Inequality has remained persistently high for decades, and a new report shows just how stark the divide is between the richest and poorest people on the planet. 

The 2022 World Inequality Report, a huge undertaking coordinated by economic and inequality experts Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, was the product of four years of research and produced an unprecedented data set on just how wealth is distributed.

“The world is marked by a very high level of income inequality and an extreme level of wealth inequality,” the authors wrote. 

The data serves as a complete rebuke of the trickle-down economic theory, which posits that cutting taxes on the rich will “trickle down” to those below, with the cuts eventually benefiting everyone. In America, trickle-down was exemplified by President Ronald Reagan’s tax slashes. It’s a theory that persists today, even though most research has shown that 50 years of tax cuts benefits the wealthy and worsens inequality.

The researchers are some of the leading minds on inequality in the entire field of economics. Chancel is the co-director of the World Inequality Lab, while Saez and Zucman have literally written a book on the rich dodging taxes and helped create wealth tax proposals for senators like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Piketty, who was Zucman’s doctoral adviser, wrote the tome “Capital in the 21st Century” which used an unprecedented data set going back to the French Revolution to expose how centuries of growing wealth inequality was a feature of capitalism, not a bug. The World Inequality Report was his effort to do the same for recent history.

They argue in the new report that the last two decades of wealth data show that “inequality is a political choice, not an inevitability.”

For instance, when it comes to wealth, which accounts for the values of assets people hold, researchers found that the “poorest half of the global population barely owns any wealth at all.” That bottom half owns just 2% of total wealth. That means that the top half of the world holds 98% of the world’s wealth, and that gets even more concentrated the wealthier you get.

Indeed, the richest 10% of the world’s population hold 76%, or two-thirds of all wealth. That means the 517 million people who make up the top hold vastly more than the 2.5 billion who make up the bottom. The world’s policy choices have led to wealth trickling up rather than down. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/uIiMY/1/

One group in particular has seen its share of global wealth swell.

Billionaires now hold a 3% share of global wealth, up from 1% in 1995

The report notes that “2020 marked the steepest increase in global billionaires’ share of wealth on record.” Broadly, the number of billionaires rose to a record-number in 2020, with Wealth-X finding that there are now over 3,000 members of the three-comma club. 

Billionaire gains are a well-documented trend: The left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness found that Americans added $2.1 trillion to their wealth during the pandemic, a 70% increase.  

So what could work better than the current system? As the authors note, there’s been a renewed interest in taxing wealth during the pandemic: “It would be completely unreasonable not to ask more to top wealth-holders in the future, especially in light of the social, developmental and environmental challenges ahead.”

For the authors, that means expanding wealth taxes like property taxes to all different types of wealth, and to make taxes progressive — meaning they increase with net worth. The US has seen proposals from leading progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Ron Wyden that would respectively tax billionaire wealth outright, or tax the gains their assets see. But neither is moving forward. Read the original article on Business Insider

Also, devs would create things quicker but they would suck for the average joe without QA people.

May 22, 2010 marks the 10th anniversary of the first Bitcoin transaction, in which a Florida man paid for two pizzas with the Bitcoin. The day has become part of folklore, not because of the transaction, but more the price: Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 Bitcoins for two Papa John’s pizzas.

In a recent interview, he said pizzas were delicious and that he does not regret anything. 10,000 $BTC is now worth around $92 Million USD.

Organized on bitcointalk forum, the Florida man reached out for help. “I’ll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas.. like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day,” Hanyecz wrote.

“I like having left over pizza to nibble on later. You can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my house or order it for me from a delivery place, but what I’m aiming for is getting food delivered in exchange for bitcoins where I don’t have to order or prepare it myself, kind of like ordering a ‘breakfast platter’ at a hotel or something, they just bring you something to eat and you’re happy!”

A British man took up Hanyecz’s offer and bought the two pizzas for him in exchange for the 10,000 Bitcoins. Even then the recipient of the Bitcoins got himself a bargain, paying $25 for the pizzas, while 10,000 Bitcoins were worth around $41 at the time. 

Despite the astronomical rise in the price of Bitcoin it seems Hanyecz is not phased about his deal. “It wasn’t like Bitcoins had any value back then, so the idea of trading them for a pizza was incredibly cool,” Hanyecz told the NY Times. 

No specific order… though these are typically pay games or ones that do NOT require In App Purchases (IAP) to play.

