Facebook doesn’t have much consumer trust. But it does have a hell of a lot of consumers.
And that’s enough to make Libra, the new virtual coin that Facebook is announcing on Tuesday, the most consequential cryptocurrency effort undertaken in several years.
I have done a lot of research on cryptocurrencies for work, and keep coming back to my thoughts that they are a scam. Bitcoin works like a pyramid scheme, where the early adopters (the early miners) gain the lions share of wealth, once the value of the coin increases, due to the way that mining works. In the best case scenario of cryptocurrency use, some companies will do an end run around the current financial system intermediaries, and insert themselves as the new financial system intermediaries. Meanwhile, cryptocurrency holders/customers are trading worthless bits they can’t pay their taxes with.