bypass regulation. Libra could only be more efficient than existing systems as long as it could dodge regulation, and none of its competitors could.

Facebook is too big and too powerful, and it is unconscionable for financial companies to aid it in monopolizing our economic infrastructure. I trust others will see the wisdom of avoiding this ill-conceived undertaking.

The Libra plan came out when Facebook was under increasingly close attention from governments, who were deeply suspicious of the company's track record on privacy, election manipulation and falsified news.

This all points to the real attraction of the project for Facebook. Libra isn't really for consumers — Libra is Facebook's call to arms against the very notion of regulation. Facebook wants to be too big to regulate, and lead the way for its Silicon Valley fellows to be too big to regulate.

Neither political nor monetary sovereignty can be shared with private interests.

The poor are poor, not stupid — and their living conditions are different in each country.

Stablecoin systems are payment systems, and the biggest problem with international payments is not the technology — it's compliance with anti-money-laundering laws. Cryptocurrencies mostly work around this by ignoring it — but Libra couldn't be allowed to do that.

The greatest day-to-day enemy of the poor is the middle-class bureaucrat who contemptuously treats them as data to be processed, without care to their needs or circumstances

After the past few months of the world heaping ordure on Libra

Real finance has human oversight and trusted responsibility all through it — and not automated systems that humans can't touch. Unfortunately, Libra's Bitcoin ancestry was still clear in the design of the system.

A financial system running entirely on smart contract programs on a public blockchain is a big, juicy single target for hackers.

As an internationally frictionless private currency founded by millionaires and billionaires, Libra would mostly be used, not by individuals to buy goods and services — but by people like its founders to move capital with much greater ease. Evading capital controls is strongly promoted by the Bitcoin subculture as a use case for cryptocurrency — as Libra's creators well know.

You may be on Facebook lots — but would you trust Facebook with your money? For most people, the answer was "no.