• Hades Star (my current and long running obsession)
• Bridge Constructor Portal
• Mini Metro
• Monument Valley 2 (1 is great too)
• Island Delta
• Agent A
• Human Resource Machine
• Counterspy
• The Room Three (everything in this series is great though)
• Battlevoid Harbinger
• First Strike Final Hour
• Despotism 3k
• Bad North: Jotunn Edition
• Hitman Sniper (this does have some IAP but I don’t think they are required… they would just speed you up to get additional rifles. I think… it’s been ages and I still don’t uninstall it because I played the every living shit out of this game)

It’s pretty clear that most people have very little understanding of privacy, falling victim to mainstream media’s depiction of it and the world in general—the very power system(s) they’re trying to combat. The belief in Apple as privacy-oriented is one such illusion. So before starting I highly suggest people educate themselves on media and propaganda (I’ll happily provide book recommendations) to develop a more critical framework. A good introduction is this documentary.

A rough summary is that mainstream media are huge corporations whose profit-making comes not from readers/viewers or paid subscribers, but advertisers. This means there’s two important institutional constraints on media ideology: that of their owners and of their buyers. Both inherently determine their values and the kind of content they make. Corporate media are businesses selling products (us, consumers) to other businesses. What kind of ideology and picture of the world do you think you’re getting from that?.

The rest of this post is written under the assumption that this sub is informed enough to view Apple as nothing more than “the lesser of evils”. A perspective I will argue is still misguided.

1. USER IDENTIFICATION:

Outside the ones shared by all competing products in the industry, there are additional ways to identify you in specifically Apple products.

1. iOS subliminally and constantly collects sensitive data and links it to hardware identifiers almost guaranteed to link to a real identity.
2. iOS forces users to activate devices which sets up a remote UUID-linked (also collecting registration IP) database for a given device with Apple’s services.
3. iOS and iOS-based coprocessors force the regular sending of incredibly sensitive metadata to Apple for the mere ability to use the device for questionable and unknown reasons.

2.1. PRIVACY POLICY IN PRACTICE IN REGARDS TO THE AUTHORITIES:

Apple is subject to the FISA Amendments Act of 2009, and PRISM is an example of that law in practice, which Apple is part of (amongst others).

As public disclosure of cooperation with authorities have been allowed in in limited degrees in recent years, we’ve seen examples like Apple admitting to complying with 90% of government requests of accessing thousands of user files every year. FBI openly praised them for providing “ample assistance”. It therefore came as no surprise when a recent leak revealed that the company purposefully kept their phones less secure to make access easier for the authorities. Despite all this, Apple is still most associated with the FBI encryption dispute in 2015, which has been a huge PR success for them.

The latter case, which was completely fraudulent, is still widely circulated and frequently brought up as demonstration of Apple’s integrity. In reality it was a demonstration, like the general theme of much else in this post, of successful media propaganda. Apple (or even FBI) aren’t able to fool professional and well-educated journalists of NYT, WP, etc. They also rely on the media’s conformity through misrepresentation of the available facts, as well as accessible and well-known critique.

Apple have outlined how they give virtually everything relevant on iCloud to the authorities. As the CEO of ElcomSot, a security company that revealed iCloud was uploading data to Apple servers without users knowing, said: “The takeaway really is don’t ever used iCloud”. Apple having the encryption keys to iCloud as well as other parts of your iPhone completely invalidates the point of E2EE, and might explain why/how NSA minesdata directly from their servers.

The company’s respect for privacy is no better outside the US. We know that they oblige and assist authoritarian governments like China in installing firewalls to block citizens’ access to encrypted tools, like social media apps. They’re actively undermining people’s security and privacy from violent regimes for the sake of profit.

2.2. PRIVACY POLICY IN PRACTICE IN REGARDS TO THE PRIVATE INDUSTRY.

Apple sellcertificates to third-party developers that allow them to track users within their own apps—third-party developers are allowed to collect data on iOS. Facebook’s privacy scandal (interestingly, Apple themselves were one of the main partners buying data from Facebook) involved iOS users as well due to the mentioned tracking. Apple reacted to the scandal with another publicity stunt by superficially punishing Facebook. A real response, like removing Facebook from the App Store or removing their ability to track you, did not happen.

The company attacks Google and Facebook’s intrusion on users’ privacy, yet are enabling them and other businesses in doing so on their products. They even use Google as Safari’s default search provider—making 12 billion USD in 2019 alone from this deal.

