12 ms·

Facebook reportedly plans to launch its own cryptocurrency

95 points by johnhenry 8y ago

jimbokun 8y ago
The kind of business where a reputation for respecting privacy and protecting user data would be really helpful.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
con22 8y ago
Great! Every big company can launch its own cryptcurrency
- sshine 8y ago
  Not every. Facebook has particularly good circumstances for launching one.
- foepys 8y ago
  Finally we can all get locked-in into vendors with the illusion of being able to freely trade these tokens on exchanges for enourmous fees! So much better than any government-issued fiat currency that is only accepted everywhere. Get payed in Facebook tokens, exchange for Walmart tokens, exchange for Ford tokens, exchange for AT&T tokens - just to be free from the FED! So easy and decentralized.
  - zpr 8y ago
    Soon we'll be bartering again, except this time for user data and other ultimately useless things.
- SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
  Ah, the return of another 1800s practice: Company Scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip
vthallam 8y ago
David Marcus moved out messenger [0] recently to focus on blockchain related products. I am sure they must be preparing for the future where a decentralized social network getting traction. But anything decentralized is diagonally opposite to what FB is, not sure how they will pull it off. [0] - https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17329696/facebook-blockchain-crypocurrency-david-marcus-crypto-messenger-app https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17329696/facebook-blockchain...
- yodon 8y ago
  > anything decentralized is diagonally opposite to what FB is, not sure how they will pull it off Exactly - when you have the might and connectivity of Facebook, and everything you could want to do with a blockchain you could do much more easily with a centralized SaaS-based currency like steam credits or MMO gold, why would you strap yourself to a difficult to administer and control public blockchain architecture? Blockchain is a thing that makes sense when you have no central authority for tracking state. There’s zero overlap between that and Facebook.
  - mwerty 8y ago
    I agree with the comment on zero overlap currently. However, I look at it more like google and android. Perhaps fb feels that it is better to have some voice in the crypto/blockchain ecosystem than none.
  - fartcannon 8y ago
    Shouldn't it be 'A blockchain' or 'blockchains' since we're speaking about one of many things? Or has the name become like software, code and water?
    - yodon 8y ago
      It depends on what use of the word blockchain we are discussing. Blockchain is the name of an algorithm (or more accurately a class of algorithms) in addition to being the name of instances of using that class of algorithm. See for example the word “average.”
platz 8y ago
now with WonderWallet.exe!
bmcusick 8y ago
I'm sure that FB will respect user privacy and won't mine your economic data for advertising purposes.
na85 8y ago
Zuckerberg fell for the "blockchain all the things" meme? Kinda reinforces the counter narrative that he's not a particularly gifted founder or CEO, just a guy who got really lucky.
bsvalley 8y ago
Does it come with a 3rd party API? :)
api 8y ago
My concern with a company like Facebook entering this space is that it would be in their best interest to lobby against other cryptocurrencies with the argument that theirs is compliant, allows government surveillance, etc. If they can help convince lawmakers to make "unmanaged" currencies illegal they can lock up the space via regulatory capture and in the process become almost like a central bank. It's also an utterly insane privacy invasion to have Facebook getting into the banking business in any way whatsoever. Just call it PanopticonCoin?
adamnemecek 8y ago
It's gonna be like telegram. A lot of hoorah and it will fizzle out.
zaza3311 8y ago
They'll find a plan to own a decentralized system
scrumper 8y ago
Not long after they banned cryptocurrency advertising...
niftich 8y ago
The difference between this and the usual ICO/blockchain/pump-and-dump pivot we've seen from others is that Facebook has four popular apps installed on lots of people's devices. It stands to reason that if anyone has the pre-existing install base to pull off PoW- or PoS-based distributed consensus at scale, it's them. If nothing else, this is a useful thing to research when you have a lot of money and a lot of users, and no fear of abandoning features that don't pan out, and useful insurance if Facebook's PII-sharing and behavior tracking aspects -- a direct requirement of their primary source of revenue -- will be heavily regulated in multiple jurisdictions. If this works, this could achieve several 'holy grail' usecases that have been long hypothesized as desirable, such as: - Paying for access (to FB, or news articles on FB [1]) by participating in setting consensus. - Peer-to-peer exchange of externally-valuable credits, with good UX and (if so desired) resistant to censorship. - A globally distributed user base whose vesting in your platform is deeper than personal content they put in. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14127049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14127049
billpg 8y ago
Oh good. There aren't enough of those. (eyeroll)
thisisit 8y ago
Interestingly, this sounds both smart and stupid. Stupid because the whole point of cryptocurreny is decentralization. So, one might ask - if Facebook doesn't control it then what is the point of this? But that's where the whole point of a blockchain comes in. Many people I know believe cryptocurrency to be anonymous. What they don't realize is blockchain is a public ledger. Everything they do is visible to everyone. Blockchain is pseudo anonymous at best. Sure, every now and then someone jumps and asks - But what about creating new addresses? New addresses are still pseudo anonymous. So, once I collect enough data I can find who is doing what on a blockchain. Now this is what will be smart about a Facebook blockchain. Facebook can build tools to collect people's data; all the while everyone believing cryptocurrency is somehow making them anonymous. In that way, going to blockchain for everything is a bad idea. There will be no privacy on a public database.
