I think Harry Belafonte speaks for us all:

The woman piaba and the man piaba
and the Ton Ton call baka lemon grass,
The lily root, gully root, belly root uhmm,
And the famous grandy scratch scratch.

It was clear as mud but it covered the ground
And the confusion made the brain go ‘round.

At the end of the day, 99.99% of users will simply be relying on a brand they trust. Look who’s behind this thing: big companies that many (but not all) people trust. I mean especially VISA and MC. (There’s an antitrust violation lurking here, seems to me.) Trust them or don’t, that’s the issue.

So, yes, we need articles like this one, and the people smart enough to understand it, who should be working on curing cancer, will benefit from reading it, to the extent that their understanding it benefits them. If they work for trusted entities, then maybe their understanding will benefit us peons. All in all, though, I’d rather pay VISA its current vig and not worry about my family medical history.

The only reason anyone thinks we need a new coin is that democracy is failing. The USD should be the underlying currency, and a government-issued Tether should be the digital stablecoin. After all, a checking account is just a stablecoin, an unsecured demand loan to an issuer (bank), repayable in fiat (cash withdrawal). Digitizing dollars would be way simpler than all this other hooey, if the democracies of the world hadn’t demonstrated their inability to govern themselves. Trump, Brexit, Bolsinaro. All are failures of governance, all reasons to look for a new currency, but not necessarily reason to believe we will find one from what is essentially a corporate cartel.

The notion that the Libra Association will not be a polity — you know, with politics — is beyond naive. We’re just exchanging the devil we know for one we know not. Lucky us.