Alexander Lipton, MIT Fellow, Alleges Facebook’s Libra of Plagiarism

Alexander Lipton, a Connection Science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and an associate professor of mathematics at New York University (NYU), argued that portion of his scholarly work was copied by Libra’s white paper. The article “Digital trade token: towards a more secure digital currency” was co-authored by Lipton in 2018.

“Without being particularly obnoxious, I can tell you that the actual structure of Libra is pretty much lifted verbatim from the paper which Sandy Pentland and Thomas Hardjono and I published last year.”

Furthermore, Lipton observed that this job was “not discussed at all in the Libra document,” and that most of the same concepts were submitted in an previous edition of Pentland’s article, which got the top place in one of the Scientific American issues. While the article’s composition could be the same, some execution facts are not. Lipton says that conventional commodities would probably support the paper’s suggested “Tradecoin” (DTC). According to the author:

“For instance, depending on their resources and abilities, sponsors can contribute oil, gold, base metals and agricultural commodities. Given that storage of significant amounts of the above is difficult and costly, it is natural to use collateral, which is in storage already, thus making stored commodities economically productive.”

In his latest lecture, Lipton revealed that the manner in which Facebook is supporting its digital currency is not what the authors thought about in their original idea: “We were speaking of manufacturers of raw materials, supra-national organizations, and potentially a pair of large-scale transaction suppliers, but definitely not Uber’s likes.”

While Libra has claimed to offer financial inclusion to individuals around the globe, through its white paper and also in one of the latest Libra proceedings, Lipton warned that the development of Libra could lead to huge inflation in emerging nations:

“In developing countries, it will cause enormous inflation because the amount of money will be kind of doubled, roughly speaking, in fact much more than doubled. […] I am not a big fan of quantity theory of money, but I am absolutely certain that as the amount of money explodes, prices will go up.”

Notably, Hedera Hashgraph, a decentralized public network initiative, also claimed that Libra plagiarised thoughts from them, particularly the governance model of the Libra Association. Notably, by the end of 2018 studies by the Wall Street Journal stated that hundreds of ICO (initial coin offering) white papers— about 16% — were tagged for potential unlawful operation, unlikely yields, and plagiarism.