If you think bitcoin is having a hard time this week, talk to Mark Zuckerberg about Libra and you’ll probably think bitcoin isn’t doing so bad.
Libra Encounters More Delays
At press time, bitcoin is trading for just under $7,900, meaning it’s crashed even harder over the past 24 hours. Marcus Swanepoel, the chief trader of bitcoin and its crypto cousins at Luno, says that this behavior is pretty much affecting every major cryptocurrency on the market, and that the trends are not specifically reserved to bitcoin. He comments:
Bitcoin staged a brief recovery yesterday but is again below [$8,000], currently trading at $7,990. Similar losses have been recorded by all the main altcoins. The loss of value is certainly as a result of the overall global market negativity, but the change in the structure of the market with the launch of the bitcoin futures on Bakkt is thought, by a number of traders, to have been a contributing factor.
As bad as all this sounds, Mark Zuckerberg has come forward to announce that Libra, despite all the hype and hoopla surrounding it since its official introduction earlier in the year, may not launch in 2020 like executives had originally planned. For the most part, the social media mogul is still encountering regulatory problems that are likely to delay the currency’s release heavily.
Libra has been rubbing people the wrong way ever since the plans to build it first emerged several months ago. This likely has to do with the fact that trust in Facebook has fallen significantly since its ties to Cambridge Analytica were first made public in 2018. Since then, everyone – from the general public to the American Congress – have wondered how Facebook plans to keep the financial data of its customers safe and secure.
As part of his attempts to fix Facebook’s reputation and get Libra moving along on schedule, Zuckerberg is changing his approach to the situation. He’s now asking for feedback from both lawmakers and the general public for data regarding how they feel towards Libra and what could potentially get in the way of its growth and development.
Doing Things Differently
He comments:
Part of the approach and how we’ve changed is that now when we do things that are going to be very sensitive for society, we want to have a period where we can go out and talk about them and consult with people and get feedback and work through the issues before rolling them out, and that’s a very different approach than what we might have taken five years ago, but I think it’s the right way for us to do this at the scale we operate in.
At press time, Libra has faced problems in several countries including the U.S., France, Germany and India.
