What's up with Facebook Libra?

things tech. And in the middle of June two thousand nineteen, Facebook released a white paper describing a planned digital currency called Libra, which has been described as a blockchain cryptocurrency, though there are a lot of people who object to one or both of those terms being used to describe Libra. So in this episode, I figured we talked about Libra,

What is it, who is behind it? How is it similar to and different from currencies like bitcoin and and then fiat currencies, and and why should we even care about it? Well, let's get that last one out of the way first. Actually, we should care because Facebook is an enormous freaking company with billions of users. Moreover, at a company that purchased WhatsApp and runs Facebook Messenger, and has an incredible incentive to incorporate a proprietary currency system

that can be fully integrated into those platforms. So we should care because this goes beyond big business. Also, as I record this on July three, two th nineteen. Facebook and its services like What's Happen Instagram are all having problems, particularly with showing photos. So that kind of thing can shake a person's confidence in a company. Though, I think it's unfair to judge a company on the occasional technological hiccup. But it's also fair to say Facebook has had a recent,

let's say, troubling history. Next, while people are often referring to Libra as Facebook's approach to currency, that's not entirely accurate. I suppose I'm not being very helpful calling it Facebook Libra. Facebook is actually just a co founder of a group called the Libra Association, which also has members like Spotify, MasterCard, eBay, Uber, and a whole bunch more. It's an quote independent, not for profit membership organization headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland end quote Switzerland,

known for its discretion with banking. That's not snark, It really is known for that. To be included in this August association, the organization has to meet some pretty steep criteria, and they also stand to benefit the most from the adoption of Libra. But let's work our way to that point. First, let's take a look at what was actually said. The first phrase in the white paper is quote Libra's mission is to enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure

that empowers billions of people end quote. Personal commentary aside, I think that's a phrase that should be evaluated critically with some skepticism. Does the proposed digital currency actually align with this stated mission? Now? I think from my tone you can tell it's pretty clear where I stand on this, but I am sincerely going to attempt to take an

objective approach so that people can draw their own conclusions. Also, I highly recommend that if this is a very interesting topic to you, you seek out multiple sources to get a full picture of this. The white paper goes into detail with a problem statement. This describes what LIBRA is intended to address. Namely, quote, large swaths of the world's

population are still left behind. One point seven billion adults globally remain outside of the financial system with no access to a traditional bank, even though one billion have a mobile phone and nearly half a billion have Internet access end quote. So presumably one of libra's main purposes is to empower people who otherwise would have no access to banks. That's a noble cause, and one that is really needed.

In many parts of the world. Financial institutions can provide security and protect wealth, and a lot of people have little to no access to them, so changing that would be a good thing. The problem statement continues and describes some of the barriers that unbanked people face when attempting to change their financial situation, and it also addresses some

of the issues of blockchain and cryptocurrency solutions and their limitations. Namely, the white paper rightfully points out that these cryptocurrencies and blockchain solutions have had some major issues with volatility and scalability. In other words, the value of these currencies can change dramatically and rapidly, and it's hard to get them scaled up to enough adoption that they can become legitimate currencies

for the general public. If they aren't adopted as and if no one is using them, then really they're not currency. And now I think we need to talk a little bit about the concept of currency in general and how it works. Now, for a lot of you, this is all gonna be super basic, but you know, I like to start from the general and work towards the specific so that we can have a full understanding of what's going on? So way back when, before the invention of money,

humans relied on bartering for trade. So essentially, person one would have something that person too wanted, and person too had something that person one wanted. They'd have to come to an agreement over how much of each something would be an equitable trade, and this could change from person to person based upon need. Supply and demand determined everything.

So if you had a whole bunch of stuff that was plentiful in general in your region, chances are it wouldn't do you much good because as everyone had enough of it at their fingertips. But if you traveled to a place that didn't have access to that same stuff, you'd be in a good position to come back with a bunch of things you needed. That's basic bartering. One

oh one. Now, sometime around six hundred b c E. A king of a region called Lydia which now is in modern day Turkey created a currency, the first recorded instance we have of an official currency. It was a form of coins, and the coins were made from electrum, which is an alloy of gold and silver. Uh The king's son Creases, would issue the first gold coins, and in fact he would amass an enormous amount of wealth, and today you can still hear people say rich as creases.

