just a thought

Originally @ Techcruch It would be an understatement to say it’s been a rocky couple months for Libra, the Facebook-proposed stablecoin. Since its announcement in June, multiple high-profile members of the cryptocurrency’s consortium have jumped ship (many due to direct pressure from legislators). A congressional hearing on Libra turned into an evisceration of Facebook’s data and privacy practices. Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard assailed the project’s lack of controls. And the Chinese government announced its own competitive digital currency. But critics of the idea, though they are well-intentioned, are missing the forest for the trees. In spite of Libra’s well-cataloged risks and unanswered questions, there is a massive opportunity in plain sight for the global financial system. It would be a tragedy to let that opportunity be destroyed on the basis of Facebook’s reputation or Libra’s haphazard go-to-market.  Governments should heed the lesson of the US/...

Originally @ TechCrunch With the release of the Facebook consortium’s project  Libra  whitepaper, the internet, tech world, financial services industry and policy circles are all burning with conversation on the project’s potential. We are still very early into Libra’s life — it is, after all, still a proposal — and there is an endless set of questions left to answer. The project could redefine how we view money or it could be a complete failure; we won’t know which for years to come. While there isn’t much to add to the (likely thousands) of pundit takes on the project until more details come out, this moment does provide us with an opportunity to step back and take a look at money itself. We should be asking ourselves: how does money work today and how should it work? Money is an anachronistically analog part of everyday life. The last 25 years saw the digitization of most services businesses, from communications (email) to bookstores (Amazon) to taxis (Uber). Yet, e...

Originally @ TechCrunch Society is beginning to wake up to a tremendous shift in one of the most fundamental underpinnings to how we live our lives: the   credit   system. Even though it’s not commonly known,   credit   infrastructure has existed about as long as civilization itself. In one way or another,   credit   systems have always formalized the one essential basis for relationships between people: trust. Over millennia, the way  credit  looks, feels and is used has changed dramatically. Today, buoyed by a plethora of technologies and a golden  age  for abundant data,  credit  is undergoing its most radical change yet. But it is being pulled in many directions by competing forces, each with their own vision for the future. In the beginning,  credit  was highly personal and subjective — this persisted for thousands of years. Over the last century, a miracle happened: Driven mostly by statistical modeli...