Quotes from David Gerard

Bitcoin also promised to solve the problems of the existing financial system and get rid of its middlemen — and then it recreated most of those middlemen, but incompetently

Agustín Carstens of BIS acknowledged in June 2019: "There needs to be evidence for demand for central bank digital currencies and it is not clear that the demand is there yet. Perhaps people can do what they want by using electronic wallets provided by banks or fintech companies. It depends on the development of payment systems.

Facebook and a cartel of junior partners will leverage their platform power to establish a global financial surveillance system, on the back of public monetary systems. — Raúl Carrillo, Demand Progress

What does Facebook want from a private currency so much that they're offering to lose money to run it? The obvious answer is: personal data — because Facebook always wants personal data. Facebook's business is selling personal data to advertisers.

Would Facebook break Mark Zuckerberg's promises not to use spending data from its Calibra/Novi wallet for ad targeting? Past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour — so we should expect that Facebook will break these promises. Facebook does not take "no" or "never" for an answer. We should assume that one of Zuckerberg's key goals with the Libra project is to harvest as much personal data as possible.

These are only the most prominent examples. Facebook's history of personal data abuse is extensive, and consistent. Given the chance, you can be sure Facebook will abuse users' data — no matter what permissions the users think they gave, and no matter the promises Facebook may have made to regulators.

There is no innovation whatsoever. They have literally invented nothing. Libra is possibly the least innovative project to ever come out of Silicon Valley. — Aleksi Grym

Facebook even builds shadow profiles on Internet users who aren't Facebook users, by using the Facebook buttons included on web pages. All the incentives are for Novi to use a "Pay with Novi" web page button to collect data on non-users, in the same way, and there's nothing to stop them.