Toward Emancipatory Currencies: A Critique of Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency and Ideas for Alternatives

Money underpins everyone's daily life. Possible solutions for the global problems fail if there is not enough money. Yet changes to our monetary system are rarely included in the discussion. Against this backdrop, cryptocurrencies create important new precedents regarding how money can be created. Libra is a recent cryptocurrency project launched by one of the dominant social media companies, which has been the subject of intense international discussion. Because the details of Libra are not yet fully specified, we present different scenarios of how a successful Libra currency might play out and some of the problems that might follow. These scenarios include the monetization of the payment infrastructure, (ab)use of sanctioning power, a reduction of the reserve ratio, and an abandonment of reconvertability. These problems suggest a number regulatory strategies in response. Finally, we describe values and design requirements that might help guide future cryptocurrency innovation and provide ways of evaluating their success or failure.