Libra Is Still A Major Threat To Bitcoin: Economist

The prominent economist and academic John Vaz thinks that Libra is still a major threat to the most dominant coin out there, Bitcoin (BTC). As we can see in the Bitcoin news today, Vaz told the media that BTC has scaling challenges in terms of payments and was used disproportionately as a vehicle for speculation.

He also said that Libra is still a project to watch out for, and that it has been built with a purpose to scale as a payments network – and could quickly emerge as a major competitor despite the ongoing issues with regulators.

“Libra isn’t dead,” he said,“they’re just navigating the regulatory nightmare.”

Vaz also dismissed central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) from his opinion. He went on and described them as “weak defensive posture” when asked about the threat that crypto assets posed to their control over money supply as well as credit.

“The biggest competition for Bitcoin comes from other cryptocurrencies,” Vaz said.

When asked about Facebook, Vaz said that it suffers from issues of public mistrust. In addition, he was vocal in the Libra news, saying that the proposed model for the Libra stablecoin was “very interesting” – he emphasized both the basket of assets underpinning the stability of the instrument as well as the existing networks which large tech companies are able to tap into.

The economist argued and said that Libra is still a cryptocurrency that companies like Facebook can capitalize on when considering their existing user base. He said that the financial transactions were already taking place.

“They are targeting a market which is ready-made for them in the sense that people are already making transactions on Facebook, and Messenger, and WhatsApp, and Instagram — they own the lot. So they’ve got the message traffic, and those people are doing economic transactions already using fiat.”

In the end, Vaz said that Libra would launch with “a very large domain possibility” – perhaps “more than any other cryptocurrency from day one.” He also predicted that the initial target for Libra is to tap into developing countries rather than developed markets.

“They will entrench themselves there – where people are already heavily using the apps and they have a need for payments,” Vaz concluded.