Facebook finished up its second round of Congressional hearings yesterday, marking the end of the beginning for what some U.S. Congressional members consider the social media platform’s ill-advised venture into the monetary realm.
The House of Representatives Financial Services Committee hearing, following in the footsteps of the Senate Banking Committee’s own earlier this week, went on for a grueling six-and-a-half hours. Libra project head, David Marcus, spent most of this time trudging through a repeat of some of the Senate’s concerns for AML and anti-terrorist funding practices, while confronting questions about libra as a systemic risk to the USD’s dominance.
House members did not skewer Marcus over Facebook’s past privacy abuses, but that didn’t stop a few anxiety-laced comments (and one outlandish one) from slipping out during the hearing. Representative Brad Sherman, for example, amazingly said that “Libra may endanger more Americans than [911].” More sensibly, Ann Wagner wants to make sure that “the dollar is not overtaken as the leading international currency that undergirds global economic stability.”
The most notable difference between the House’s hearing and the Senate’s, though, was the thing that makes Libra relevant in the first place: Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Reclaiming the Conversation
Bitcoin, blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies in general were markedly absent from the Senate’s time with Marcus, but in the House, Bitcoin was at least on the periphery of the discussion — as well as at the center of many of the representatives’ inquiries into Libra.
“The reality is, whether Facebook is involved or not, change is here, digital currencies exist, blockchain technology is real and Facebook’s entry into the world is just confirmation, albeit at scale,” Representative Patrick McHenry, a ranking member of the committee, said in his
