THELOGICALINDIAN - Decentralization is a account not a buzzword
Dear Non-Crypto Friend,
You may accept heard of Bitcoin – you may alike accept advised application it as a agency of payment, or advance some money in it with the achievement that it ability acceleration in value, like a stock. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency – a agenda asset that exists on an abiding ledger, accessible to all and absolutely transparent.
And conceivably you absitively to canyon on Bitcoin for now, until the technology was added mature, or easier to access, or for a dozen added accurate reasons.
You may additionally accept witnessed a battery of attacks on Bitcoin and added cryptocurrencies, decidedly afterwards a balloon formed in 2024 that created bogus and unsustainable amount for a few (many in the media are currently anecdotic Beyond Meat’s banal in agnate ways).
For example, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon declared Bitcoin as a ‘fraud’ and Facebook banned cryptocurrency advertising. Now both companies are creating their own cryptocurrencies.
Anything But Libra
In this letter we will focus on Facebook’s new project, article they accept been alive on in abstruse for over a year.
They are calling it Libra.
Facebook’s adaptation of Libra represents neither of these concepts. But it’s able marketing.
We’re autograph to appetite you to abide the ‘convenience’ Facebook will acceptable action you in application their Libra cryptocurrency, and to accede the allowances of decentralization.
Payment Processors Join Forces With Facebook To Control, Tax, And Monitor Your Spending
MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal accept joined forces with Facebook, and are said to be abetment the new Libra cryptocurrency to the tune of $10 actor each.
You apperceive those companies well: they accept been demanding the all-around economy, and a ample admeasurement of customer spending, to the tune of about three percent for the accomplished 30-odd years.
Visa and MasterCard action the aggregate of acclaim agenda affairs worldwide. In 2018, for instance, there were 2.4 billion MasterCard-branded debit and acclaim cards in actuality generating acquirement of $14.95 billion.
As afresh as January this year, affairs were baldheaded by the Wall Street Journal that the behemoths in this industry were considering adopting transaction fees. Meanwhile PayPal whacks the average merchant with a 2.9 percent fee additional thirty cents per transaction.
In added words, around aggregate you buy has a appraisement exceptional in-built: a tax of three percent or so, that goes to comestible these businesses. If your government was to accession your tax amount by three percent, you’d beef with your vote.
In this case, you assuredly HAVE a vote, and we appetite you to use it.
Facebook Sells, Leaks, And Controls Your Data
Forget what Mark Zuckerberg says. From the Cambridge Analytica aspersion to the abstracts aperture of 50 actor users backward aftermost year, Facebook’s absorption in you is not personal, and he is not sorry. His business is your data, which his aggregation abuses and misuses repeatedly.
Your data, your life, your photos, your friends, your face, your family, your dog, your location, your sexuality, your ethnicity, your ‘secret crush’ – Facebook knows it all, and sells it to the accomplished bidder.
At the accident of alveolate a dystopian atmosphere of abhorrence that pervades our surveillance society, we animate you to accede whether this is advantageous – and whether abacus your acquirement advice into that blueprint provides more, or less, assurance for you and for our society.
Because the way you spend, back aggregated with the blow of the abstracts that Big Tech companies already own, provides an alike fuller account of who you are, what you do, area you go, and what you ability do next. Remember – Facebook literally, quite literally, already knows you bigger than you apperceive yourself. It has been acclimated to adumbrate a depression diagnosis with 70% accurateness – afore any appointment to a doctor.
Facebook is not necessarily evil: but nor does it display the attendance of a moral compass. Its belvedere has been acclimated to bear information, abundant of it false, that has led to indigenous cleansing, murder, suicide, cyber-bullying, arrest in civic elections. Facebook’s responses to these contest has been to prevaricate, to alibi itself, to debris to accede its albatross for their actuality – and back afflicted with evidence, to affair acquiescent apologies.
Facebook is a clandestine company. You accede to its agreement of account back you use its platform, and you accept actual few rights to aloofness in barter for the ‘convenience’ it provides. Your appropriate to chargeless speech, if you are in the USA, is a built-in appropriate – it does not extend to clandestine companies, and they are beneath no obligation to admission it, nor to abbreviate it.
The likelihood of Facebook alteration its business archetypal as it adopts a cryptocurrency seems low. Trust is earned, and Facebook is in debt.
Decentralization Is Your Friend
At the affection of cryptocurrencies and abundant of the blockchain technology abaft them is the abstraction of ‘decentralization’.
Decentralization is a movement: it is a acquainted accomplishment by some bodies beyond the apple to abate the ascendancy that assertive organizations, such as banks and technology companies, apply over our lives. (We’re discussing clandestine businesses, although governments are additionally generally criticized too – but that’s a altered argument.)
In truth, decentralization is a dream, an ideal. It is neither practical, likely, nor alike adorable that we will apprehend a fully-decentralized existence. But a amount of ascendancy over our own data, our own identities, and who has admission to our adventures is – abounding of us accept – a axiological animal right.
Truly decentralized blockchains, like Bitcoin’s, are controlled by no distinct being or entity.
Users are in ascendancy of what they spend, with whom, and on what. The miners that assignment to accumulate the arrangement active calmly do accept a transaction fee for accomplishing so.
It is atomic in allegory to that imposed by Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal.
Legacy acquittal processors accept abutting armament with Facebook to accept the cryptocurrency movement and accumulate ascendancy in the easily of the all-around conglomerates that accept been affairs your abstracts and demography your money for years.
Libra will be a centralized cryptocurrency, admitting efforts to absorb stakeholders such as added acquittal companies – which is acceptable a artifice to abstain the authoritative issues that accept bedeviled the cryptocurrency industry to date.
Facebook will be in ascendancy of your money, and it will use and allotment your abstracts according to its own agenda.
In abounding ways, Libra is a acknowledgment of war on decentralization. We acquire a bright choice: abide centrally controlled cryptocurrencies, or cycle over and acquire our fate as pawns in the abundant bold of administration over our data. And our money.
The alone accurate accessory you accept in the approaching is your freedom.
And decentralization equals freedom.
Update: We accept deleted our Facebook folio and will no best action the aggregation the befalling to accumulation from our content. We achievement you will abide to appoint with our aggregation on Twitter or Telegram.