- bogomipz 8y ago
  >"Many people I know believe cryptocurrency to be anonymous. What they don't realize is blockchain is a public ledger." "Public" and "anonymous" are orthogonal concepts. They are not mutually exclusive. There are many examples of this from letters to the editor, graffiti, donations etc. The fact that something has both the property of being public and anonymous does not make it "pseudo anonymous."
- vbo 8y ago
  The point of cryptocurrency to some people is decentralization. The point of cryptocurrency to the average user is whatever they can do with it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
zerostar07 8y ago
They did have Facebook Credits. I wonder what transaction volume that had. I wonder why they didn't go with one of the existing ones though. In any case if true this has the potential to be huge - i imagine they 'll integrate a wallet for every user.
joejerryronnie 8y ago
The only thing that would make this announcement worse is if we found out Goldman Sachs was underwriting the ICO, breaking up different FB coins into tranches, selling these to pension funds as an investment, and then creating a credit default swap vehicle to hedge the risk - an ICOCDS, if you will.
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  That's v2
bittysdad 8y ago
How is this not anticompetitive behavior considering their ban of everything crypto advertising just a few months ago?
look_lookatme 8y ago
I don't understand this post from The Verge. First it adds nothing to the original reporting, just two paragraphs with a headline. The original reporting comes from Cheddar, which is essentially a cynical publication and news channel built around giving airtime to PR initiatives and poorly sourced reporting. There is no indication that Facebook is creating a cryptocurrency. Blockchain can be used for other purposes. They may or may not be, but there's no public proof one way or another. The only indication that anything is happening beyond research is this quote: > “They are very serious about it,” said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing unannounced plans. That's it.
- spike021 8y ago
  It's The Verge, what do you expect? Most of their content is click-bait style now and lacks depth. When they first launched their bread and butter was supposed to be complex, long-form articles. That didn't last.
  - alexkavon 8y ago
    It's worse than that. It's essentially a social media feed based around a few people. Most of their articles are like this one where it's regurgitated writing or reporting that another outfit reported something. Actually if you visit many of The Vox "culture" sites you will see this trend. A lot of the times it will be a brief summary of a video someone else produced. A good example is The Vox McDonald's coffee lawsuit article[0] that summarizes an Adam Ruins Everything video on the subject. We live in an age where blogging careers required tricking Google algorithms to thinking your site was valuable in order to increase traffic and thus serve ads to consumers (or grab their email for later product blasts, for example signing up for a free ebook on passive income). This trend spiraled into "spinning articles" which essentially was a method of using software to change articles via word/sentence substitution. The spun articles would then be posted to similar websites that then linked back to one of your main sites. All of them nicely littered with ads of course and leading you in a research circle. This of course evolved into clickbait headlines. Buzzfeed and its ilk are born to maximize this growing pile of garbage echoing, and labels itself as a brilliant strategy which is then echoed out again. Release a few high quality long form articles every once in a while, call yourself journalism instead of blogging (difference being the above strategies and highly opinionated pieces), badda-bing-badda-boom, media is changed. Now instead of reporting on a subject, we regurgitate something else for a few sentences and post the source and call it a day. No understanding, investigation, expansion, or reworking required because the author is no longer writing for an audience but instead for an advertiser click minimum. It's not hard to understand why The Verge specifically went from long form tech website to culture slog (sloppy whatever goes weblog). I'm not saying there isn't good journalism/ists out there. I'm saying somethings were lost and confused along the way for many reasons. /rant [0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/mcdonalds-coffee-lawsuit-stella-liebeck https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/...
davidgerard 8y ago
reblog of https://cheddar.com/videos/facebook-plans-to-create-its-own-cryptocurrency https://cheddar.com/videos/facebook-plans-to-create-its-own-... - change to source
kankroc 8y ago
While the relation is only tangential, it reminds me of the East India Company minting their own coin. Another powerful megacorp with a monopoly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coins_of_British_India https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coins_of_British_India
Ataraxy 8y ago
Yeah this was inevitable. It had been speculated that they were going to embrace LTC if not create their own.
craftyguy 8y ago
I hope they name it Zuckercoin
- jtwaleson 8y ago
  The Mark would be better ;)
- cvaidya1986 8y ago
  Probably Facecoin.
stared 8y ago
1 friend = 30 pieces of silver?
- smallhands 8y ago
  More like 30 fbcoin!

