Coin flip

Facebook wants to create a worldwide digital currency

Libra could be massively disruptive—including to the social network itself

A GLOBAL DIGITAL currency would make sending money across the world as easy as texting. It would do away with fees, delays and other barriers to the flow of cash. It would give those in less developed countries access to the financial system and a way to protect hard-earned wages against runaway inflation. It could trigger a wave of innovation in finance, much like the internet did in online services.

That, in a nutshell, is what on June 18th Facebook promised to launch within a year. Libra, as the social network’s new currency is to be known in honour of an ancient Roman unit of mass (and the word for “pound” in many romance languages), professes to be all about “empower[ing] billions of people”.

The potential is indeed enormous. If each of Facebook’s 2.4bn users converted a slice of their savings into libras, it could immediately become one of the world’s most circulated currencies. It could also, if widely adopted, vest unprecedented power in the hands of its issuer. In a tacit acknowledgment that its mishandling of user data, condoning the spread of misinformation and other sins have devalued its stock with policymakers, users and potential partners—though not investors—Facebook wants to outsource the running of Libra to a consortium of trustworthies recruited from the world of finance, technology and NGOs. The consequences for the global financial system could be far-reaching. So could the impact on Facebook’s business.

If the project lives up to the mock-ups, buying, selling, holding, sending and receiving libras will be a doddle. It can be done in Facebook’s Messenger app or WhatsApp, another messaging-service-cum-social-network it owns—and, later next year, in a standalone app. All at a tap of a smartphone.

So far, so familiar. Messenger already offers payments to Americans. WhatsApp is testing a similar function in India. But these services do not cross borders, and require users to have a bank account. Fintech firms like TransferWise, which offer international transfers to the banked, take a 4-5% cut to wire $200—a third less than Western Union but not nothing. Libra will be global and cheap, and require no bank accounts: more bitcoin than Venmo.

Except that, unlike bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, libras will change hands in seconds, not minutes, for next to nothing, not a few dollars. The system should handle 1,000 transactions a second at its launch, and more later, compared with no more than seven a second for bitcoin. The virtual coins will be bought with real money, which will top up the reserve backing the currency. This should prevent wild price swings from bitcoin-like speculation.

If it works, Libra could be a money-spinner for Facebook, albeit not directly. Notional transaction fees would not generate much revenue. But libras should allow Facebook to charge more for online ads, by making purchases of advertised products quicker and simpler. It could furnish a new source of data to target adverts, making up for user information Facebook will forgo with the “pivot to privacy”, which Mark Zuckerberg, its boss, proclaimed in March with respect to messaging. Libra would let his company catch up with WeChat, a Chinese super-app which offers payments and other financial services, and whose foreign ambitions are on hold as the Sino-American trade war rages on.

Technically and financially, Facebook could probably pull off such an ambitious undertaking on its own. Not politically. Its culture is more measured than it was in its early years, when it aspired to “move fast and break things”—but only a bit. Chary consumers may choose not to entrust their money to a social network which has, until recently, leaked their personal data left and right. Unless users appear on board, merchants may be reluctant to embrace the currency, however hassle-free.

Enter the Libra consortium. The association, to be based in reassuringly staid Geneva, will take over from Facebook before the first libra has been spent and manage the hard-currency reserves. Facebook has enlisted 28 prospective founding members out of an envisaged 100, each with equal voting rights and operating a node in a decentralised system which issues coins. They include financial firms (Visa and Stripe, among others), online services (Spotify, Uber), cryptocurrency wallets (Anchorage, Coinbase), venture capitalists (Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures) and charities (Kiva, Mercy Corps)—though, for the time being, no banks. Not a libertarian alternative to the existing financial system, in other words, but a complement.

To add credibility to its promise, broken in the past, to keep social and financial data strictly separate, Facebook has created a subsidiary, Calibra, to run Libra services within its apps. It is unlikely to face hurdles to uptake from Apple or Google. It is impossible to imagine them expelling Messenger and WhatsApp—and later other providers Facebook is inviting to the open-source project—from their app stores, as they have done with other cryptocurrency offerings, many of which have turned out to be scams.

To get Libra going, the consortium will pay merchants to offer discounts to customers who pay in the new currency, financed by a $10m one-off fee each member pays for a seat at the table. Eventually, Facebook would like anybody, not just the consortium, to be able to generate the currency, move it and offer services on top of its “blockchain” (crypto-speak for the database that keeps track of who owns what). At that point, Libra would truly turn into Bitcoin, minus the kinks and the libertarianism.

