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

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