On the Eve of Facebook's Libra Whitepaper

Monopoly corporations run today's media, which more often than not polarizes the world’s citizens for profit. People make unconsidered, snap judgments in reaction to world events and ideas they do not fully understand. Largely, we accept what we are told either because we are too ignorant of the broader world around us or simply too busy to consider the full impact of our passive acceptance.

The world, all too often, is measured in these black-and-white terms. X Politician is bad because of Y. B Politician fucked up because of C and D. Z is unacceptable due to N.

In reality, the world we live in SHOULD be cast in shades of grey. But we have built ourselves a digital echo chamber extraordinaire. As in the manner in which Magneto's specially crafted helmet amplifies his ability to manipulate magnetically charged particles found throughout the earth, our digitized social media platforms effectively concentrate the worst elements of our collective troll psyche and, essentially, wall us off from each other.

These are my thoughts as we head into tomorrow's landmark release of the highly anticipated Facebook Libra whitepaper. Facebook (FB) already wields too much power over our social lives. Now it's coming for our commerce as well. I'm not sure what to think, to be honest. On the one hand, this event could serve as the inflection point for the massive adoption of crypto that we've all been waiting for. On the other, a consortium blockchain managed and designed by corporations is pretty much counter to the apparent motivation for the release of bitcoin's blockchain technology in the first place.

I'm so confused. And for some reason, I think that the whitepaper could bring me some clarity.

Given that each of the companies in the graphic below have reportedly paid $10 million to operate a node for verifying transactions of the multi-currency stablecoin codenamed Libra, this project could turn out to be a very profitable venture for FB before they even launch the blockchain on which the token will ride. Reports indicate that they aim to recruit 100 companies as node operators. They are more than a quarter of the way there already. Once they have 100 nodes, that's a billion dollars. And they don't expect to launch anything until 2020.

Graphic taken from The Block

One thing I do know is that at @darc, we'll be researching the heck out of that whitepaper as soon as we can get our hands on it.

We'll let you know what we find out!

As always,

PEACE ✌🏼