todaysgazette.com
Facebook’s Libra, a stable digital currency designed to be complaint with regulatory guidelines and principles, received series of spanks from the United States Senate yesterday.
The Head of Facebook’s Calibra and a former employee of PayPal, David Marcus was at the other side of the table receiving big shots from the Senate Banking Committee.
The CSO of Blockstream, Samson Mow, after watching the senate committee hearing on Facebook’s Libra concluded that the digital currency is “so screwed”.
Finished watching the entirety of the Senate Banking Committee hearings today.@Libra_ is so screwed.
— Samson Mow (@Excellion) July 17, 2019
Samson, penning down his thoughts on the hearing, concluded that Marcus does not have a deep idea of “what he is building”.
He said the head of Calibra continuously conflated Free and Open-source Software (FOSS) with open permissionless systems.
The blockchain security expert submitted that Bitcoin cannot be all in one, and can’t be open and closed at the same time.
Samson aired that the statement made by Marcus that the Libra Network, the code base especially, is open sourced and does not belong to Facebook but the community, shows that the network gives the dev team the opportunity to remove the “AML/KYC components in a non-Calibra wallet”, while still having the opportunity to relate with the Libra network without any issue.
The security expert noted that the above statements by Marcus invalidate the claim that Calibra “Wallets will enforce the sanctions that are led by our national security apparatus and treasury.”
Although, the senators did not connect the two statements of David Marcus, however, Samson said it would have been more interesting if the senate had done.
Samson Mow suggested that the only means to guarantee Facebook’s Libra full compliance is to be in complete control.
“You can’t have only Calibra wallets requiring authenticated government ID’s but not others,” Samson said.
He said the claim by Marcus that Facebook’s Libra “wanted to ensure people, as long as they have a legitimate use of the product, can do what they want with their money” opens the network to the same centralized problems faced by PayPal among others.
Samson cautioned that anytime the “legitimate use” door is opened, “it’s all over”. The crypto expert said once Libra Association decides that something is not legitimate, then the money used is frozen or the user get de-platformed.
Yesterday, the US house minority leader, said Libra is not decentralised but Facebook is.