[modeless]

> they can't freeze your wallet if you're not using theirs

This is false. The wallet just reflects what's in the ledger, and the ledger is controlled by Facebook('s consortium). They can absolutely freeze any addresses they want. Furthermore, they control the currency peg and thus the value of the coin; they can make any address ineligible for redemption and thus worthless. And they certainly will, in the name of preventing fraud and crime and terrorism.

[stcredzero]

This is false. The wallet just reflects what's in the ledger, and the ledger is controlled by Facebook('s consortium). They can absolutely freeze any addresses they want.

Isn't this a transfer of power over the movement of money away from the government, and to a corporate consortium?

And they certainly will, in the name of preventing fraud and crime and terrorism.

Which will result in the US government using those accusations more.

[grey-area]

Isn't this a transfer of power over the movement of money away from the government, and to a corporate consortium?

That’s kind of the point.

[patrickaljord]

Visa and mastercard are already banning people left and right, it is not a transfer of power though. They're working hand in hand with the government, when the US government got mad at Wikileaks during the Obama administration, visa, paypal and mastercard banned them without blinking after the government asked them to I guess.

[stcredzero]

Massive power shifted towards corporate consortiums: Often this presages bad news on geopolitical scales.

[tanzbaer]

Do you have some examples?

[patrickaljord]

This is true of most blockchains though, if a majority of nodes are blocking an address, the coins can't be transferred. Granted, this is more likely to happen with tiny consortiums like Libra.

Do you know how would this work in Libra's case in practice? Would there need to be a super majority to block a given address? I guess the government could force the whole consortium to block an address though.

On the other hand, the government could also use anti-terrorism law to force coinbase and any legal exchanges to ban a certain bitcoin address and any movement from this address. Coinbase already banned all people sending coins to sites such as the dailystormer for example. While this was a private initiative, the government could pass a law to ban people and businesses from sending bitcoins to Iran for example. Hard to enforce I know but scary enough to be problematic (see war on drugs for example).