MIT Fellow Says Facebook ‘Lifted’ His Ideas for Libra Cryptocurrency

A number of features of the social community’s so much-ballyhooed international cryptocurrency challenge uncannily resemble the imaginative and prescient laid out in a paper released final year in the Royal Society’s Open Science e-newsletter.

For instance, the Libra paper described a digital coin that might preserve its price due to the fact that it was backed by means of a basket of fiat currencies and brief-term debt. This echoed the July 2018 paper through MIT colossal-hitters Alex Lipton, Thomas Hardjono and Alex “Sandy” Pentland, who described an asset-backed, supra-countrywide digital token. (To be certain, the belongings in their proposal have been commodities like oil or vegetation).

Continuing the similarities, Libra association, a bunch of 27 economic, tech and VC organizations tentatively committed to FB's project, carried a whiff of the hypothetical consortium governing Tradecoin. undefined proposed cash have been intended to streamline home and move-border payments and, more loftily, to prolong monetary offerings to the world’s undefined. And of direction, Libra and Tradecoin each would run on allotted ledgers. Coincidences? undefined in Lipton's view. The MIT Connection Science Fellow advised CoinDesk:

undefined being above all obnoxious, I will be able to inform you that the actual constitution of Libra is most of the time lifted verbatim from the paper which Sandy Pentland and Thomas Hardjono and that I published final 12 months.