This is the creases to whom they are referring. These kings of Lydia would later be connected with the the myth of King Midas and the Golden Touch. Now, the important concept here was one of standardization. The coins represented distinct units of wealth and value, so rather than bartering with physical goods, you can buy and sell with coins.

Now you can still haggle to come to an agreement on the value of any particular good or service, but now payment could be exchanged with coins rather than with other physical things. So if you had a bunch of sheep, then you needed some grain, but the guy who had the grain didn't have any need for wool or for sheep. You could sell some of your stuff for coins at a market. Then you can use those coins to buy

the stuff you needed. So far, so good. Right now, for currency to work, that standardized approach was really necessary. Everyone has to agree upon the actual value of the currency itself, and in the old days, this was partly determined by what the coins were made out of. Making coins from precious metals seemed to make total sense, but

you know not sense if you catch my drift. The value was intrinsic in the coins themselves because of the material they were made out of, was already seen as being valuable gold and silver, for example, as for paper money that dates back to around eight hundred CE. In China during the Tang dynasty, the Tang government issued certificates

that represented a certain number of metal coins. The certificates could be redeemed for those metal coins at the Chinese capital, and the government would issue these certificates when it needed to purchase goods that were from the further reaches of

the empire. Because transporting large amounts of metal currency was difficult and dangerous, the certificates were much easier to carry and they were transferable, meaning you could trade a certificate to someone else and that person could then redeem that certificate for its value in coins if they were to travel to the Chinese opital. And so people on the outer regions of China would use these certificates as currency itself when making trades, never bothering to actually cash them

in for any metal coins. The certificates and that cells were good enough. When Marco Polo traveled to China he learned of the paper currency. They brought that knowledge back to Europe. That was in the late thirteenth century, but it wouldn't be until the mid seventeenth century then the first bank notes would be issued in Europe, specifically in Sweden.

For a long time, currencies were either made of precious materials or stood in representation of a fixed amount of those precious materials, so a silver standard or a gold standard. So in a country that used the gold standard, you could theoretically take your paper currency to a bank and exchange it for an amount of gold that was equal to the value of that currency. Now, in theory, this would mean that a country on the gold standard would

automatically have some checks and balance is in place. Because of that limitation, the issuing government couldn't circulate more currency than what it's gold reserves contained. At least ethically, they

couldn't do that. You could only issue as many bank notes as would reflect the total amount of gold you had on hand, since in theory, everyone holding those notes could demand their gold at any time, and based on the system, you should be able to hand it over, So you shouldn't have more notes available than you have gold. In your supply, but the United States and much of the rest of the world abandoned that standard in the

twentieth century. During the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose to sever the US paper currencies relationship with gold. This allowed the government to issue more currency, which obviously they couldn't if they had to rely on just how much gold was in the reserves. But this allowed them to lower the interest rates and thus stimulate the economy. People could take out loans with lower interest, and interest

is really how more wealth is generated. Because let's say you take a loan for a certain amount, Let's say it's a hundred dollars, and then there's interest on top of that loan. So you've taken out a hundred dollar loan. But when you're finished paying it off, you've paid out a hundred and twenty dollars For that hundred dollar loan. You've generated twenty more dollars of wealth there. But now

the currency wasn't rooted on a specific commodity. This is what we would call a fiat currency, which depends upon supply and demand of the currency itself as well as the stability of the financial institution. Or government that issues the currency in the first place. This is also what makes it not a big deal when governments change the

materials they use to mint coins. There have been times when shortages and precious metals have forced governments to change to less rare and therefore less valuable materials to make their coins, But fiat currency gets around that. The government ultimately determines how much of the currency should enter circulation. If a government was to create too much currency, it would risk triggering hyperinflation, in which the value of the

