Why is the latest version of Laravel not being installed?

Question

Composer

I do:

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel blog

I get 5.8 instead of version 6 .

php -v

PHP 7.3.12 (cli) (built: Nov 19 2019 13:58:02) ( ZTS MSVC15 (Visual C++ 2017) x64 )
Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.3.12, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies

php -m

[PHP Modules]
bcmath       
bz2
calendar
Core
ctype
curl
date
dom
exif
fileinfo
filter
ftp
gd
gettext
hash
iconv
json
libxml
mbstring
mysqli
mysqlnd
openssl
pcre
PDO
pdo_mysql
pdo_sqlite
Phar
readline
Reflection
session
SimpleXML
SPL
standard
tokenizer
wddx
xml
xmlreader
xmlwriter
zip
zlib

[Zend Modules]

Answer 1

Just the --prefer-dist option does not mean that the latest version will be installed.
Either:
Or we install the installer globally (it makes sense if Laravel is often installed locally):
And then:
If you need a basic authorization system, then with the --auth parameter (relevant at least for Laravel 6.8.0):
laravel new blog --auth