By
Bena Ilyas
April 18th, 2024
If there was a competition between Libra and Bitcoin, head of Facebook’s blockchain sector David Marcus seems to have conceded rather than overselling the facts.
As the news about new Facebook’s Libra coin didn’t exactly land on fertile ground, its head men are making a great effort to show that they are not in any way threat to rest of the altcoins or Bitcoin whatsoever.
David Marcus, the head of Facebook’s Calibra division, claims that both Libra and Bitcoin can co-exist. He also confirmed he is a big fan of BTC as well. He tweeted:
Many want to pit Libra vs. Bitcoin. In my mind these two are not in the same category. BTC is a decorrelated (investment) asset. Libra is designed to be a stable medium-of-exchange. I have been, and remain a fan of BTC, but for very different purposes.
— David Marcus (@davidmarcus) June 19, 2019
Former president at PayPal, Marcus puts Libra as a better digital cash and payment system, while Bitcoin is, according to him, better as a long-term investment. He said:
“To earn people’s trust, we are going to have to make strong commitments on privacy. If people don’t want to trust us, they can use any of the other wallets that will be available. There will be plenty of competition.”
He also explained that the Calibra digital wallet will be the way Facebook eventually makes money through financial services such as loans. However, he noted that those additions won’t happen soon.
He said the new currency would lower the barrier for cross-border payments:
“We felt it was time to try something new, and this is the beginning of a long journey in launching this new network. Other cryptocurrencies are investment vehicles or investment assets rather than being a great medium of exchange. [Libra] is really designed from the ground up to be a great medium of exchange, a very high quality form of digital money that you can use for everyday payments.”
Educator and author of several books on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, Andreas Antonopolous, noted that since Libra is not borderless (imposed by Government constraints), censored, ‘permissioned‘ and even mutable to a certain degree on validators consent, it not an ideal cryptocurrency.
With him agrees British businessman and cryptographer Adam Back who tweeted:
Also Bitcoin is permissionless, censorship-resistant, unseizable and unfreezable. In other words it is both global electronic cash and investable asset. Seems to me Libra will be more a "tokenized" user interface for a PayPal / WeChat Pay-alike with bank account like properties.
— Adam Back (@adam3us) June 20, 2019
Back also added that Bitcoin isn’t competing against free, cheap, etc it’s in its own class:
“Permissionless, censor-resistant, unseizable, global electronic cash. properties that nothing else can compete with. not banks, not paypal, not facebook etc. libra is a paypal/venmo etc competitor.”
In the end, all other currencies like US Dollar, Euros, Yen, Yuan, and so on, are backed by the GDP of a country. The stablecoins pegged to these currencies are therefore exposed to the same degree of risk a FIAT is. Libra, on the other hand, is backed by a basket of currencies and government bonds so it’s for us to wait and see if people will want to trust Facebook with their money or give it a key role in running a global currency.