currency decreases dramatically. Fiat essentially means let it be done, so that kind of tells you how it's meant to stand on its own. As long as people have confidence in the issuing body and there's not a sudden flood of currency, the value remains pretty stable day to day. I could do a whole episode about how currency gets into circulation, mostly through loans and banks and stuff, but

that's kind of outside the realm of tech stuff. I explain fiat currency mostly because Librick sort of straddles a category and it dips its toe in fiat currency. It's not being issued by a government, however, but it is being issued by a centralized group. More on that in a bit Now, the literature around the Labor Association calls it decentralized, but I think that really just depends on your point of view. To quote Obi Wan Kenobi, because it's really a group of very large companies that are

in charge of this. So to me, it is centralized. It's just centralized and distributed amongst a relatively small number of companies. Cryptocurrency then would refer to a group of digital currencies that are meant to be decentralized and global. With a cryptocurrency, there is no authority that ultimately issues more currency. Rather, you typically have an algorithm that dictates the supply of currency going into circulation. Cryptocurrency is like

the famous bitcoin have a limited supply. There's only so many bitcoins that will ever exist. They will only enter the circulation once, and then once all the bitcoins are in circulation, that is it. Once all bitcoins are my that's all there ever will be. There will remain in circulation,

but you won't generate new bitcoins. Now, in this sense, they are closer to one of the currencies that are based on a commodity, like gold, because there is a finite amount of gold on earth, So if everyone still had currencies that were tied to gold, eventually we would have to stop issuing currency because we would have covered all the gold available. But how do you assign actual value to something that is purely digital? A bitcoin or

any other cryptocurrency is just some code. Well, here's the trick. It has value if people treat it as having value. If someone has something and you want it, then that's something they have has a value to you. How much value is up for discussion, obviously, so a bitcoin's value is dependent upon how much people want it and how much they'd be willing to pay for it, or how much they would be willing to accept for it. If they happen to own some Libra is a slightly different beast.

I'll explain more in a second, but first let's take a quick break. Now, one other thing I should mention about bitcoin is that it is truly decentralized. There is no financial institution in charge of overseeing or regulating the currency. Now, on the one hand, that means that a government can't influence the value of the currency or interfere with fiat

currencies or sovereign currencies. The whole concept behind them points back to how a government can exert influence over the financial system through supply and demand of currency, not necessarily in a malevolent way, but certainly in a way that is beyond the control of the people relying on that currency. Now, a downside of this, with bitcoin being so decentral is that it's value is incredibly volatile, so it changes rapidly

and dramatically. In fact, it can change so quickly they can cause people to be averse to spending bitcoin once they get some. So think of it this way. Let's say you have a dollar bell and you go to the store, and based on the value of that dollar at that time, you're able to buy a loaf of bread. So you buy your loaf of bread and your feeling package. You go home and you make yourself a sandwich, and

you're enjoying your sandwich. And then there's a sudden shift in the value of a dollar, and suddenly a dollar's value is much higher. Now you could buy let's say, ten loaves of bread with that single dollar. The value of the dollar dollar has increased, the value of the loaf of bread has remained the same. Fiat currency rarely experiences that sort of rapid change in value, but it can and does happen with some decentralized digital currencies like bitcoin.

So that's a problem. You might be afraid to spend something because you have no idea how much it's going to be worth from moment to moment. In fact, you don't know if the value of your bitcoin is going to change in mid transaction. To avoid that problem, the