95 points by johnhenry 8y ago

jimbokun 8y ago

The kind of business where a reputation for respecting privacy and protecting user data would be really helpful.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

con22 8y ago

Great! Every big company can launch its own cryptcurrency

sshine 8y ago
Not every. Facebook has particularly good circumstances for launching one.
foepys 8y ago
Finally we can all get locked-in into vendors with the illusion of being able to freely trade these tokens on exchanges for enourmous fees! So much better than any government-issued fiat currency that is only accepted everywhere. Get payed in Facebook tokens, exchange for Walmart tokens, exchange for Ford tokens, exchange for AT&T tokens - just to be free from the FED! So easy and decentralized.
- zpr 8y ago
  Soon we'll be bartering again, except this time for user data and other ultimately useless things.
SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
Ah, the return of another 1800s practice: Company Scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

vthallam 8y ago

David Marcus moved out messenger [0] recently to focus on blockchain related products. I am sure they must be preparing for the future where a decentralized social network getting traction. But anything decentralized is diagonally opposite to what FB is, not sure how they will pull it off. [0] - https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17329696/facebook-blockchain-crypocurrency-david-marcus-crypto-messenger-app https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17329696/facebook-blockchain...

yodon 8y ago
> anything decentralized is diagonally opposite to what FB is, not sure how they will pull it off Exactly - when you have the might and connectivity of Facebook, and everything you could want to do with a blockchain you could do much more easily with a centralized SaaS-based currency like steam credits or MMO gold, why would you strap yourself to a difficult to administer and control public blockchain architecture? Blockchain is a thing that makes sense when you have no central authority for tracking state. There’s zero overlap between that and Facebook.
- mwerty 8y ago
  I agree with the comment on zero overlap currently. However, I look at it more like google and android. Perhaps fb feels that it is better to have some voice in the crypto/blockchain ecosystem than none.
- fartcannon 8y ago
  Shouldn't it be 'A blockchain' or 'blockchains' since we're speaking about one of many things? Or has the name become like software, code and water?
  - yodon 8y ago
    It depends on what use of the word blockchain we are discussing. Blockchain is the name of an algorithm (or more accurately a class of algorithms) in addition to being the name of instances of using that class of algorithm. See for example the word “average.”

platz 8y ago

now with WonderWallet.exe!

bmcusick 8y ago

I'm sure that FB will respect user privacy and won't mine your economic data for advertising purposes.

na85 8y ago

Zuckerberg fell for the "blockchain all the things" meme? Kinda reinforces the counter narrative that he's not a particularly gifted founder or CEO, just a guy who got really lucky.

bsvalley 8y ago

Does it come with a 3rd party API? :)

api 8y ago

My concern with a company like Facebook entering this space is that it would be in their best interest to lobby against other cryptocurrencies with the argument that theirs is compliant, allows government surveillance, etc. If they can help convince lawmakers to make "unmanaged" currencies illegal they can lock up the space via regulatory capture and in the process become almost like a central bank. It's also an utterly insane privacy invasion to have Facebook getting into the banking business in any way whatsoever. Just call it PanopticonCoin?

adamnemecek 8y ago

It's gonna be like telegram. A lot of hoorah and it will fizzle out.

zaza3311 8y ago

They'll find a plan to own a decentralized system

scrumper 8y ago

Not long after they banned cryptocurrency advertising...

niftich 8y ago

The difference between this and the usual ICO/blockchain/pump-and-dump pivot we've seen from others is that Facebook has four popular apps installed on lots of people's devices. It stands to reason that if anyone has the pre-existing install base to pull off PoW- or PoS-based distributed consensus at scale, it's them. If nothing else, this is a useful thing to research when you have a lot of money and a lot of users, and no fear of abandoning features that don't pan out, and useful insurance if Facebook's PII-sharing and behavior tracking aspects -- a direct requirement of their primary source of revenue -- will be heavily regulated in multiple jurisdictions. If this works, this could achieve several 'holy grail' usecases that have been long hypothesized as desirable, such as: - Paying for access (to FB, or news articles on FB [1]) by participating in setting consensus. - Peer-to-peer exchange of externally-valuable credits, with good UX and (if so desired) resistant to censorship. - A globally distributed user base whose vesting in your platform is deeper than personal content they put in. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14127049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14127049

billpg 8y ago

Oh good. There aren't enough of those. (eyeroll)

thisisit 8y ago

Interestingly, this sounds both smart and stupid. Stupid because the whole point of cryptocurreny is decentralization. So, one might ask - if Facebook doesn't control it then what is the point of this? But that's where the whole point of a blockchain comes in. Many people I know believe cryptocurrency to be anonymous. What they don't realize is blockchain is a public ledger. Everything they do is visible to everyone. Blockchain is pseudo anonymous at best. Sure, every now and then someone jumps and asks - But what about creating new addresses? New addresses are still pseudo anonymous. So, once I collect enough data I can find who is doing what on a blockchain. Now this is what will be smart about a Facebook blockchain. Facebook can build tools to collect people's data; all the while everyone believing cryptocurrency is somehow making them anonymous. In that way, going to blockchain for everything is a bad idea. There will be no privacy on a public database.

