News of the year -the conception of a new child after the marriage between Facebook and Cryptocurrency in the sacred space of Blockchain - and the child shall be called Libra

Possibly the biggest news in the cryptocurrency sector since the launch of Ethereum in 2015, and even the biggest news in social media and modern day digital banking history, is the release in the past 48 hours of Facebook’s own cryptocurrency, the Libracoin. Blockchain has gone mainstream and so has cryptocurrency. Is this a good or bad thing? Well it depends who you ask, but I think that when we look back at this point one day in the future, we will see that it marks a time when the world had a shift in direction that ushered in something more profound than we realize from this standpoint today.

If it takes off as Mark Zuckerberg hopes, since there’s likely to be stiff restriction from the SEC and US government, then this new cryptocoin, to be used on the Facebook platforms like WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, will open up a new world of digital money, possibly even reinventing the banking, insurance, lending, trading and financial sector in a move as big as going off the gold standard in the nineteen seventies, and possibly equally as ominous, although we will get into the pros and cons of it presently.

Financial history in the making
Few may have realized it at the time but going off the gold standard changed the financial playing field completely as it allowed the unfettered printing of paper fiat currency and ushered in a new era of deflation that we have never recovered from. Similarly launching a digital cryptocurrency stable token on the biggest social media platform, or in fact any online platform in the world, may change the face of finance in all its parameters, perhaps ushering the end of paper money and the shift from fiat currencies as the only form of money. Libra will be the first “global coin” (as it was named until dubbed Libra recently) to potentially be used by more than 2 billion people from hundreds of countries simultaneously.

The Empire strikes bank
It’s curious to note that the name denotes the old Roman Empire’s Latin concept of fairness and balance, but more importantly freedom. It may turn out to be rather ironic that a unit of measure in the Roman Empire called the Libra (from where the abbreviation lb for pounds originates), that great dictatorship that ruled almost the entire western world at the time, with a name suggesting fairness for its users, may become the very means by which the new world order, the modern day Roman Empire, enslaves us all via its digital control over everyone’s money, data, social credit score and therefore very freedom itself to transact without fear or favor.

Trojan Horse?
Conspiracy theories aside though, some are already warning that this Libracoin is a Trojan Horse, that it is the way for the elite to capture all the data including our financial spending habits, so that they can add it as the last bit of information-gathering on us all, allowing them to finally have a full profile of everyone to tag them, follow them, target them and keep tabs so that they can be categorized and made to fit into the tightening parameters of acceptability at a time in history where freedom is the very thing slowly being eroded as the scales tip ever more in favor of the 1% elite at the top, while the 99% fall further and further into poverty and subjugation.

Banking the unbanked
And all of this will be in the name of charity and the empowering of the masses. There are currently millions globally that do not have access to the internet or to banking and finance facilities, which means ironically they can’t be put into debt by unscrupulous money lenders. Facebook now wants to bring in the unbanked under their new net by spreading the internet like a literal net to capture all those outside of the system and then give them the one world digital currency via the most popular thing known to them all, namely Facebook, in a subtle an seamless takeover of the finances of the masses worldwide, without them complaining or trying to hide their private data whatsoever.

Free to be mined for your data
In accepting this new tool of commerce that makes transacting in micro and macro payments anywhere in the world so easy, are we effectively giving away our freedom and privacy in the process, so that down the line, when the trap is sprung, we will be so deeply immersed in it that it will be impossible for us to escape with our money and our liberty? But this is just an Orwellian cynical conspiracy theory so not worth worrying about, we hope.

Centralized vs decentralized
After all, this is not just Facebook’s personal cryptocurrency to rival Bitcoin and Ethereum. Facebook is only one of several huge international mega corporations to buy in as investors into the Libracoin project. Facebook may be running it, but they know that their reputation is tarnished so they are playing a background role and to a degree are designing the Libracoin project as a decentralized concept. Among real crypto enthusiasts it is comparatively centralized, and does not compare to Bitcoin in that regard, but compared to mainstream banking it is revolutionary, and so comes somewhere in the middle, the marriage of mainstream and cryptocurrencies.

