Chainspace co-founder: Facebook's dystopian, censorship-prone cryptocurrency

Mustafa Al-Bassam, the co-founder of Facebook acquired blockchain startup Chainspace, said Libra could recreate a dystopian financial system that's less censorship resistant and easier to manipulate than the current one.

Mustafa Al-Bassam, the co-founder of blockchain startup Chainspace, joined the ranks of dozens of other industry influencers by questioning Libra's decentralization model.

In a lengthy Twitter threat, he said that while he had no doubt that the Libra team wants to create an open, decentralized payment system, the road to dystopia is paved with good intentions.

Namely, Libra's decentralization model is what worries Al-Bassam the most, as it has the potential to create a financial system that's prone to censorship and manipulation.

My concern is that Libra could end up creating a financial system that is *less* censorship-resistant than our current traditional financial system.

On the other hand, cryptocurrency systems are always at risk of a 51 percent attack that can censor or reverse transactions, no matter how decentralized a network is.

Libra's potential worsens problems of censorship resistance.

If the Libra network is the only way to transfer value-and if it's easily censored-it would cause irreparable damage to the global financial system.

This, according to Al-Bassam, can be solved by creating a "Sybil-resistant" node selection model that would be less prone to censorship than Libra's current "Association-based" model.

Despite the fact Libra outlined their plan to switch to a proof-of-stake based permissionless model in the next five years, there is a high probability that the system would be too late to fix by then.