bogomipz 8y ago
>"Many people I know believe cryptocurrency to be anonymous. What they don't realize is blockchain is a public ledger." "Public" and "anonymous" are orthogonal concepts. They are not mutually exclusive. There are many examples of this from letters to the editor, graffiti, donations etc. The fact that something has both the property of being public and anonymous does not make it "pseudo anonymous."
vbo 8y ago
The point of cryptocurrency to some people is decentralization. The point of cryptocurrency to the average user is whatever they can do with it.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

zerostar07 8y ago

They did have Facebook Credits. I wonder what transaction volume that had. I wonder why they didn't go with one of the existing ones though. In any case if true this has the potential to be huge - i imagine they 'll integrate a wallet for every user.

joejerryronnie 8y ago

The only thing that would make this announcement worse is if we found out Goldman Sachs was underwriting the ICO, breaking up different FB coins into tranches, selling these to pension funds as an investment, and then creating a credit default swap vehicle to hedge the risk - an ICOCDS, if you will.

52-6F-62 8y ago
That's v2

bittysdad 8y ago

How is this not anticompetitive behavior considering their ban of everything crypto advertising just a few months ago?

look_lookatme 8y ago

I don't understand this post from The Verge. First it adds nothing to the original reporting, just two paragraphs with a headline. The original reporting comes from Cheddar, which is essentially a cynical publication and news channel built around giving airtime to PR initiatives and poorly sourced reporting. There is no indication that Facebook is creating a cryptocurrency. Blockchain can be used for other purposes. They may or may not be, but there's no public proof one way or another. The only indication that anything is happening beyond research is this quote: > “They are very serious about it,” said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing unannounced plans. That's it.

spike021 8y ago
It's The Verge, what do you expect? Most of their content is click-bait style now and lacks depth. When they first launched their bread and butter was supposed to be complex, long-form articles. That didn't last.
- alexkavon 8y ago
  It's worse than that. It's essentially a social media feed based around a few people. Most of their articles are like this one where it's regurgitated writing or reporting that another outfit reported something. Actually if you visit many of The Vox "culture" sites you will see this trend. A lot of the times it will be a brief summary of a video someone else produced. A good example is The Vox McDonald's coffee lawsuit article[0] that summarizes an Adam Ruins Everything video on the subject. We live in an age where blogging careers required tricking Google algorithms to thinking your site was valuable in order to increase traffic and thus serve ads to consumers (or grab their email for later product blasts, for example signing up for a free ebook on passive income). This trend spiraled into "spinning articles" which essentially was a method of using software to change articles via word/sentence substitution. The spun articles would then be posted to similar websites that then linked back to one of your main sites. All of them nicely littered with ads of course and leading you in a research circle. This of course evolved into clickbait headlines. Buzzfeed and its ilk are born to maximize this growing pile of garbage echoing, and labels itself as a brilliant strategy which is then echoed out again. Release a few high quality long form articles every once in a while, call yourself journalism instead of blogging (difference being the above strategies and highly opinionated pieces), badda-bing-badda-boom, media is changed. Now instead of reporting on a subject, we regurgitate something else for a few sentences and post the source and call it a day. No understanding, investigation, expansion, or reworking required because the author is no longer writing for an audience but instead for an advertiser click minimum. It's not hard to understand why The Verge specifically went from long form tech website to culture slog (sloppy whatever goes weblog). I'm not saying there isn't good journalism/ists out there. I'm saying somethings were lost and confused along the way for many reasons. /rant [0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/mcdonalds-coffee-lawsuit-stella-liebeck https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/...

davidgerard 8y ago

reblog of https://cheddar.com/videos/facebook-plans-to-create-its-own-cryptocurrency https://cheddar.com/videos/facebook-plans-to-create-its-own-... - change to source

kankroc 8y ago

While the relation is only tangential, it reminds me of the East India Company minting their own coin. Another powerful megacorp with a monopoly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coins_of_British_India https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coins_of_British_India

Ataraxy 8y ago

Yeah this was inevitable. It had been speculated that they were going to embrace LTC if not create their own.

craftyguy 8y ago

I hope they name it Zuckercoin

jtwaleson 8y ago
The Mark would be better ;)
cvaidya1986 8y ago
Probably Facecoin.

stared 8y ago

1 friend = 30 pieces of silver?

smallhands 8y ago
More like 30 fbcoin!