Facebook, funny money and Libra

Waters is, on some level, sincere: the company's record on privacy protections are not so much shoddy, as horrendous, if only because they anathematize them altogether. Monetisation is premised on doing away with privacy, usually under the false impression that consent has been extracted in the process. Data is the secular version of religion's soul, to be prized away from the human subject, and sold.

Other states are qualified in assessing the currency. The Russian Ministry of Finance, through deputy minister Alexei Moisseev, told reporters this week that Libra would receive the treatment afforded any other digital asset. Such regulatory treatment has legislatively stalled thus far, but the minister was emphatic enough. "Nobody is going to ban it."

This was not be confused with the status of the currency: as with other cryptocurrencies, legal tender was out of the question. Purchasing goods and services with such assets would be impossible, though it would "be possible to buy it, sell it, keep it".

Like other behemoths of history, Facebook realises that a degree of dissimulation is necessary. Knowing privacy to be its Achilles heel in any regulatory scrap, it has come up with its own variant of a regulator, advertised as a cure-all. Libra Association, a non-profit, Geneva-based body is supposedly one step removed in keeping Facebook out of overseeing the currency. The digital wallet of the new currency, Calibra, is said to share limited data with the mother ship, even if it entails using Facebook's Messenger and WhatsApp applications. (A standalone application is set to follow in 2020.) Protections such as fraud checks are also built in, including a consensus model described as a "proof of stake" featuring transactions authorised by those with a stake in the currency.

The Libra Association has been gathering the names, having 28 weighty co-founders. To Facebook can be added such corporate entities as MasterCard, Paypal, Visa, Spotify, Uber, Vodafone Group, Andreessen Horowitz and eBay. Notable absentees are the banks themselves, deemed the stuff shirts of the modern money market.

States, and their banking arms, are unlikely to have their currency gates stormed by this new cryptocurrency, though some nibbling of market share is anticipated. The main banking priority remains issuing loans to customers and companies. While electronic money payments, in their nature, can threaten the money lending function of banks, a point that would also affect interest rates, Facebook will have to do a bit more if it seeks an insurrection that lasts.