Libra Chair Says Bitcoin Is Not A Payment System

Dante Disparte, vice chairman of the Libra Association, spoke at the Digital Money Forum at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on Tuesday (Jan. 7), arguing for Libra and against bitcoin as a payment system, according to CoinDesk.

“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.