MIT Fellow and NYU Math Professor Says Libra Copied Off Co-Authored Paper

Alexander Lipton, a connection science fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and adjunct professor of mathematics at New York University, has claimed that Libra's white paper copied concepts for a coin proposed in his academic work.

Lipton co-authored the paper "Digital trade coin: towards a more stable digital currency" 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."

Lipton noted that this work was "Not mentioned in the Libra document at all," and that some of the same ideas were presented in an earlier version of the paper with Pentland, which received the cover spot for an issue of Scientific American.

While the structure of the paper may be the same, some details of implementation are not.

Lipton mentions that the paper's proposed "Tradecoin" would likely be backed by traditional commodities.

In his recent interview, Lipton confirmed that the way Facebook is backing their virtual currency is not what the authors had in mind for their proposal: "We were thinking about raw material producers, supra-national organizations, and, possibly, a couple of large-scale payment providers, but certainly not the likes of Uber.".

"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."

On June 22, Ethereum World News also reported that the decentralized public network project Hedera Hashgraph also claim that Libra copied ideas from them, specifically the Libra Association's governance model.

As previously reported by Cointelegraph, research by the Wall Street Journal near the tail-end of 2018 indicated that hundreds of initial coin offering white papers - roughly 16% - were flagged for possible fraudulent activity, improbable returns and plagiarism.