David Gerard > Quotes

“Agustín Carstens of BIS acknowledged in June 2019: “There needs to be evidence for demand for central bank digital currencies and it is not clear that the demand is there yet. Perhaps people can do what they want by using electronic wallets provided by banks or fintech companies. It depends on the development of payment systems.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Bureaucrats also keep being seduced by the prospect of a full Eye of Sauron panopticon of every transaction in the economy. This appeals to those who think their problem is not having enough knowledge to exert control as finely as they’d like to. This is otherwise known as the Big Data Fallacy — where you think that just getting enough data will surely solve all your problems. It’s a fallacy because your problems are usually political — you know perfectly well what you need to do, and you’re hoping the big data will help convince others to let you do it.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Governments won’t let Facebook use its superpower — negligence — to disrupt their economy. Enabling genocide in Myanmar is one thing, but messing with our ability to buy Chick-fil-A and Land Rovers is another level. — Scott Galloway, NYU Stern”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Facebook made $50 billion from advertising in 2018 — $25 on average for each user, and $112 per North American user.1”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“You may be on Facebook lots — but would you trust Facebook with your money? For most people, the answer was “no.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Waters spoke of the many ways that Facebook had “utterly failed.” The company had failed on diversity and inclusion. It had been caught in “redlining,” when housing advertisements were not shown to users of particular races — which Facebook was being sued for both by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and privately by housing charities. Antitrust investigations were active in 47 states and the District of Columbia. The company had been fined $5 billion by the FTC over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook had enabled the government of Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Prospective users hear the blockchain hype and assume the hypothetical plans are real products that exist now — though “the blockchain could” is a phrase that really means “the blockchain doesn’t,” because if it did, they’d say that.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“The greatest day-to-day enemy of the poor is the middle-class bureaucrat who contemptuously treats them as data to be processed, without care to their needs or circumstances”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Developers could use the “credit_balance” interface to see how many Credits a user had309 — and Facebook confirmed that developers could use this to identify the biggest Credit holders, and squeeze them for even more money.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. — Milton Friedman”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“The poor are poor, not stupid — and their living conditions are different in each country.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Facebook and a cartel of junior partners will leverage their platform power to establish a global financial surveillance system, on the back of public monetary systems. — Raúl Carrillo, Demand Progress”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“A financial system running entirely on smart contract programs on a public blockchain is a big, juicy single target for hackers.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“The fallacy of Libra, and of cryptocurrency plans in general, is that the problem isn’t that we need a new technology. We know how to move numbers on a computer. The problems with Libra were always going to be regulation — especially when the project came from Facebook. Crypto dreams are tolerated when they’re put forward by weird small-time nutters — but not when they’re coming from a huge company with a continent-sized user base. But, even though every single thing about Libra went wrong, Facebook doesn’t take “no” or “never” for an answer.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Real finance has human oversight and trusted responsibility all through it — and not automated systems that humans can’t touch. Unfortunately, Libra’s Bitcoin ancestry was still clear in the design of the system.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“To use Messenger Pay, you connected your existing Visa or Mastercard debit card as a back end. To send someone money, you opened a message to that person, tapped the “$” icon, entered an amount and tapped “pay.” You could receive money by connecting your debit card for the money to be sent to.252 Messenger Pay didn’t charge a transaction fee — what Facebook got out of this was keeping you on the platform, and showing you ads. And, of course, that juicy personal financial data.253”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“When Silicon Valley says “disruption,” this means they don’t understand what they’re doing, don’t care to understand, and have only contempt for anyone who objects. “Move fast and break things,” as Facebook used to put it.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Of course, the most common pitch for Bitcoin is much simpler: you might get rich for free. People will say and do any ridiculous thing if they might get rich for free. The one really consistent ideology in Bitcoin is: “number go up.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Let’s say an unsavory app developer that’s based in Pakistan utilizes an exchange that’s based in Thailand to rip off an Arizonan who’s using a wallet that was built in Spain, so they steal all of their Libra. And that, of course, is minted by an association based in Switzerland. So which law enforcement or government or agency in which country does the Arizonan call to seek his or her Libra and financial recourse in this situation?”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Technically, a blockchain is simple. It’s an append-only ledger (using a data structure called a Merkle tree) — like an account book where you can only add new entries, not alter or remove old ones — and some mechanism to decide who adds the next entry. You can distribute copies of the ledger, and anyone receiving one can check they have a good copy. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.44* Blockchains are really simple — and when normal people find out what a blockchain actually is, they go: “What? That’s not magical at all. How do they get all of the nonsense I’ve read out of that?”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Neither political nor monetary sovereignty can be shared with private interests.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“After the past few months of the world heaping ordure on Libra,”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“All Oculus headsets will require a Facebook account by 2023, to help you “find, connect, and play with friends in VR” — and only incidentally to match you to ads.111”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“What Bitcoin does is run a computerised lottery, in a process called “mining.” Bitcoin miners guess a number. They take their guess, they combine it with a block of transactions that are waiting to be processed, and they do a simple calculation on them. If the calculation gives a small enough number, the miner wins six-and-a-quarter fresh new bitcoins! And their block of transactions is added to the public blockchain. The more guesses you make, the better your chances. In June 2020, Bitcoin miners were making 100 quintillion guesses every second. This used as much electricity as all of Austria.45 This is called “proof-of-work” — though it might better be termed “proof-of-waste.” Blocks come out approximately every ten minutes. If miners win coins too often, the difficulty goes up, to slow the system down — so the miners have to add more computers to compete. This results in spiraling electricity use — Bitcoin is, literally, anti-efficient. The point of all this waste is to secure the blockchain — the threat model is that nobody can change the blockchain without wasting at least as much electricity. The Bitcoin mining system is incredibly slow, and very hard to scale up. Bitcoin now consumes between 0.1% and 0.5% of all the electricity in the world — for the same seven transactions per second, worldwide, that it could do in 2009, when it was just running on Nakamoto’s desktop PC. Bitcoin is the most inefficient payment network in human history.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Blockchains don’t solve settlement and compliance issues — they’re only more efficient if they can bypass regulation. Libra could only be more efficient than existing systems as long as it could dodge regulation, and none of its competitors could.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“This all points to the real attraction of the project for Facebook. Libra isn’t really for consumers — Libra is Facebook’s call to arms against the very notion of regulation. Facebook wants to be too big to regulate, and lead the way for its Silicon Valley fellows to be too big to regulate.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“The Libra plan came out when Facebook was under increasingly close attention from governments, who were deeply suspicious of the company’s track record on privacy, election manipulation and falsified news.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Bitcoin also promised to solve the problems of the existing financial system and get rid of its middlemen — and then it recreated most of those middlemen, but incompetently”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“Stablecoin systems are payment systems, and the biggest problem with international payments is not the technology — it’s compliance with anti-money-laundering laws. Cryptocurrencies mostly work around this by ignoring it — but Libra couldn’t be allowed to do that.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money

“A “permissionless” cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is built to be out of anyone’s control, wastes incredible amounts of electricity — Bitcoin uses about as much power as all of Austria45 — and would be a completely silly idea for a company to develop as an investment, unless they were maintaining control by other means.”
― David Gerard, Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money