Libra Association has anchored or pegged the Libra currency. This is a way of tying the value of a currency to the value of something else, in this case low volatile commodities, including several different currencies including the US dollar, the Euro, etcetera. So even as one currency might change, the fact that Libra's value is spread across numerous commodities means that its value won't change much unless we're talking about like a global financial crisis or something, in which

case Libra's value would also change. The Libra Association effectively has a reserve like the old gold reserves during the Gold Standard, except this reserve is not filled with precious metals. It's filled with low volatility investments and currencies. So Libra is sort of like a commodity based currency, but since those commodities themselves are largely fiat currencies, it's kind of like a fiat currency once removed. The Libra Association refers

to this as a stable coin approach. That's not just their term. It is a term for a digital coin that is tied to something that's more stable. It's a digital currency anchored in real world assets to provide that stability and encourage liquidity, in other words, to encourage people

to actually spend it instead of just sitting on it. Okay, So, a cryptocurrency is a digital currency that uses cryptography for security, both to protect the people who possess the digital currency and to protect the actual transaction process made with that currency. Bitcoin fits that description. Bitcoin is also a blockchain cryptocurrency, and there are a lot of articles talking about Libra blockchain.

But personally, I think that that term is misleading or in the words of in Ingo Montoya, you'll keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. So, a block chain, simply put, is a chain of data grouped together in blocks of data.

You can think of it as a chronological record of transactions, a chain of blocks future calculations all depend upon the previous ones made in the chain, and a community of users work to verify transactions and those verified transactions are codified into blocks, and then they join the chain with bitcoin. The blockchain is the ledger of all blockchain transactions, all of them. So if you want to spend or transfer

a bitcoin, it goes through this process. This blockchain process, the community of bitcoin users verify the transactions in a process called mining. This is a computation sational problem of arbitrary difficulty. The overall bitcoin system sets that difficulty for the computational problem, and the more people, or rather the more computational power that is trying to solve the problems,

the harder the problems become. This way, they meter out the release of new bitcoins, because solving the problem verifies the transactions for a block, which then goes to the rest of the community to essentially check the work and make certain that it's valid, and then the computer system that made that correct transaction verification first gets rewarded with a certain number of bitcoins or portions of bitcoin. That

number changes over time. The number of bitcoins rewarded decreases in a steady predictable pattern, and it will do so until all bitcoins are in circulation, which will happen sometime in the middle of the twenty second century. I think think it's when it will all be in circulation. Now everyone can see the blockchain, and everyone can see this chain of transactions. This shared ledger means that no one

can spend the same bitcoin twice. There's no double spending of bitcoin, as the first transaction will already be a matter of record and any secondary attempt will fail during this verification process. Now, one down downside to all of this is that transactions take longer to verify than traditional payment transactions, and that can be an issue when you're trying to buy something unless you're not in a hurry. So, to give you a sense for this, like how slow

am I talking about? Bitcoin transactions happen at a rate of around seven transactions per second, which sounds pretty fast, except then you learned that a more traditional payment transaction service like Visa can process closer to three thousand transactions per second. So that's a big disparity. It shows a huge gap. Now, Facebook, Libra will not follow bitcoins methodology. Instead, there will be a somewhat centralized though not localized database

of transactions cryptographically protected database. So you have a database, not a blockchain. Uh. It is not fully decentralized. In other words, you've got a group of companies that are in charge of the governance and verification of transactions. It's not open to a whole community. UH. The community using the currency are not the ones providing the computational work to verify those transactions. Instead, members of the Libra Association

more on them in a bit. UH. Specifically, members that have coughed up ten million dollars for this privilege will act as validation nodes to validate those transactions. If at least two thirds of the validation nodes verified transaction, it is considered to be verified and it goes through. Because Libra will use a limited number of validation nodes by an elite few members of the Libra Association, it's what we would call a permissioned system. You have to be

granted authority to validate transactions. That's in contrast with systems like Bitcoin, which are permission less, meaning you simply have to download the software and be part of the network and you're part of the community. Facebook has said the reason I went with the permissioned approach was that the alternative just doesn't scale, as illustrated by Bitcoin's painfully slow

transaction verification process. According to Facebook, the Libra approach will allow for as many as one thousand transaction verifications per second, still not as fast as more traditional financial institutions like Visa, but loads faster than the permission less cryptocurrencies. The long term goal, Facebook says is to transition to a permission