If they really cared about privacy they would deny the ability of privacy-invasive apps to collect any user date. They don’t because these apps’ importance in keeping their products’ platform popular and therefore profitable.

3. THE LACK OF OPEN SOURCE CODE.

Open source code, specifically those that have been audited, is for obvious reasons much safer than closed source ones. Even government agencies take it into account in choosing secure software for their members.

It is all the more important when the company in question surrenders data to state authorities, allows third-party developers to collect data, have weak security measures (sometimes on purpose) and have been discovered of numerous suspicious activities. No to mention the fact that Apple’s verification mechanism in designed in such a way that they have the ability to “silently send targeted malicious updates to devices matching specific unique ID criteria”. iOS is a textbook example of why closed source is bad.

Imagine if Huawei, on top of providing third-party developers the ability to track its users, admitted to giving the Chinese government access to user data (but only after it was caught doing so) and were continuously caught in suspicious activities (many involving Chinese authorities)—all on a completely closed source software platform. Would you take their claims of “security” and “privacy” seriously?

Many users (predominately Americans) already have a hard time trusting Huawei, despite 0 evidence of illegal data collection of users or claimed connections with the CCP. Users have bought into US government claims and mainstream media propaganda. At the same time they buy and congratulate Apple for their privacy-oriented approach. A perfect example of a system of indoctrination.

4. ALTERNATIVES.

Here are some reasonable steps with descending order in how effective they are, that provide you with Android-based alternatives superior to iOS in privacy and security:

1: Disable Google tracking and services in settings (the little that they make available to you) and use F-Droid instead of Play Store. Notwithstanding the lack of privacy in many ways, it’s a good starting point.

-At this point your privacy from private companies is a bit better than on iOS.

1.5: Some OEMs, like Huawei, simplify and help users uninstall Google apps and services. Huawei’s current products (like Mate Pro 30) also come without all that, due to the current trade war. The phones still come with Huawei bloat and their ad-based data mining, but it’s nowhere as bad as Google and easier to evade.

-At this point your privacy from private companies is better than on iOS.

2: Root your device (an easy task) and uninstall all Google apps and services, as well as anything else, completely.

-At this point your privacy from both government and private companies is better than on iOS.

3: Install Custom ROMs that allow the same as 2, have even more open software for examination and also include enhanced privacy features in the system (or you can get these as third-party apps). Some, like LineageOS, also provide UI, performance and update cycles superior to almost all the main Android OSes (One UI, MIUI, EMUI, LG UI, etc.)

-At this point your privacy from both government and private companies is significantly better than on iOS.

4: GrapheneOS. It provides an exceptional level of privacy and security that has been praised by Snowden himself. It runs a stock Android setup with the same pros as LOS above, making it very well from a non-privacy perspective as well. If you want a user-friendly and highly privacy-related platform without having to do a lot of tinkering and manual management, this is the ROM for you.

-At this point your privacy from both government and private companies is tremendously better than on iOS.

5. SUMMARY: IPHONES ARE NOT THE BEST ALTERNATIVE FOR DATA PRIVACY.

iPhones give no additional security and privacy from the government over Android phones. They only do in limited conditions that are inconsequential to this sub. The minute you want to improve your privacy and security beyond what you get out of the box, iOS is terrible. It is not the “lesser of evils”— a myth that needs to die.

Additionally, positioning themselves as a beacon of privacy make them even more dangerous, as they become a honeypot for people in severe need of privacy. This has profound consequences in authoritarian societies for journalists, demonstrators and other dissidents. COINTELPRO has shown how ugly it can get in free societies as well.

If Apple’s software and ecosystem is more important to you than increased security on even some of the best UX alternatives on Android (LOS, GrapheneOS, etc), then at least admit to this hard truth and move on. Spreading misinformation undermines the privacy of others, and doing that to serve your confirmation bias is disingenuous and honestly deplorable.

Note: None of this is to say that Google Android is necessarily a secure alternatives in general, only in  relative terms – but at least it’s Open Source. Having said that, the hardware it runs on is not and some features they are building in only work on their devices. So if you have a Pixel and want all the features you are locked, essentially, into Close Source hardware due to chips like PVC,Titan, Soli, etc. Pixels with GOS make very little sense due to them being overpriced and having fairly mediocre flagship hardware. Their most fundamental strengths lie in software smoothness and image processing. Both of which are are lost when installing GOS.

