On Tuesday (January 7), in Las Vegas, Dante Disparte, the vice chairman of the Libra Association, rejected the idea of Bitcoin being used as a means of payment.
The Libra Association executive’s comments while speaking as part of “The Libra Effect” panel session at “Digital Money Forum: Fintech, Crypto and Blockchain”, which is part of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
The other speakers at this panel were Michael Casey, Incoming Chief Content Officer at CoinDesk, Amy James, CEO at Alexandria Labs, Andrew B. Morris, Founder and CEO at The Fintech Agenda LLC, Robin Raskin, Founder of Living in Digital Times (LIDT), and Akin Sawyerr, Strategy and Governance Lead at Decred.
According to a report by Coindesk, Disparte, who is also Head of Policy and Communications at the Libra Association, had this to say about Bitcoin:
Bitcoin as an asset class has proven that mathematical scarcity can support an incredibly exciting asset. It's not a means of payment. It just isn't.
He also said that he became interested in the Libra project because he realized that “the bottom rung of the ladder of economic mobility is payment access” and that existing cryptoassets were not good enough for making payments.
He went on to explain the problem that Libra is trying to solve:
How do you drive mass adoption How do you remove insidious levels of friction that basically make it cost-prohibitive to give people access to payments?
Fellow panel member Akin Sawyerr was not convinced that Libra had the right answer:
I'm not convinced that a council of self-interested companies can do money better than a decentralized system. The only way to really get there is to empower the individuals to have some base-level sovereignty.
Disparte, however, claimed that it was not fair to apply a “crypto purity test” to Libra since permissionless crypto projects had failed so far to deliver a working scalable solution that could be used by people in the developing countries.
He then added:
It's not one or the other. The world is not zero sum.
Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com