less system somehow. At some point, the Libra association will oversee the governance of the currency and verify the transactions, and in addition, they will profit from the use of Libra. So Libre transactions will include a small transaction fee. So when you buy something with Libra, there'll be a small percentage of that h purchase that will end up being a transaction fee, sometimes called a gas fee. It's meant

to pay for the cost of doing business in general. Now, on individual transactions, it will look really small, like minuscule you maybe you won't even notice it, but at scale with a service that could potentially reach billions of people, you're talking some serious freaking money there. You know. If you're doing numerous purchases, a day, Even if they are small amounts, if billions of people are doing that, that

racks up pretty fast. In addition, remember when I said that the value of Libra will be pegged or anchored to a collection of low volatility commodities such as fee out currencies. Well, the expectation is that those will slowly pay off. Those will earn money themselves, and in a bank, as a customer of a bank, if you have add money in their their accounts, then you would earn interest off that money, depending upon the type of account you have,

and that's not gonna happen with Libra. You will not earn interest in Libra. Instead, all that money that comes from these investments and through these transaction fees are going to go to the members of the Libra Association, not the people using Libra, So it's going to go to these big companies. The ledger of transactions for Libra is public, just like with bitcoin. Uh. That could also raise a

lot of tough questions about privacy and security. I mean, after all, Facebook has access to an incredible amount of personal information. Even if you have an account but you aren't very active, or even if you don't have an account at all, people who do have accounts and who know you may have already shared information about you, so it's already out there. But the more you use Facebook, the more data the company has about you, what you like,

what sort of browsing habits you have. So clearly there's concern about a currency system tied to a company that already knows a ton about us. To address that concern, Facebook assures us that Libra users will be issued pseudonyms, so it's a pseudonymous system and their true identities will not be publicly tied to transactions. That's good bitcoins the same way. Moreover, the company promises to keep the user data from things like Facebook and its various services separate

from Libra and its digital wallet. Also, the company promises that activity using Libra would never be used for data for targeted advertising. Whether or not you believe this claim is up to you. Facebook has had a very public, very messy series of pr disasters and controversies surrounding user privacy and security. Zuckerberg himself has had to appear in front of the the United States government to talk about some pretty serious problems. So there are many people out there

who remains skeptical at best. About Facebook's pledge to keep these things truly separate. The pseudonym approach is another way Libra is trying to have the best of both worlds and cryptocurrency and the more traditional currencies overseen by a centralized authority. In a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, the transactions are public,

but the identities of the parties involved are protected. That manages to protect the individuals, but it also raises the possibility that the cryptocurrency could be used for shady or outright illegal activities like money laundering or purchasing illegal goods. For Libra to get widespread acceptance, it needs to be

seen as legitimate and lawful. Most financial institutions follow up policy generally called No Your Customer or k y C. This is all about verifying a customer's identity and being reasonably certain that the customer or potential customer doesn't pose a risk. In other words, making sure the customer is on the up and up and not trying to do

something like money laundering. Libra intends to follow that general approach, so the system would allow people to make purchases using pseudonyms uh automatically by the system, they wouldn't have to choose them or anything, ideally protecting their personal identities from the general public. But at the same time, the LIBRA

Association would be able to verify identities. So we're starting to see how from a conceptual level, this is getting pretty complicated and it does pose a big security concern. It's not that it's impossible to do, but it does mean that you have to be super careful with all that privacy and security. When we come back, i'll talk about a few other complications as well as some trivia

about LIBRA, but first let's take another quick break. One other big complication with LIBRA is that the organizations that make up the Libra Association so far are a mix of financial institutions like banks and commerce companies, you know, companies that sell goods and services. And that's a huge warning flag for certain countries, specifically the United States of America, which has traditionally sought to keep banking and commerce as separate entities. This has been the case since the mid

nineteenth century in the United States. It turns out that US citizens aren't crazy about the idea of banks owning non banking businesses because it could potentially mean that a bank might operate a business that runs in direct competition with the business of one of that bank's customers, and banks get a lot of insight into the financial transactions of their customers. They see everything. So let's say you

