⧉ Infominer

⧉ Infominer

The Libra Blockchain

11 minute read

  • @TechCrunch -Facebook announces Libra cryptocurrency

    The risk and reward of building the new PayPal

    In cryptocurrencies, Facebook saw both a threat and an opportunity. They held the promise of disrupting how things are bought and sold by eliminating transaction fees common with credit cards. That comes dangerously close to Facebook’s ad business that influences what is bought and sold. If a competitor like Google or an upstart built a popular coin and could monitor the transactions, they’d learn what people buy and could muscle in on the billions spent on Facebook marketing. Meanwhile, the 1.7 billion people who lack a bank account might choose whoever offers them a financial services alternative as their online identity provider too. That’s another thing Facebook wants to be.

  • White Paper

    Libra’s mission is to enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people.

    This document outlines our plans for a new decentralized blockchain, a low-volatility cryptocurrency, and a smart contract platform that together aim to create a new opportunity for responsible financial services innovation.

Dev

TLDR:

Try Libra Core

Technical Papers

  • The Libra Blockchain - Technical Paper

    Abstract.The Libra Blockchain is a decentralized, programmable database designed to support alow-volatility cryptocurrency that will have the ability to serve as an efficient medium of exchange forbillions of people around the world. We present a proposal for the Libra protocol, which implementsthe Libra Blockchain and aims to create a financial infrastructure that can foster innovation, lowerbarriers to entry, and improve access to financial services. To validate the design of the Libra protocol,we have built an open-source prototype implementation —Libra Core— in anticipation of a globalcollaborative effort to advance this new ecosystem

  • Move: A Language With Programmable Resources
  • State Machine Replication in the Libra Blockchain

Libra Codebase

Commentary

  • Move: A Language With Programmable Resources

    Abstract.We present Move, a safe and flexible programming language for the Libra Blockchain. Move is an executable bytecode language used to implement custom transactions and smart contracts.

    The key feature of Move is the ability to define custom resource types with semantics inspired by linear logic a resource can never be copied or implicitly discarded, only moved between program storage locations.

    These safety guarantees are enforced statically by Move’s type system. Despite thesespecial protections, resources are ordinary program values — they can be stored in data structures, passed as arguments to procedures, and so on.

    First-class resources are a very general concept thatprogrammers can use not only to implement safe digital assets but also to write correct businesslogic for wrapping assets and enforcing access control policies.

    The safety and expressivity of Move have enabled us to implement significant parts of the Libra protocol in Move, including Libra coin,transaction processing, and validator management. -[source]

Reaction

-[source]

@CaitlinLong_ 1/ FIRST ANALYSIS of @facebook ‘s #Libra: Facebook completely misunderstands money. 🤣 😩 Facebook understands payment systems–but that’s not the same as money. Two telling quotes: “Libra is backed by a reserve of real assets.” “Many cryptocurrencies today (eg #Bitcoin & #Ether…

  • Jack Dorsey says now is our chance to build a global currency for the internet

    This is our one opportunity to align every community, and every country, around the world, which I think provides a lot of clarity, enables a lot more innovation, and most importantly creates a probability of much greater access for more people. As we bring more people online, we can also imagine a trend in parallel where they all have access to the same currency, and there are still conversions to a local currency like the pound, but being able to have one currency really takes away some of the barriers of the past and how we think about global markets.

    … Do you think bitcoin could be the internet’s currency?

    I haven’t seen any other currency that would challenge it across the dimensions that I think are really important. First, I think it has an amazing brand. The other thing that I think makes it probably the strongest candidate is that the principles behind it are very pure. The creation of it was very pure, and focused on a public good, rather than any other particular agenda. The fact that it’s meant to be deflationary, meant to incentivize savings instead of spending, I think is a net positive for the world and how we think about consuming. Because it is a scarce resource, it has a probability of always increasing in value, which makes you consider a lot more how you spend it. Because you know that spending it today—it might go up in a week. And purchasing coffee, or a new sofa, with that really puts everything in perspective. Do I really need this? So from a psychological perspective, I think that’s interesting. H/T @jamestodaromd

Tech

Libra tech in 1 tweet: Pseudonymous base-layer. Smart contracts. 1000 tx/s onchain so forget about running a full node. You’ll DL a Merkle root with >2/3 sigs to know your balance - full trust in signatories (like XRP). Consensus algo called “HotStuff” (improved PBFT). Rust impl. -@ercwl

Annotated White Paper

  • Annotated Libra White Paper - [source]

  • Annotated Libra White-Paper - source

    Libra’s mission is to enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people. This document outlines our plans for a new decentralized blockchain, a low-volatility cryptocurrency, and a smart contract platform that together aim to create a new opportunity for responsible financial services innovation.

    Problem Statement: The advent of the internet and mobile broadband has empowered billions of people globally to have access to the world’s knowledge and information, high-fidelity communications, and a wide range of lower-cost, more convenient services.

    These services are now accessible using a $40 smartphone from almost anywhere in the world.

    1 This connectivity has driven economic empowerment by enabling more people to access the financial ecosystem. Working together, technology companies and financial institutions have also found solutions to help increase economic empowerment around the world. Despite this progress, large swaths of the world’s population are still left behind — 1.7 billion adults globally remain outside of the financial system with no access to a traditional bank, even though one billion have a mobile phone and nearly half a billion have internet access.

Response from the State

Association

  • Facebook’s cryptocurrency partners revealed—we obtained the entire list of inaugural backers

    As recently reported by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook’s cryptocurrency will be governed by a consortium of firms known as the Libra Association, which includes the likes of Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal. But The Block has gotten its hands on consortium marketing materials and can now report dozens of firms not previously known to be involved, including investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and non-profits including Mercy Corps. Calibra, a subsidiary Facebook formed to oversee the social media giant’s crypto efforts, is also among the founding members, according to a source familiar with the matter.

  • How to become a founding member of the Libra Association

    Technical Requirements

    Validators will have the option to run their node self-hosted, in which they themselves would be directly managing it, or cloud service-hosted, where the organization could run the node via a cloud service provider.

    Evaluation Criteria

    Must meet two of the following criteria:

    • More than $1 billion USD in market value or more than $500 million USD customer balances.
    • Reach more than 20 million people a year, multinationally.
    • Be recognized as an established top-100 industry leader by a third-party association.

Joining LibraAssoc

You may also enjoy

Ethereum Curated

44 minute read

Clearly could use some more organization here… this is basically a staging area until I’m ready to get serious about Ethereum links.

Curating Global Crypto Regulations

89 minute read

Defining smart contracts When contrasting contractual principles, it is clear that where a contract is not required to be in writing (Columbia ...

Curating Blockchain Securities

46 minute read

The term “security” is a fungible, negotiable financial instrument that holds some type of monetary value. It represents an ownership position in a public...