Hard currency

With a project with so many moving parts, much can go wrong. Although Facebook says it has a working prototype, the technology is untested; sceptics doubt that a 100-node system, let alone a bigger one, could process thousands of transactions per second. Hackers are doubtless champing at the bit.

Then there are consortium dynamics. Facebook will have to prove to the other 99 Libra members that it is truly prepared to give up control. At the same time, because important decisions need a two-thirds majority, someone has to knock heads together. The history of information technology is littered with initiatives which collapsed under the weight of internal conflict.

The biggest barrier may be political. Facebook has apparently consulted many regulators. Initially they should be able to keep tabs on Libra. The providers of digital wallets will have to comply with national rules, like those against money-laundering. Calibra, whose integration into Messenger and WhatsApp will initially make it the dominant wallet, is bound to stoke competition concerns. These may recede as the currency grows bigger and more decentralised, only to be replaced by worries about financial stability.

Libra’s success, then, is far from assured. But it could prove useful even if it flops, for it offers a blueprint for how Facebook itself could one day be governed. The Libra Association’s main task is to oversee the blockchain, ensuring, for instance, that Calibra does not enjoy privileged access to it. An equivalent Facebook Association, some observers have ventured, could be composed of representatives of users, advertisers, data-protection authorities and so on. Their job could be to oversee the “social graph”, another database, which lists all of Facebook’s users and the links between them—and to guarantee that Facebook users can post to another social network and vice versa.

Calls for a Facebook constitution along these lines have grown louder as the social network’s influence on world affairs, from election-meddling in America to genocide in Myanmar, has become apparent. Mr Zuckerberg is no stranger to such thinking. In 2009 Facebook let users vote on big changes in its privacy policies but abandoned the experiment with global democracy a few years later. Last year Mr Zuckerberg announced that Facebook wanted to set up a “content review board” of independent experts—a kind of “Supreme Court”, in his words, which would make “the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech”.

Asked whether Libra could serve as a model for Facebook, David Marcus, who is in charge of the project, replies that it marks “a coming of age, the moment we recognise that there are some things that we shouldn’t control—and a radical departure from the traditional way of operating things”. Perhaps. But checks and balances would almost certainly make Facebook less profitable. It would be ironic if a new digital currency marked the beginning of the end of Facebook’s money-minting days.

【六月份】经济学人

Casting light on the Moon

Improving robots’ grasp requires a new way to measure it in humans

Donald Trump vows to use tariffs to punish Mexico

Why managers should listen to shareholders

Advertising may make people miserable

Using sponges to census the ocean

Electric-scooter startups are becoming more cautious

Climate change will be a big issue

Drone deliveries are advancing in health care

The benefits of pre-schooling may extend for generations

Global carbon emissions hit another record

Japanese debate how foreigners should refer to them

 

【五月份】经济学人

Caster Semenya’s case sets a big precedent for women’s sport

一篮子无形资产

Shanahan is likely to be America’s next defence secretary

How creepy is your smart speaker?

Why women’s art sells at a discount

Brewers at AB InBev need to rethink its strategy

Amazon’s boss reckons that humanity needs an HQ2

Climate change strikes the Venice Biennale

Two books explore the evolutionary origins of morality

“Furious Hours” is an ingenious double mystery

Incumbency ain’t what it used to be

The global battle over high drug prices

The world is about to get a new way to measure itself

3D printing makes it easier

British politics after Theresa May

Keeping children safe on the internet

Facebook’s planned new currency based on a blockchain

In “The Farm”, immigrants carry the super-rich’s babies

Ghost workers of the world, form a guild

推荐阅读：

【历年张璐口译】2019总理记者会，张璐翻译的这些话真给力！

公众号后台回复：

"政府工作报告"|"资料"|"外交部金句"|"卢敏".......

更多英汉注释政府报告：

十九大完结

19大词组及句子整理（百度网盘）

2019政府工作报告完结@备考CATTI个人注释

2018政府工作报告完结@备考CATTI个人注释

2017政府工作报告完结@备考CATTI个人注释

【中英对照全文】2019政府工作报告

---

如果您感觉本文还不错或者对您有帮助，那请分享给您的朋友