I like to give people the benefit of the doubt too. But his main mantra since forever has been that he wants to connect the world. But if that was really his goal, then facebook wouldn't be such a closed, proprietary system.
It doesn't really matter whether the motives are pure or base; my point is more that the system is set up to amplify the wishes of one person with no recourse. So when the pharaoh gets obsessed with something weird, the empire must follow.
Libra's sole purpose is to let FB do this kind of stuff while sidestepping the regulatory red tape.
Still, it's important to understand that there are people who disagree with you, and who do things that you view as objectively wrong, that are driven by idealistic impulses.
But hey, I could be wrong. Maybe he's doing it because he's an idealist and wants to help the Africans.
I hadn't made this connection before (although I'm sure it has been made many times in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency space already). Just to spell it out: the Winklevi's cryptocurrency exchange is called Gemini, the first air sign in the zodiac and also the sign of twins. Libra is the second air sign and also the sign of scales, or measuring & balance.
Coming up with a project of "we will cure all diseases" show that well, it's just some pipe dream that sounds good for the mere mortals hence why Mark came up with it. Not because curing diseases is good for humanity, but because it will look nice on his CV.
Him, together with Bill Gates, look like the kind of people who would sell their own mother to make more money.
The moral here is you can't concentrate power this far, not that Gates or Zuckerberg are history's greatest monsters. No human being should have that level of power.
More like extremely self centered
> It's becoming clearer with each day that Zuckerberg has no concept of morality or humanity
You might know all about morals and actively go against them. I don't think that's what's happening here
Seriously though, assuming this is a zuckerberg brain fart, is that not more reason to be wary, more reason for regulators to close it down. If compliance are doing contortions to make a bad idea legal, that doesn't seem the best basis for a global currency.
What if Zuckerberg is simply a very idealistic person who happens to have full voting control of one of the largest corporations in the world, and insists on pushing it to idiosyncratic ends? This is a guy who a couple of years ago decided that "we will cure all disease" was a non-ridiculous goal to put his and his wife's name on.
A lot of the complexity around Libra can be explained as Zuckerberg pushing for unfettered access to the financial system for everyone, and the many smart legal and technical minds at Facebook trying to protect the company from the regulatory and criminal nightmare such a system would pose in practice.
I may be wrong in this analysis, but in general I think we spend too little time analyzing what vapid thought may have come into Zuckerberg's head this time around, when it is a perfectly sufficient explanation of Facebook's behavior. In this model, the complexity and subtlety of the strategy come from people around the Great Leader trying to mitigate his vision, or adapt it to their own bureaucratic or ideological ends.