Why Facebook Libra and a cashless society are bad

Facebook revealed its long-awaited cryptocurrency plans Tuesday, announcing “Project Libra,” a new type of digital money designed for the billions of people using its apps and social network. If the plan is successful, users will soon be able to shop with and send the currency—known as Libra—on Messenger and Instagram, as well as use it with a wide variety of other merchants like Uber, Spotify, and MasterCard. Facebook Announces Project Libra, by Jeff John Roberts

It all comes down to Facebook and friends holding on to your money, making interest on it, while everybody passes their tokens around. Let’s admit it, Libra is just an attempt to replace democracy with corporatism. The companies that run Libra have zero obligation to the users and only need to maximise profits for the shareholders, and if it is a success, it will definitely speed up the movement towards more countries becoming cashless. And a cashless society WILL be bad for several reasons:

• In case of a crisis, the financial system will be paralysed.
• Homeless people will be even more excluded, like that’s even possible tbh.
• People won’t be able to pay anonymously in a gay bar.
• Everything you do, where you go and with whom will be tracked, permanently recorded and passed to algorithms for further analysis.
• Kids will have even less options to mess around without their parents checking on 24/7.
• Nobody will be able to make a living off the grid.
• No more grandpa selling his homegrown vegetables at the farmer market or on the side of the highway.
• Super easy to censor unpopular artists or activists.
• Impossible to do something that has not been validated by the state first.
• No escape if the government raises taxes in an unjust way.
• If mean and/or powerful people want something from you, you can’t be on the run.

So yeah … fuck Facebook Libra. David Marcus, as the former president of Paypal (don’t get me started on what a steaming pile of donkey turd Paypal is), and the entire Libra team should be ashamed of themselves.