Fast and close to free
So depending on who you are, you may or may not appreciate the project. It is also more than a coin, it is an ecosystem that is planning to have faster TPS (transactions per second) than Bitcoin (7TPS) and even Ethereum (15 TPS before sharding). Visa is around 24 000 TPS if needed although usually does around 2000TPS. Facebook, with its billions of users, plans to basically become another Visa, or PayPal and so will need speed in its blockchain to process the potentially high volume of payments being processed through its Libra token system. There are other faster cryptocurrencies, like XRP (1500TPS), but Libra will outdo even that. And it will be very cheap to transact, although the shareholders will be making their money of the interest on your fiat investments as well as your transaction fees.

Not up to the Bitcoin Standard
From the Bitcoin maximalist point of view, Libracoin is a step down from true decentralized cryptocurrency but from the mainstream banking sector this is revolutionary, so if we see it in this way, we could say that it may even usher in a new wave of acceptance of digital currencies and act as a gateway or onramp for millions in the mainstream to enter into the real cryptocurrency sector. Purists will of course always decry Libracoin as nowhere near the real deal as propounded by Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of the Bitcoin white paper.

World class team
Nevertheless the release of the Libracoin white paper this week by Facebook and their partners reveals that it comes from a pedigree team of Ph.D Stanford specialists after at least a year in the making and is based on all the experience learned by watching how Ethereum performs and then improving on that. Just like Ethereum, the second biggest crypto blockchain platform after Bitcoin, Libra will allow developers and coders to actually build Apps upon their platform, as well as write “smart contracts”, which is the newest cutting edge level of coding in today’s tech sector.

Multinational investment and partnership
The company behind Libracoin may be Facebook, but they are not alone in running the show. Some of the biggest corporations in the world are investing $10 million each to be partners in the project, names such as Visa, Uber, Investment fund Andreesen Horowitz, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe, Visa, Lyft, Vodaphone, Coinbase, Spotify to begin with. In fact to qualify to be a shareholder or investor you have to be a multi million dollar global company. This is for the super rich globalists it seems.

Voting rights appear decentralized
Fortunately the governance of the entire Libracoin plus the Calibra wallet to be built into WhatsApp, is to be divided up between 100 investors who all have a 1% vote. This protects Facebook from any more privacy law suits, as they are apparently on the surface a minority stakeholder. People no longer trust FB so this is there way of disguising their influence, but behind the scenes they are the ones who hired the software engineers, including David Marcus, ex director of PayPal and Coinbase crypto exchange to run the project.

Two coins
Besides that there are actually two coins involved, one for retailers like us which will be pegged to a basket of fiat currencies, thus ensuring its stable value, and another which is open only to big investors, which looks to me basically like a share in the company. In the new tokenized world where everything can be digitally divided up and sold like shares, the blockchain is opening up the investment field with crypto tokens as the new shares. The amazing part is that coders and developers can now write their own smart contracts on the Libra blocckchain, just like we do on Ethereum or EOS and others, to build our own tokens or trade parameters, which are like shares in whatever it is we want to trade.

The white paper says it all
In the long run there is a lot that can be said about this new historic move to launch Facebook’s Libracoin, which is aiming for 1000TPS with 10 second confirmation, according to the white paper found here: https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/. More importantly there is no KYC (know your customer) or AML (anti money laundering) where we have to give our proof of address and ID, as usually needed in a bank, to use the actual Libracoin, so it could still be anonymous. Its only the protocol or second level building of Apps that will require your personal data. There is a difference, so it appears private on the surface.

Will it survive the year?
Libra stablecoin is still in testnet phase for the next year, and if Facebook can withstand the demand from the US government and the SEC to reign in their revolution, they should go live by then, and we will know once and for all if this global crytpocurrency run out of Geneva Switzerland will be a tool to liberate the poorest masses or bind them still further. Facebook already has our data and knows more about us than we realize. Now we will be giving them our financial details too, like our spending habits and our transaction details. Will they use it to target us with advertising still further, as well as use tighten their surveillance on us for their handlers in the NWO? Only time will tell.