own a small business. Chances are you do not want the entity that can see all of your financial transactions to be operating a competing business against you. If nothing else, you would be handing over leads to that bank because the bank could see who your most loyal customers are based on your various financial transactions, And to the bank that's operating a competing business, they could say, huh, you know what this is. It's a lead sheet for me

to give to the sales team. Will target all of this person's customers because we see how loyal they are, and if we can win them over to our service, will win. So in other words, banks have an incredibly

unfair advantage when they enter into the commerce world. So that could potentially be a really big barrier for Libra in the near future in the United States, as the Open Marks Institute spokesman Matt Staller wrote, imagine Facebook's subsidiary Calibra knowing your account balance and you're spending and offering to sell a retailer an algorithm that will maximize the price for what you can afford to pay for a product.

Imagine this cartel having this kind of financial visibility into not only many consumers, but into businesses across the economy. Such conflicts of interest are why payments and banking are separated from the rest of the economy in the United States end quote. So in other words, if you can see what all the transactions are, then you can get a good idea of how much money a person has. And if you have an idea of how much money they have, you can adjust your prices so that they

are more expensive for people who have more money. People who have less money, it will be less expensive because the alternative is you don't make a sale at all. Seems a little shady. Then again, all of this might be moot. As I record this, the Libre platform isn't fully fleshed out. Facebook has introduced a digital wallet that

exists as a subsidiary company. That would be the Libra that I mentioned just a moment ago, and this is the interface through which users can interact with Libra in order to make transactions or send money or purchase Libra. That's the actual name of the currency itself. The idea is that third parties will be allowed to create their

own digital wallet solutions. But for now, Calbra is it, and that's Facebook's contribution, and it's only it in a largely hypothetical sense as of the recording of this podcast, because at the moment there's very little functionality available in the wallet. You can put fake Libra coins in there, and that's about it. According to an article in Bloomberg, there's not a lot to show for Libra just yet, and the piece also criticizes the white paper for being

vague in spots. In fact, the article titled I tried using Facebook's Libra blockchain. It didn't work goes on to guess that the purpose of the white paper and the announcement isn't so to prepare the way for the emergence of a fully fleshed out digital currency. Rather, it's to prompt a reaction from regulatory agencies to sort of test the waters. So, in other words, it's not a sincere

effort to get a digital currency off the ground. It's to check and see what sort of obstacles are going to be in the way when they finally get their act together, and indeed the regulatory bodies have responded. In the United States, the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services has urged Facebook to hold off on any more

developments with Libra and Calibra. The committee states, quote, it appears that these products may lend themselves to an entirely new global financial system that is based out of Switzerland and intended to rival US monetary policy and the dollar. This raises serious privacy, trading, national security, and monetary policy concerns for not only Facebook's over two billion users, but also for investors, consume mers, and the broader general economy

end quote. Yikes. The committee goes on to express concern about oversight and regulations, how a sovereign currency without these faculties in place could cause financial instability around the world, and they are also quick to point out that Facebook doesn't exactly have a stellar track record in the eyes of the US government. Just now, and just to show that the Americans aren't the only ones concerned, let's hop

across the pond. In the UK, Christopher Woollard, the Financial Conduct Authorities Executive director of Strategy Competition, stated quote, Historically this may have been a sector that has lived by the mantra of move fast and break things, but the issues raised here require deep thought and detail end quote. Meanwhile, in France, the Bank of France as governor has stated that the Libra currency will have to comply with anti money laundering regulations and also attain a banking license if

it offers any banking services. And the concern is understandable because if Libra doesn't work properly, it could cause frustration and economic hardships for many people around the world. But if it works really well, it might mean hard times

for entrenched traditional financial institutions. And while I'm not gonna lose sleep about how the CEOs of massive banks are going to be able to afford their next private plane, I'm not exactly looking to a company like Facebook to act like robin Hood, because they're just as huge as some of these financial institutions. One thing Libra is trying to do is make cross border transactions easier. The idea

