Facebook recently announced a new project, Libra, whose mission is to be “a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people”. The announcement has predictably been met with scepticism by organisations like Privacy International, regulators in the U.S. and Europe, and the media at large. This is wholly justified given the look of the project’s website, which features claims of poverty reduction, job creation, and more generally empowering billions of people, wrapped in a dubious marketing package.
To start off, there is the (at least for now) permissioned aspect of the system. One appealing aspect of cryptocurrencies is their potential for decentralisation and censorship resistance. It wasn’t uncommon to see the story of PayPal freezing Wikileak’s account in the first few slides of a cryptocurrency talk motivating its purpose. Now, PayPal and other well-known providers of payment services are the ones operating nodes in Libra.
There is some valid criticism to be made about the permissioned aspect of a system that describes itself as a public good when other cryptocurrencies are permissionless. These are essentially centralised, however, with inefficient energy wasting mechanisms like Proof-of-Work requiring large investments for any party wishing to contribute.
There is a roadmap towards decentralisation, but it is vague. Achieving decentralisation, whether at the network or governance level, hasn’t been done even in a priori decentralised cryptocurrencies. In this sense, Libra hasn’t really done worse so far. It already involves more members than there are important Bitcoin or Ethereum miners, for example, and they are also more diverse. However, this is more of a fault in existing cryptocurrencies rather than a quality of Libra.