Inside the Facebook-led Libra Association

Who exactly owns a blockchain?

This is a bit of a misdirected question, because the purpose of the technology is to make it so everyone who uses the blockchain, owns it. Or something along those lines.

I think the word I'm looking for is decentralised.

The Libra Association own the LibraCoin blockchain. Which means they own the associated cryptocurrency, LibraCoin, as well as the environment upon which all of its decentralised applications (dApps) will be built and run.

LibraCoin is being launched by Facebook but they intend to relinquish sole ownership upon launch. They will achieve this by giving exactly one master node (a node that validates new blocks in the chain) to each member of the Association. This way, the network won’t belong solely to Zuckerberg.

So sadly, we won't be able to call it the ZuccBuck.

Membership of The Association is obtained through of a $10 million buy-in with 28 members already announced, including vaunted players such as Ebay, its former child PayPal, Lyft and its investor Andreessen Horowitz, a few more venture capitalists, some telecommunication firms and then Facebook itself (plus its new subsidary, Calibra...).

Source: Deccan Herald

This is a proof of stake model. Because the $10 million buy-in is being used to build the reserve that will back LibraCoin (making it a promising stablecoin), their interest is being staked. By the time the launch swings around Facebook hopes to have an even 100 validators.

So the Libra Association are in simple terms a committee of validators who will jointly own the whole platform. Everyone gets one vote (apart from Facebook who gets two, because they own Calibra).

Presumably, because corporate ownership is a shady tangle of conniving puppetmasters, there will be collaboration between this relatively small committee. And as the economic clout between the validators is quite disparate, ‘one vote’ actually means ‘one vote + however many votes I can get by threatening to put the smaller members in thumb screws’.

What does this mean for us, the average user? It means that Big Tech, who already own most of your personal data via social media, will now jointly own your payment transactions, if you let them. As it stands, just PayPal or Visa theoretically have access to this information.

But soon so will Facebook, and whoever else manages to buy in before 2020. Probably the Qatar Investment Authority.

What a fun ride this could turn out to be.