is attractive. Rather than converting money from one sovereign currency to another and going through the process of doing a wire transfer, you could use a digital currency like Libra and do it all much more quickly without as much fuss, maybe with even lower transaction fees. But some critics have said there are already many alternatives to the more traditional routes in place, and they are either ready to go right now, or they're further along in development than Libra

seems to be. The Financial Times also called into question whether Libra would actually benefit the unbanked as its mission sets out to do, asking how could someone actually enter into that world if they don't already have a bank account, which is a decent question to ask. On top of all that, Libra wouldn't magically become a ubiquitous currency overnight. Merchants would still have to accept it as payment for goods and services. First, see, a currency is no good

if no one accepts it. It doesn't matter how big the issuing entity may or may not be. So if I go out on the street then I hand out pieces of paper with my face on it and I call it strict bucks, that doesn't mean you're ever going to be able to spend that cash. A merchant would have to accept it for and it would be crazy

to do so. The Libra Association is proposing possible incentives to get merchants on board and be part of this, But to me, it seems like a pretty big endeavor, and it feels a little like a catch twenty two because there's no reason to sign on if there aren't enough merchants to support the currency and turn it into something useful. But then without signing on, then the currency will just remain a curiosity and not be an incentive

for anybody to join. So if a yo yo manufacturer is the only company to accept Libra's payment, it won't do much, though I guess technically the business would still have its ups and downs. There are a couple of other things I'd like to touch on before I sign off. One of them is the name Libra in the first place. Now, in Latin libra was a term for a unit of weight and ancient rome, and most of the stuff I've read about in the digital currency realm has reference to this.

That's talking about scales or weights in Roman times. However, it's also the name of an astrological sign. Now, I don't put any stock in astrology, unlike my beloved producer Tari, who tells me that's just like a cancer. But I think of astrology as magical thinking. However, I do think it is important and relevant to point out how Libra is an astrological sign. Why, well, it all has to do with a pair of twins who are once a big part of Facebook, the Winklevoss Twins. These twins who

had an infamous falling out with Mark Zuckerberg. The foundation for that falling out was that the twins alleged that Zuckerberg had essentially ripped off the idea for Facebook from them. They went on to found a company in two thousand fourteen. They called it the Gemini Trust Company. It's a digital currency exchange company. And that means that a customer of that company, you could establish a digital wallet, you could

buy or sell digital assets, that kind of thing. And Jim and I, I'm sure many of you know, is also the name of an astrological sign. It's for the twins. So could it be that when it came time to name this new digital currency that Zuckerberg wanted something that would stick in the craw of the Winklevoss brothers and call it Libra and say I stole your idea again, I have no idea. It could just be coincidence. And honestly, we're ultimately talking about several extremely rich dudes who are

enjoying a life of privilege beyond my imagining. So really, I don't care who is having a fit with who. It doesn't matter to me anyway. That's the low down on Libra. Now. It is possible that the Libra Association will get this currency up and running they want to launch in twenty twenty. I would argue that right now, at least Facebook's involvement is a pretty big albatross around

the neck of the project. I think it might actually have been a better idea to go without Facebook's name on it at all, particularly since that's what everyone is focusing on right now. I do want to see more support for the unbanked, both in developing and developed countries. I want to see those folks get access to financial stability. I want there to be more financial security for people

in general. I wanted to be easy to make payments without exorbitant transaction fees, and maybe it could well be that the Libra Association will fulfill those goals as they have stated they want to. I'm obviously really skeptical about that, but I'll also admit these may just be my biases coming into play. I would love to be proven wrong, because if I'm proven wrong, it could possibly be a huge benefit for a lot of people. I'm just not convinced yet that this is the group to pull that off,

But I'm curious what you guys think. If you want to share your thoughts with me, you can send me email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook. The handle for both of those is text stuff hs W. Remember you can visit our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You're gonna find the archive of all of

our past episodes there. You will also find links to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show and we appreciate it very much, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.