It’s important to understand that while not ending government intrusion (though severely limiting it and its data mining), the available methods on Android, which include continuous development of new and better measures, tremendously improve on privacy from the private industry. All that is is simply impossible on iOS as a system; its security and privacy out of the box is also all you get. You have zero flexibility on the system and are completely locked in. This is really bad with their track record (covered in OP). All its important hardware being in-house and exclusive to them is even more troubling.

A good way to approach hardware security is to see what members of non-allied countries use. To give an example, Germany’ aerospace industry got rid of Cisco routers after discovering backdoors installed in their hardware. The issue in that case was industrial espionage, which The Five Eyes’ Project ECHELON, as a European Union report on the matter states, is “a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications”.

As for general surveillance, when Angela Merkel found out that her and other politicians’ Nokia 6260 Slides were tapped by US intelligence, she switched to a Blackberry fitted with an encryption chip by Secusmart. The latter company is a popular option for many government agencies.

Another thing to consider in a scenario where you need to choose between hardware backdoors of two rivalling countries, is to always go for the rival/enemy. It’s safer for a Chinese citizen to use phones with US-based hardware backdoors, and equally so for a US citizen to use phones with Chinese hardware backdoors. The reason being that the most immediate and relevant threats to you is your own government. They are the ones with sovereignty and monopoly of power over you and they are the ones who care. If surveillance is the only choice, it’s always better to choose a non-allied country.

Of course, the above hardware backdoor example is theoretical. In reality, governments often use dedicated security chips in phones unavailable to regular consumers. Furthermore, companies from non-allied countries cooperate with surveillance laws of local governments. Those relate to software and not hardware though (and this is why Android’s open source nature is extremely important).

Much of this is a repost from /r/Privacy.

Now a new evaluation of global climate models used to project Earth’s future global average surface temperatures over the past half-century answers that question: most of the models have been quite accurate.

We hit 2012 and everything goes bananas. The coming decades might be pretty rough.

Half of the iPhone vulnerabilities were discovered in Apple’s Safari browser, five in the kernel, and hackers also used two separate sandbox escapes to access data outside the permissions of an app or a process.

The attack had such deep access to iPhone systems that hackers could even read or eavesdrop the messages of victims on encrypted communications services like WhatsApp, iMessage, and ProtonMail.

“There was no target discrimination,” Ian Beer, a Google hacker and member of the company’s Project Zero team, wrote in a blog. “Simply visiting the hacked site was enough for the exploit server to attack your device, and if it was successful, install a monitoring implant.”

There’s also a chance that the attackers have acquired access tokens from the Apple victims, which they could use to log into social media and communications accounts.

You can read the in-depth posts on Google’s Project Zero blog.

Citing the United Nations migration replacement report as evidence of the far-right great replacement theory is a disingenuous tactic that I’ve seen used quite often. The intent is to purposely misinterpret the preamble of the document in an attempt to “prove” the great replacement conspiracy theory, however, the United Nations report does little to support the far-right conspiracy. The report indicates that western nations require immigration due to economic necessity as our projected population will significantly drop off later in the century, but the report also touches upon issues including the rise of social tensions due to cultural differences and goes into detail about the importance of integrating immigrant communities so they understand cultural norms and practices. The report concludes that future policy decisions must take into account the impact on both the host society and countries of origin.[1]

All too often we see those on the far-right conflate the economic necessity of immigration with a racist conspiracy theory that Muslims are going to outbreed native populations and replace them, which is currently statistically improbable even with an increase of immigration from Muslim majority countries. Moreover, the report does not claim Muslim immigrants are required therefore the referral to the migration replacement theory as proof of white genocide is not only disingenuous but nefarious in intention. The conspiracy theory is steeped in misogynistic beliefs including controlling and forcing white women to have more children as they believe feminism is the root cause of declining birth rates.[2] White nationalists believe in the concept of “race realism,” an idea that race is not a construct but a biological category that determines a person’s character.[3] As a student of anthropology, I know that it’s complete and utter racist bullshit.
Race is a social construct as is explicitly outlined by the leading anthropological opinion on the matter according to the American Anthropological Association.[4] Race exists as a social construct as it defines specific groups within a population that often do not share biological similarities. For example, in North America, we often categorize people into “Black,” “White,” Asian,” “Hispanic,” and Native American.” These classifications are deceptive as they attempt to define populations that are not genetically distinct, easily recognizable, or confined to one region. This limited classification does not address racial admixture, ethnicity, or nationality. In a biological context, the traditional social construct of race has very little meaning or use. When we consider these factors ancestry is the more appropriate term when we refer to a specific group of people. Differences between the “races” are manifested through a variety of morphological traits selected by ecological factors. Certain characteristics may reflect geography while some may not. Traits that seemingly distinguish individuals from others are not unique to particular racial groups but occur in every racial group in a wide range of variation. When distinguishing between individuals we refer to their ancestral traits, however due to government agencies devising standards the public is more familiar with the traditional construct of racial categories hence its common usage.

