Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project

It looks like a misstep followed by a hasty and ignominious retreat because thats exactly what happened - no one anticipated the reaction from lawmakers and rules agencies.

Its kind of hard to see this from the perspective of people who follow tech and HN, but Libra really may have been the first occasion that the possibility of crypto as anything other than an investment instrument - e.g. an actual usage as currency - penetrated the awareness of top national political leadership. Yes the ICO's got some attention but in many ways that attention seemed to suggest that crypto would be tolerated. And probably it will be, as long as it is simply another category of asset.

It will not be tolerated as currency, and governments will destroy any crypto that threatens to become one. For now, BTC is safe because its usage as a currency is minuscule and threatens no one. If it were to become successful, it will be destroyed. I've always known that was a possibility but now I'm sure of it.

>Facebook would not have unilateral control by any stretch of the imagination.

At minimum they are the registered owner the Libra federal trademarks...that's a funny first step for a "decentralized" project. Satoshi Nakamoto never trademarked bitcoin or blockchain for that matter.

The current financial system worldwide looks quite suspect right now, negative interest rates could soon become a new norm in the EU even officially in retail. Most importantly political leaders in the US(and EU) have scaled up their massive money-printing schemes designed to keep their banking-financial overlords in business.

With that in mind, the very last thing the EU and US authorities want is for the people who (mostly unwittingly) underpin the actual value to have an Exit from this type of controlled use of inflation into an alternative currency backed by say gold and other hard to inflate commodities, because allowing any significant amount of that.. (remember the true impact is inverse of the real fractional-reserve in play) would lead to a collapse in the power of the existing political-financial hegemony.

The primary threat for payment processors and fiat currency is real cryptocurrency.

Libra is a fake cryptocurrency that the payment processors and governments hoped would help to hold off the cryptocurrencies for a few extra years. It would have allowed the payment processors to continue to profit from transactions and made it practical for governments to control payments and wallets.

They are probably pulling out for two reasons. One, having all of the payment processors involved makes it too obvious that it's not actually a cryptocurrency. Two, it's dead in the water, and to even have a slight hope of reviving it, that association with payment processors needs to go away. If they are able to resurrect it, expect the companies to come back down the line.

Call me cynical, but the whole idea of Libra would be disruptive to the existing international payment businesses, such as the ones that just exited. So the only reason for them to join in the first place would be to basically "know your enemy" - make certain you get the first-person intel on the project's vitals and to know what to expect. Now that a couple of governments made it clear that there would be roadblocks in deploying Libra according to the original roadmap, it is no longer seen as a threat, so anyone without a direct monetization interest (Facebook itself?) is going to leave.