One of our most prominent voices in the Bitcoin ecosystem in France is Jacques Favier. Having been a historian before becoming a Bitcoiner, Jacques often has a very interesting point of view on many aspects of the revolution we’re seeing happen before our eyes.
When asked about what money is, Jacques often answers that the moneyness of any good cannot be analysed separately from the space in which this good is presumably used as money. The Euro is used everywhere in the Europeean Union, but you would have a hard time paying you coffee with it in the US - and vice versa. Cigarettes become money under certain conditions, as exhibited in every carceral closed system, from the Kolyma to US prisons nowadays.
Bitcoin, by essence, is the currency of cyberspace. It moves permissionlessly, unaware of any border or jurisdiction, from one digital island to another. It is a symbol of hope for the beings of the digital age.
But cyberspace is a vast domain. Borderless. Adimensionnal. Free and open by nature, and yet everywhere enclosed by barriers. On those barriers, Corporations and States try to anchor their dominion. They fragment the Garden of Eden to take over parts of it, over which they can reign unchallenged and impose their law. They erect artificial borders, made up spaces inside of which their currencies are the default, and where Bitcoin is banned.
Facebook failed in creating its own currency with Libra, because they failed to recognize the space they were preying upon was still the Kingdom of nation states. So they turned their eyes and greed to the last free land. They already reign over vast portions of cyberspace, but now they want to extend their reach far deeper in the web. A specter is haunting cyberspace, and it is not the specter of crypto anarchy.
Make no mistake about Facebook’s metaverse. It is nothing but another prison of the mind. Its currency will not be cigarettes. It will be the Libra.