“Race” thus evolved as a worldview, a body of prejudgments that distorts our ideas about human differences and group behavior. Racial beliefs constitute myths about the diversity in the human species and about the abilities and behavior of people homogenized into “racial” categories. The myths fused behavior and physical features together in the public mind, impeding our comprehension of both biological variations and cultural behavior, implying that both are genetically determined. Racial myths bear no relationship to the reality of human capabilities or behavior. Scientists today find that reliance on such folk beliefs about human differences in research has led to countless errors.

At the end of the 20th century, we now understand that human cultural behavior is learned, conditioned into infants beginning at birth, and always subject to modification. No human is born with a built-in culture or language. Our temperaments, dispositions, and personalities, regardless of genetic propensities, are developed within sets of meanings and values that we call “culture.” Studies of infant and early childhood learning and behavior attest to the reality of our cultures in forming who we are.
It is a basic tenet of anthropological knowledge that all normal human beings have the capacity to learn any cultural behavior. The American experience with immigrants from hundreds of different language and cultural backgrounds who have acquired some version of American culture traits and behavior is the clearest evidence of this fact. Moreover, people of all physical variations have learned different cultural behaviors and continue to do so as modern transportation moves millions of immigrants around the world.

How people have been accepted and treated within the context of a given society or culture has a direct impact on how they perform in that society. The “racial” worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth. The tragedy in the United States has been that the policies and practices stemming from this worldview succeeded all too well in constructing unequal populations among Europeans, Native Americans, and peoples of African descent. Given what we know about the capacity of normal humans to achieve and function within any culture, we conclude that present-day inequalities between so-called “racial” groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances.
White nationalists believe they are going to be replaced by what they perceive as an “inferior population” and therefore society will regress due to the supposed inferiority of immigrants when there is no scientific evidence that backs such an absurd conspiracy theory.

1) United Nations Development of Economic and Social Affairs – Replacement Migration: Is It a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?
2) New York Times – ‘Replacement Theory,’ a Racist, Sexist Doctrine, Spreads in Far-Right Circles
3) South China Morning Post – ‘White genocide’ and ‘the great replacement’: a primer on the US alt-right movement
4) American Anthropological Association – AAA Statement on Race

Source: PoppinKREAM on Reddit

Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory trained an AI called Word2Vec on scientific papers to see if there was any “latent knowledge” that humans weren’t able to grock on first pass.

The study, published in Nature on July 3, reveals that the algorithm found predictions for potential thermoelectric materials which can convert heat into energy for various heating and cooling applications.

The algorithm didn’t know the definition of thermoelectric, though. It received no training in materials science. Using only word associations, the algorithm was able to provide candidates for future thermoelectric materials, some of which may be better than those we currently use. –Motherboard

“It can read any paper on material science, so can make connections that no scientists could,” said researcher Anubhav Jain. “Sometimes it does what a researcher would do; other times it makes these cross-discipline associations.”

The algorithm was designed to assess the language in 3.3 million abstracts from material sciences, and was able to build a vocabulary of around half-a-million words. Word2Vec used machine learning to analyze relationships between words.

“The way that this Word2vec algorithm works is that you train a neural network model to remove each word and predict what the words next to it will be,” said Jain, adding that “by training a neural network on a word, you get representations of words that can actually confer knowledge.”

Using just the words found in scientific abstracts, the algorithm was able to understand concepts such as the periodic table and the chemical structure of molecules. The algorithm linked words that were found close together, creating vectors of related words that helped define concepts. In some cases, words were linked to thermoelectric concepts but had never been written about as thermoelectric in any abstract they surveyed. This gap in knowledge is hard to catch with a human eye, but easy for an algorithm to spot.

