I'm pretty skeptical about Libra overall. In the case where it succeeds massively as in some of Matt Levine's recent thought experiments, I'm not convinced tha

I'm pretty skeptical about Libra overall. In the case where it succeeds massively as in some of Matt Levine's recent thought experiments, I'm not convinced that Facebook has captured enough of the US regulatory framework for them to turn a blind eye to a new global currency which eventually rivals or overtakes the dollar in usefulness. If we accept, for example, that needing to buy and sell oil in dollars allows for a much more effective sanctioning infrastructure then it seems unlikely they will let a corporate-controlled currency whose ideals don't align explicitly with those of the US get too powerful without a fight. In the other case, where it just becomes a data-hoarding venmo, but initially for the unbanked global poor, I'm not convinced that a) those people are truly sitting around unable to transact while they wait for Facebook to provide the solution and b) that a payment token which is pegged to a basket of global currencies rather than their own is truly the solution that these people would be seeking. Now, the (theoretical) implementation makes it look more like it's aimed towards the first scenario, some kind of global-corporatist dystopia which we as a society walk into blindly because it's conveniently available within WhatsApp. And I don't doubt the value of convenience, nor that there are some very smart people behind this who may have estimated that with the right implementation and dark enough patterns, they can use their market share to break through the latter scenario and into the first. But these are interesting times - I don't expect governments to sit on their hands, and we're not exactly in the midst of a surge in the popularity of globalism right now.