Libra Falls But Gov Needs Bitcoin

Facebook’s attempt to launch a fiat backed stable cryptocurrency has for all purposes failed as many of the founding corporations back out.

Mastercard, Visa, eBay and Stripe, have joined PayPal in ditching the initiative just months after it launched in June.

Meaning this project is pretty much over amidst intense political pressure including by the French finance minister and Trump himself.

The latter showed his grandpa years by mixing bitcoin with Libra, completely different things that in many ways have nothing to do with each other.

Yet some think this is a blow to crypto innovation. That Facebook’s coin could have introduced many to the crypto space. That the token could have allowed them to experiment with a potentially non ad supported social network.

Others think this project was just Silicon Valley doing what Silicon Valley does. Crush competition. Buy it out to extinguish it or copy it out of existence.

There was nothing to buy here however, except maybe Coinbase, so they went with the copying method. Something like let us do this better than free tokenized model first instead of waiting for all these start-ups to boot us out.

That shows them oblivious to the fact Facebook is despised, partly because Zuckerberg himself basically said he wanted control.

This open corporate mapping of human relations for all to data-mine and manipulate is repulsive in itself, not least because Facebook accounts keep being hacked en mass with Facebook doing nothing about it.

Adding a financial component to this monstrosity in a way that is totally controllable by Zuckerberg, was a proposal that reflexively was rejected by cryptonians, the public, and the elected.

Some however suggest this is what would happen to bitcoin too if it reaches any scale, but such suggestion misses many differences and nuances.

While Libra in practice was controlled by corporations under the leadership of Zuckerberg, bitcoin, ethereum, and any other decent public blockchain is controlled by an idea.

Just what that idea is can vary and change, but fundamentally it’s an alternative to the banking system, both the issuing central bank and the semi-issuing commercial banks.

The central bank is a quasi private-public monstrosity that is itself currently going through some transformations outside of this space in as far as the elected in some places are exercising more and more jurisdiction over it.

Commercial banks are an even greater monstrosity as political awareness is lacking in regards to their power over the elected, the economy, and the public.

They are however somewhat decentralized in as far as there are four banks which kind of run everything in USA. With other countries then sort of having their own four banks.

Facebook could have turned into a complete merger of all these banks, with just one so having the immense power.

Even without such merger, there are considerable concerns by the elected and by the public over a different sort of merger, over a different sort of total control.

The convenience of contactless payments even for small amounts of a dollar or two, is making cash vanish.

This can have considerable implications for the banking system itself which would lose the only real method of public accountability through cash management, and politically over the far greater increase in power of commercial banks.

This centralization of different methods of fiat money makes an alternative necessary because humans cheat and the only way we know to prevent it at a systematic scale is through the dispersion of power, or more plainly said through alternatives and competition.

Digital cash, like bitcoin or ethereum, can easily serve this purpose of providing modern cash so that you don’t have to go through a bank to perform a value transferring function.

With digital cash, the disappearance of fiat cash can be less important because there would still be a space for freedom.

Such freedom is necessary at least de minimis and has always existed, even in outright totalitarian dictatorships like North Korea where black markets are tolerated in daily and public life, but are not overtly tolerated.

Hence perhaps why no country on earth of significance has found it fit to pass a law to make the possession of bitcoin illegal. India is considering it, but we doubt they’d like to gain an international reputation of being more authoritarian than China.

This free flow outside of the system keeps the system itself in check, accountable, and responsive.

With it, the system adapts in time. Without it, the system dies from sclerosis. That’s Darwin.

The necessity of revolting edges that keep the core mobile has been underestimated and continues to be underestimates despite history making it clear that without it, there is no system.

Yet as it becomes clear the pendulum has swang too much towards total control, a new generation is finding it necessary to extend those edges, to pressure the system more, for it is failing to adapt.

Not fully. The clarification by the Bank of England that commercial banks create money by the stroke of pen when they issue a loan, has gone some way towards a better understanding.

Yet FED’s claim of potential “political upheavals” if the public is made aware of what role interest plays in the current financial system, may have taken two steps back in regards to any attempt to adapt this massive machine to the needs of a far more complex age that is vastly different from the one where it was established.

This tension between a current system and a potentially challenger system is manageable due to the incremental nature of innovation which like seasons does not go straight from autumn to winter, but does so gradually and almost unnoticeably.

For it to be manageable, however, adaptation is necessary as otherwise the current system risks losing touch completely, which would not be desirable, neither for peasants nor kings.

That’s because both would benefit far more from the gradual improvement of the current system through pressure by alternative or challenger systems where all understand that the process is healthy and necessary.

Such understanding is the basis of our freedom. The opposite of it is the basis of revolution.

The latter seems like fiction, things of books. Yet any educated man or woman knows very well they can be inevitable if there is no adaptation.

For it is not the strongest that survive, nor the most intelligent, but those most adaptable to change.

Bitcoin is undisputedly change. It soon will be the hardest money known to man. And it is change very much needed for there has been a trend for 20 years towards far too much centralization, far too much control, far too much micro-managing, and yes, even far too much enslavement.

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