This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, June 24th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A new currency launched by Facebook and a consortium of other big tech and financial firms would have an instantaneously large user base

and would fix some of the perceived problems with

cryptocurrencies today.

But even those benefits don't come without costs. Cato's

Diego Zuluaga comments. Libra is a cryptocurrency announced by Facebook but at some point of course Facebook will not be in control of it.

It will be this 20 company consortium that has come together to run it and my first thought was well there's a human operator here that is not software

right there there's a group of companies that has some lever

that they can pull with respect to this cryptocurrency.

And I thought, well, for people who have been involved in

crypto for a long time that wouldn't be a red flag wouldn't it? I think to some

people it does raise the question of whether this is a cryptocurrency at all

because the way it's been marketed as you the question of whether this is a cryptocurrency at all.

Because the way it's been marketed, as you say,

is that this begins as a partnership of large,

primarily tech, but generally large payments

and tech firms to provide a payment solution that will work globally.

But the idea is to expand the membership steadily into decentralized quote un, control of the software over time, but quite how they will do it and

evolved towards something that looks more like Bitcoin and is open access in crypto parlance a permissionless rather than a permissioned ledger of

transactions is unclear and from the text that I've seen from the documents that were released as part of the Libra announcement.

I cannot tell you exactly what the mechanics of that will be.

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