Facebook’s latest venture into the cryptospace has encountered a lot of debate and criticism, since the day it was first introduced. The contentious Libra project led by 28 corporate giants including Facebook, has been touted as a “centralized digital crypto” by many skeptics. The latest hearing before the United States’ Senate Banking Committee has only fueled more negative comments against the social media giant.
The latest individual to jump into the bandwagon of critics is Samson Mow, CSO of Blockstream. Following the conclusion of David Marcus’s testimony before the Senate, Mow concluded,
“@Libra_ is so screwed.”
Mow pointed out a contradiction in Marcus’s statement, something the Senators forgot to identify.
Mow called out Marcus’s words, wherein the Facebook executive said that the Libra network would be open-sourced and will belong to the community. Marcus also said that eventually, users would build the code after the “firm relinquishes control over both the codebase and network.”
According to Mow, this would mean that the dev team will be able to interact freely with the network, even after removing KYC/AML components in a non-Calibra wallet. This will be completely contradictory to the following statement,
“Wallets will enforce the sanctions that are led by our national security apparatus and treasury.”
Mow added that “the only way for Libra to guarantee compliance in all areas” is to be completely centralized, stating that a scenario where government ID authentication is a prerequisite for Calibra wallets only is not possible.
Marcus’s other statement that came under fire from Mow was when he stated that people can do what they want with their money as long as “they have legitimate use of the product.” This begs the question, what can be deemed legitimate and what cannot?
Several lawmakers have already termed the project “delusional.” Blockstream’s CSO added salt to Marcus’s open wounds by claiming that Marcus “has no idea what he is building.”
Samson Mow went on to quote the “funny part” of the hearing, referring to Marcus talking about Switzerland’s Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner [FDPIC] for the purpose of handling data monitoring and privacy protections for its new cryptocurrency, something the regulatory agency had no prior clue about. The Blockstream CSO commented on the whole episode in a characteristic tongue-in-cheek manner,
“We want to keep America competitive by setting up shop in Switzerland”
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