“Bitcoin as an asset class has proven that mathematical scarcity can support an incredibly exciting asset,” Disparte said. “It’s not a means of payment. It just isn’t.”
The Libra Association is a group of companies that came together to launch Libra, a digital currency meant to help the millions of unbanked people around the world, according to Facebook. It would work with each company controlling a node, and only companies approved by previous members could join.
“The bottom rung of the ladder of economic mobility is payment access,” Disparte said.
He added that a lack of access is what drew him to Libra, and that the digital currency was attempting to fix a complicated problem.
“How do you drive mass adoption?” he said. “How do you remove insidious levels of friction that basically make it cost-prohibitive to give people access to payments?”
Akin Sawyerr, a strategy lead on the Decred project, was also on the panel with Disparte.
“I’m not convinced that a council of self-interested companies can do money better than a decentralized system,” Sawyerr said. “The only way to really get there is to empower the individuals to have some base-level sovereignty.”
By sovereignty, Sawyerr meant a person having complete control over their own money. For example, with bitcoin, as long as a person has their own keys, there’s no way anyone can take it from them, he argued. He believes that a group of large corporations are going to be very resistant to censorship.
Many companies — like Visa, PayPal and Mastercard — left the association in October.
