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Meta poured a ton of resources into Libra/Diem and Novi and got shut down hard by regulators. I don’t blame them for moving on from this idea: the political cos
by matthewdgreen 4y ago
Meta poured a ton of resources into Libra/Diem and Novi and got shut down hard by regulators. I don’t blame them for moving on from this idea: the political costs aren’t worth it.
Of course there’s a secondary implication: a lot of people clearly though that Libra/Diem/Novi would have been a serious threat to legacy payments businesses if it hadn’t been killed. I think that’s pretty interesting and I’m curious to see who steps into the void that regulators have just scooped out.
- finfinfin 4y agoI am not sure there is a void in the crypto space that otherwise would have been filled by Novi. Even a more centralized (federated?) coin like that would still inherit major shortcomings of blockchain-based digital currencies. Also looks like even Meta eventually decided to pivot to a more traditional digital offering “Zuck Bucks”.
- seanhunter 4y agoI’m not sure it follows that people thought “Libra/Diem/Novi” would be a threat to the payments business. Personally at the time I thought having payments be at the mercy of a ruthless data monetization cartel seemed like a terrible idea, and it could be it was shut down for reasons along those lines.
- matthewdgreen 4y agoWhen you use the phrase “having payments be at the mercy of [Facebook]” you’re pretty much granting the premise that the project could have seen major adoption -- and that's significant given that its sole justification was to provide an alternative to legacy payments tech. If everyone thought Libra/Diem/Novi was going to crash and burn, there wouldn’t have been so much emphasis on preventing its launch (over perfectly reasonable concerns.)