
Facebook reportedly plans to launch its own cryptocurrency - johnhenry
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/11/17344318/facebook-cryptocurrency-token-blockchain-report-david-marcus
======
look_lookatme
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
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
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/...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2016/12/16/13971482/mcdonalds-coffee-lawsuit-stella-liebeck)

~~~
sterlind
Good rant, though. You should be a journalist!

Is there a way to visualize link circles and spun article chains on the web?
I've wanted something similar to track astroturfing.

~~~
alexkavon
I'm not aware of any tools but that would be a fun project. A lot of the
problem stems around Google search result ranking. If you research this issue,
you will recognize the name Pat Flynn [0] as a knowledgeable source
(proliferator?) of spinning and "backlinking" (the term for link
circles/chains). I think a tool could be a cool way to identify bias or
weakness of an actual article or source. Kind of a reverse Google search/page
rank explainer, which may be needed this day-in-age to help improve the
quality of information on the net.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQQe8GxlB8E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQQe8GxlB8E)

------
vthallam
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...](https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17329696/facebook-blockchain-
crypocurrency-david-marcus-crypto-messenger-app)

~~~
yodon
> 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.

~~~
fartcannon
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?

~~~
rebuilder
The use of the word "Blockchain" without the article is useful in identifying
those who understand decentralized ledgers and those who are following the
crowd. Essentially it's the buzzword version of the real deal, which is kind
of nice as it lets you concentrate on reading the writings of people who have
some idea what they're talking about.

~~~
yodon
Your comment is super interesting to me. I’ve historically been in the camp of
“what’s important is the concept” (aka blockchain) rather than the instancing
(aka a blockchain), but taste testing your comment with my roughly coincident
comment on parallels with a word like “average” or “sum,” I see how if talking
with someone I knew to be a mathematician or physicist I’d be very comfortable
hearing them drop the article but with someone who didn’t seem to grok any
real math if they dropped the article I’d likely conclude they had no idea
what they were actually talking about. I think you’ve convinced me that going
that tiny bit of extra distance and including the article before the word is
in fact a potentially valuable in-group signaling mechanism for communicating
that you are in fact a person who commonly talks with others knowledgeable
about blockchains (genuine question: did I do the signalling right in your
reading there by using a plural in that sentence? I’m realizing I’ve so
favored dropping the article and treating blockchain as a collective noun that
I’ve not trained my ear correctly on this and need to start trying to do so).

~~~
rebuilder
You got it "right" in terms of what my snobbery likes! ;) Obviously the style
of writin is not actually a direct proxy for skill and understanding, but I do
believe it relates to experience. Dropping the article is so new that I think
most people who've spent the better part of the last decade working on
cryptocurrencies would have to make a conscious effort to adopt that style of
writing.

Could you, by the way, provide an example of how, in maths, you'd use e.g.
"average" without an article in a sentence? I'm having difficulty coming up
with an equivalence to this issue, but then I'm no mathematician at all.

Edit: also, sorry about the snub. I got confused and thought we were talking
about how the article used the word. I wouldn't have been quite so abrasive if
I'd realized I was also commenting on you, personally. I do tend towards
snarkiness but usually try to avoid making it personal.

~~~
yodon
The simplest usage of average without an article would be “let’s average FB’s
data” (where average is a used as a verb). That’s completely acceptable to say
in normal usage but maps to “let’s blockchain FB’s data” which you’d
presumably hate. We could also say “I used an average”/“I used a blockchain”
(average being a gerund/noun form of a verb as in “I went for a run”) or we
could say “I computed the average”/“I forked the blockchain” (akin to “on my
run”, where we are referring to a specific instance or result of the verb to
average or to run).

------
niftich
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)

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

------
api
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?

------
scrumper
Not long after they banned cryptocurrency advertising...

------
kankroc
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)

------
thisisit
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
>"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."

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

------
joejerryronnie
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
That's v2

------
davidgerard
reblog of [https://cheddar.com/videos/facebook-plans-to-create-its-
own-...](https://cheddar.com/videos/facebook-plans-to-create-its-own-
cryptocurrency) \- change to source

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

------
zerostar07
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.

------
stared
1 friend = 30 pieces of silver?

~~~
smallhands
More like 30 fbcoin!

------
con22
Great! Every big company can launch its own cryptcurrency

~~~
foepys
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
Soon we'll be bartering again, except this time for user data and other
ultimately useless things.

------
zaza3311
They'll find a plan to own a decentralized system

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

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

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

------
craftyguy
I hope they name it Zuckercoin

~~~
jtwaleson
The Mark would be better ;)

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

------
platz
now with WonderWallet.exe!

------
na85
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.