After showing its capacity to predict future materials, researchers took their work back in time, virtually. They scrapped recent data and tested the algorithm on old papers, seeing if it could predict scientific discoveries before they happened. Once again, the algorithm worked. –Motherboard

The technology isn’t restricted to materials science either – as it can be trained on a wide variety of disciplines by retraining it on literature from whichever subject for which one wants to provide a deeper analysis.

“This algorithm is unsupervised and it builds its own connections,” said the study’s lead author, Vahe Tshitoyan, adding “You could use this for things like medical research or drug discovery. The information is out there. We just haven’t made these connections yet because you can’t read every article.”

Check out the full thing right over here.

Libra, will run on a blockchain network secured at launch by 100 distributed computer servers, or nodes. Twenty-eight node-running members are currently on board.

The Libra blockchain will go live in 2020, with the Libra Association – a Switzerland-based non-profit – tasked with leading the cryptocurrency’s ongoing development. In a white paper released Tuesday, the organization detailed how the Libra blockchain will be Byzantine fault-tolerant, meaning faulty behavior by some of the actors in the network will not compromise the security of the broader network.

It states:

“[The Libra blockchain makes] it extraordinarily difficult for an attacker to compromise 33 separately run nodes that would be required to launch an attack against the system.”

Facebook is launching a subsidiary company also called Calibra that handles its crypto dealings and protects users’ privacy by never mingling your Libra payments with your Facebook data so it can’t be used for ad targeting. Your real identity won’t be tied to your publicly visible transactions. But Facebook/Calibra and other founding members of the Libra Association will earn interest on the money users cash in that is held in reserve to keep the value of Libra stable.

Facebook plans to develop Libra into a “global coin”, pegging it to “well-known currencies” such as the US dollar and British pound in a bid to prevent the “wild swings” of conventional cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and Ethereum. This is one of the first red flags. This is less a cryptocurrency than it is an attempt at a stablecoin. As such… it isn’t even really moving into the cryptocurrency space but more the space of fiat banking.

If you’re wondering about Libra’s implications on the future of payments: stop it because Joshua Davis has it all figured out.

Facebook won’t fully control Libra, but instead get just a single vote in its governance like other founding members of the Libra Association, including Visa, Uber, and Andreessen Horowitz, which have invested at least $10 million each into the project’s operations. The association will promote the open-sourced Libra Blockchain and developer platform with its own Move programming language, plus sign up businesses to accept Libra for payment and even give customers discounts or rewards.

So yeah… this will all be tied together and of course, since Facebook really is a data company you can assume that your purchases will help inform companies in order to be able to target you (even if indirectly).

Early bitcoin core developer Peter Todd, a well-known industry figure and an applied cryptography consultant, and outspoken Bitcoin maximalist didn’t mince his words.

Libra runs on a permissioned blockchain, which means that only companies in the Libra Association can mine it/control it. After five years they say they will transition to a permissionless chain. Except… no blockchain has ever moved from permissioned to permissionless. Also… anybody familiar with Facebook’s constantly moving permissions on the social platform? Yeah. It’s nothing more than a private global federal bank.

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible. – Satoshi Nakamoto

What Facebook, or any company like Facebook, is proposing is not a cryptocurrency. It doesn’t have any of the fundamental characteristics of cryptocurrency. It doesn’t stand on the five pillars of an open blockchain. In fact, it has none of those. –Andreas M. AntonopoulosThe five pillars: open, public, neutral, censorship-resistant, and borderless.

Libra:

• Open… naw, total opposite. Highly centralized. It costs $10 million USD to be a node.
• Public? Nope… Run by an organization that paid $10m a pop to be included.
• Neutral – No way… how could it be? It’s backed by multiple, government created, fiat currencies. To build on many features of Libra’s blockchain, developers must seek permission from Facebook and its partners who administer it.
• Censorship-resistant – again, nope. Its chain isn’t even… see above… to build on many features of Libra’s blockchain, developers must seek permission from Facebook and its partners who administer it.
• Borderless – Can you use Facebook in China? Messenger? Whatsapp? or would you simply do like the majority of Chinese and use WeChat and Renren? They use those for a reason after all.

What they are building might be more akin to a better version of PayPal. They will also share info with government authorities – they’ve not said which ones but how can they be borderless, censorship-resistant, neutral, etc. AND comply with an individual nation-state at the same time?