Libra is not designed to minimize the number of trusted parties in an economic transaction. Libra is designed to maintain a stable value and users trust the Libra Association’s management of a reserve fund to achieve that goal. Users also rely on the permissioned validators to add transactions to the ledger, and but for their participation a transaction would not go through.
Peter van Valkenburgh article about differences between Bitcoin and Facebook’s Libra. The two have different design goals, work in different ways, and raise different regulatory questions.
Author’s answer is that Bitcoin and Libra are very different projects that use very different technologies and, as a consequence, each project faces different regulatory and legal challenges.
The article then look sat the design goals of each project, the technologies they use, and conclude with a high-level comparison of the relevant laws and regulations:
- Different design goals and priorities
- Different technologies employed
- Different regulatory consequences
For a deeper dive on the concepts of permissionless vs permissioned blockchains, the technical details involved in their development, and their legal implications, check out the Coin Center report: Open Matters: Why Permissionless Blockchains are Essential to the Future of the Internet. Nice one!
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