I can't believe it either, but for a different reason. If Facebook had announced that they're going to launch their own version of Paypal, nobody would have wanted to use it for privacy concerns. But because cryptocurrency is trendy and supposed to have a positive effect on privacy and not supposed to be controlled by a single party, all of those concerns fall away. Except that (Wikipedia):
> Libra will not rely on cryptocurrency mining.[20] Only members of the Libra Association will be able to process transactions via the permissioned blockchain.
It's not a cryptocurrency at all. It's a cryptocurrency to the same extent that, because your credit card cryptographically signs the transaction at the POS terminal, euros can be said to be a cryptocurrency.
Somehow they get away with calling it cryptocurrency when it's really just another Visa or Paypal. Nobody should want to use this and that should be obvious, but 'crypto magic' is involved and so we need to have the conversation.
Why not? Unlike governments, private companies can't coerce me to use their currency. If I think their currency is garbage, I'm totally free to not use it and to convert any Libra I receive into USD. That's not at all true for government-issued currencies. For example: If I try to pay my taxes with anything other than USD, men with guns will come to my home and put me in a cage.
