Libra Shrugged Quotes

“Developers could use the “credit_balance” interface to see how many Credits a user had309 — and Facebook confirmed that developers could use this to identify the biggest Credit holders, and squeeze them for even more money.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“The fallacy of Libra, and of cryptocurrency plans in general, is that the problem isn’t that we need a new technology. We know how to move numbers on a computer. The problems with Libra were always going to be regulation — especially when the project came from Facebook. Crypto dreams are tolerated when they’re put forward by weird small-time nutters — but not when they’re coming from a huge company with a continent-sized user base. But, even though every single thing about Libra went wrong, Facebook doesn’t take “no” or “never” for an answer.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“There is no innovation whatsoever. They have literally invented nothing. Libra is possibly the least innovative project to ever come out of Silicon Valley. — Aleksi Grym”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Agustín Carstens of BIS acknowledged in June 2019: “There needs to be evidence for demand for central bank digital currencies and it is not clear that the demand is there yet. Perhaps people can do what they want by using electronic wallets provided by banks or fintech companies. It depends on the development of payment systems.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Bureaucrats also keep being seduced by the prospect of a full Eye of Sauron panopticon of every transaction in the economy. This appeals to those who think their problem is not having enough knowledge to exert control as finely as they’d like to. This is otherwise known as the Big Data Fallacy — where you think that just getting enough data will surely solve all your problems. It’s a fallacy because your problems are usually political — you know perfectly well what you need to do, and you’re hoping the big data will help convince others to let you do it.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“You may be on Facebook lots — but would you trust Facebook with your money? For most people, the answer was “no.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“To use Messenger Pay, you connected your existing Visa or Mastercard debit card as a back end. To send someone money, you opened a message to that person, tapped the “$” icon, entered an amount and tapped “pay.” You could receive money by connecting your debit card for the money to be sent to.252 Messenger Pay didn’t charge a transaction fee — what Facebook got out of this was keeping you on the platform, and showing you ads. And, of course, that juicy personal financial data.253”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“A financial system running entirely on smart contract programs on a public blockchain is a big, juicy single target for hackers.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Real finance has human oversight and trusted responsibility all through it — and not automated systems that humans can’t touch. Unfortunately, Libra’s Bitcoin ancestry was still clear in the design of the system.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Zuckerberg did admit to Andy Barr (R, KY-06) that China had put its programme to start a central bank digital currency into high gear specifically because of Libra — that Facebook had caused the problem they were now selling a solution to: As soon as we put out this white paper on Libra, what we saw was, in China, especially, they immediately kicked off this public-private partnership with some of their biggest companies in order to race to try to build a system like this quickly, a digital renminbi.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Waters spoke of the many ways that Facebook had “utterly failed.” The company had failed on diversity and inclusion. It had been caught in “redlining,” when housing advertisements were not shown to users of particular races — which Facebook was being sued for both by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and privately by housing charities. Antitrust investigations were active in 47 states and the District of Columbia. The company had been fined $5 billion by the FTC over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook had enabled the government of Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“After the past few months of the world heaping ordure on Libra,”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Stablecoin systems are payment systems, and the biggest problem with international payments is not the technology — it’s compliance with anti-money-laundering laws. Cryptocurrencies mostly work around this by ignoring it — but Libra couldn’t be allowed to do that.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Neither political nor monetary sovereignty can be shared with private interests.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Facebook is too big and too powerful, and it is unconscionable for financial companies to aid it in monopolizing our economic infrastructure. I trust others will see the wisdom of avoiding this ill-conceived undertaking.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Facebook’s obvious use case for a payment system was to be yet another source of personal information on users. Every regulator and commentator noticed this immediately.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“was glaringly obvious that a new currency at Facebook scale would be a systemic risk — it would be big enough to break everything. Regulators and legislators had Libra’s number immediately — they knew this kind of foolishness, and they knew that these Bitcoin venture capital bros were absolutely stupid and arrogant enough to do another 2008 financial crisis all by themselves.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Let’s say an unsavory app developer that’s based in Pakistan utilizes an exchange that’s based in Thailand to rip off an Arizonan who’s using a wallet that was built in Spain, so they steal all of their Libra. And that, of course, is minted by an association based in Switzerland. So which law enforcement or government or agency in which country does the Arizonan call to seek his or her Libra and financial recourse in this situation?”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Governments won’t let Facebook use its superpower — negligence — to disrupt their economy. Enabling genocide in Myanmar is one thing, but messing with our ability to buy Chick-fil-A and Land Rovers is another level. — Scott Galloway, NYU Stern”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Facebook even builds shadow profiles on Internet users who aren’t Facebook users, by using the Facebook buttons included on web pages. All the incentives are for Novi to use a “Pay with Novi” web page button to collect data on non-users, in the same way, and there’s nothing to stop them.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“All Oculus headsets will require a Facebook account by 2023, to help you “find, connect, and play with friends in VR” — and only incidentally to match you to ads.111”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“These are only the most prominent examples. Facebook’s history of personal data abuse is extensive, and consistent. Given the chance, you can be sure Facebook will abuse users’ data — no matter what permissions the users think they gave, and no matter the promises Facebook may have made to regulators.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Facebook’s 2011 settlement with the FTC promised this would not happen again — and Facebook said it would put controls into place to make sure it didn’t happen again. Then it happened again. Facebook uses personal data as a business weapon directly. From at least 2011 to 2015, Facebook would pass data to companies it favoured, and withhold data from companies it didn’t — it gave special access to Amazon as they bought so much advertising, but cut off messaging app MessageMe in case it got too popular and competed with Facebook.107 When Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014, it told the European Commission that it would not match Facebook and WhatsApp user data — and, in fact, that it couldn’t do so reliably. Then in August 2016, Facebook did it anyway, using users’ phone numbers to match them across Facebook and WhatsApp. In May 2017, the Commission fined Facebook €110 million for this — and they were particularly annoyed that Facebook knew in 2014 it could share data between WhatsApp and Facebook in this manner, but had told them otherwise.108”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Would Facebook break Mark Zuckerberg’s promises not to use spending data from its Calibra/Novi wallet for ad targeting? Past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour — so we should expect that Facebook will break these promises. Facebook does not take “no” or “never” for an answer. We should assume that one of Zuckerberg’s key goals with the Libra project is to harvest as much personal data as possible.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“What does Facebook want from a private currency so much that they’re offering to lose money to run it? The obvious answer is: personal data — because Facebook always wants personal data. Facebook’s business is selling personal data to advertisers.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Facebook and a cartel of junior partners will leverage their platform power to establish a global financial surveillance system, on the back of public monetary systems. — Raúl Carrillo, Demand Progress”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Bitcoin also promised to solve the problems of the existing financial system and get rid of its middlemen — and then it recreated most of those middlemen, but incompetently”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“As an internationally frictionless private currency founded by millionaires and billionaires, Libra would mostly be used, not by individuals to buy goods and services — but by people like its founders to move capital with much greater ease. Evading capital controls is strongly promoted by the Bitcoin subculture as a use case for cryptocurrency — as Libra’s creators well know.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“The greatest day-to-day enemy of the poor is the middle-class bureaucrat who contemptuously treats them as data to be processed, without care to their needs or circumstances”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“The poor are poor, not stupid — and their living conditions are different in each country.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money