WisdomBringsWealth.com

My notes of certain highlights:

Silicon valley is coming for banking in a bid way.
A lot of people predicted this would happen, thought Amazon would dot it first, but it turns out it FB which is much worst than anyone had imagined possible.

30 names on white paper.
Whitepaper is very impressive, they are very serious about it.
Took some best features of existing blockchains and advanced it.

Doesn’t make sense to ask if it is a cryptocurrency.
It is a corporate digital currency. We have seen that seen the opium wars, and medieval feudalism and the Medici.

We now have 3 point stand off
1. Money of the coprorations
2. Money of the people
3. Money of the government

and more will be joining…

FANGS – FB Amazon Netflix and Google (also Twitter, Uber, and Air B&B)

This will disrupt a lot of things.
First to be effected are retail banks (not investment banks).

FB can use your preferences, all of your behavior patterns, and use that to drop the cost of banking, wrap it a candy colored cute interface, and every time you make a purchase it tickles your dopamine receptors a bit, and encourages you to do certain things, and plays with you like a mouse in a psychological experiment of mazes.

Will be stable to your local currency which is hyper-inflating.

IMF a global institution that uses a contributions by members that they put in a pseudo currency that they call: SDR = Special Drawing Rights
they are lender of last resort for governments… They do so in a very predatorial manor, imposing extreme neo-liberal austerity on the governments that fall into their clutches. They asset strip their industries, their water plants, their railroads, and their telecom companies.

Guess what?
FB is going to do that now. If you think about what Libre is, It is an Special Drawing Rights pseudo-currency drawn on a basket of currency that is funded directly by consumer activity, in the same countries where the gov’t will come back and try to ask them for a loan or curtail their activity. This is very serious stuff. We just went post-national.

We just went post-national. The power to control money used to be the exclusive prerogative of the states got kicked in the nuts by BitCoin, and decapitated by Libre this month.

More and more technology companies, which currently are worth a trillion dollars, once given or taking the ability to mint their own money, will radically transform their business models, and will use that to generate more money than you can every imagine. And soon will dwarf the GDP’s of the at least a third of the nations on the planet.

Andreas – is hopeful – will introduce a billion people to the wrong type of cryptocurrency, just like AOL introduced almost a billion people to the wrong type of internet.

Is it open? Can anyone participate without vetting or providing id?
Is it border-less? No – only one border-less one today, and that is BitCoin [I’m not sure why he doesn’t consider other cryptos as border-less],maybe as good as USD as being border-less. FB will not be in China; they will have their only alternative launched by WeChat, whole owned by Peoples Republic of China… Won’t launch in Russia either. Won’t launch in a bunch of places where un-banked people need this.

World is about to have an iron-curtain drop in currencies, like we never seen before. Fundamental split between East and West…

Where can you send a subpoena for BitCoin?

Any corporation (such as Facebook) will be obliged to sensor transactions.

With FB Libra – There may be no privacy. Your purchases may be visible to your friends and family.

The path and timetable to cashless society just got accelerated; and cashless societies are not to be celebrated.
They are societies without freedom, without democracy, without robustness… [he gives more…]

They can decide you did something bad and turn off your financial future.

Expect crypto projects to get very focused about what their principles are, and how they differentiate, now that there is a lot of confusion.

Morality is not on the spreadsheet, not in the ROI equation. Differentiate on the thing that FB cannot compete with.
Make your self the one project or align yourself with the one project that is truly open, borderless, neutral, censorship resistant, transparent, audit-able, private, immutable. There are a few of those.

I expect the privacy currencies will get quite a run. Now there’s a reason to focus on Privacy because FB won’t.

As a technologist I’m excited. As a human being I’m horrified.

We are about to open a door that is truly distopian, truly terrifying, given an amount of power to some of the ruthless, unaccountable corporations out there, not just to fight against government, but in some cases to join hand-in-hand in making sure that while we are being exploited by ruthless politicians on one side, we are exploited by ruthless business people on the other.

An unholy alliance between capital, corporation and state is called fascism.

This is not your grandfather’s fascism.
This is a whole neo-feudal environment that we have never seen before.

Society is not ready for this because we have not been here before.
I’m not afraid because I don’t think bitcoin can compete, I’m afraid because a I believe that lot of people don’t care; a lot of people will go for the easy, convenient, mindless, the repetitive, the seductive, the hypnotizing rhythm of a FB feed a lose their freedom and their future.