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Facebook Bitcoin Businesses The Almighty Buck

Facebook Plans To Create Its Own Cryptocurrency: Report (cheddar.com) 90

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
Facebook is "very serious" about launching its own cryptocurrency, news outlet Cheddar reported Friday. It's not the first time the idea of a Facebook coin has been floated, but it seems more apparent now in wake of Facebook's reshuffled executive structure and newly formed blockchain group. From the report: Facebook started studying blockchain almost a year ago, when a member of its corporate development team, Morgan Beller, began looking at how the social platform could use the emerging technology. At the time, Beller was the only Facebook employee devoted to studying blockchain, the digital and decentralized ledger that underpins cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Her work was thrust into the spotlight this week when Facebook announced that the vice president in charge of the Messenger app, David Marcus, would lead a new team to "explore how to best leverage blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch."
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Facebook Plans To Create Its Own Cryptocurrency: Report More

Facebook Plans To Create Its Own Cryptocurrency: Report

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  • In the words of Michael Scott (Score:5, Funny)

    by nwaack ( 3482871 ) on Friday May 11, 2018 @11:41AM (#56596408)
    Noooooooooooooooo!!!!! God nooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!

    • not going to fall for the Zucker, or AngryCoin, or whatever bilious nonsense scheme they are into here. all cryptocurrency is a scam, existing only to buy crap on the darknet. I don't intend to friend Tor, either.

      • not going to fall for the Zucker, or AngryCoin, or whatever bilious nonsense scheme they are into here. all cryptocurrency is a scam, existing only to buy crap on the darknet. I don't intend to friend Tor, either.

        sigh... you do know that all transactions in bitcoin ( and most other crypto) are open and everyone can see everything right? (Posted again after logging in)

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by KMnO4 ( 684253 )
        Agreed. The issue with cryptocurrencies is any set of, ohhh, 2 or more masters level cryptographers can get together and create one. There's no reason to think these algorithmic widgets won't keep flowing off the assembly line until the whole investment class becomes a joke. That being said, like everyone else, I sure wish I bought some bitcoins back in 2010!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by torkus ( 1133985 )

          Well I leveled up to master last week but i'm waiting on my friend to get a few more crypto XP so we can start crafting crypto. Do you know how much gold they're selling for in the auction house these days?

  • Sooo, FarmVille on steroids?
  • who exerts this much effort and energy (literally, it's a ton of electricity) for yet another made up currency (and one mostly used to purchase illegal drugs because heaven forbid somebody smoke a little pot and not go to jail). It's not like Crypto currencies even fix the problems with fiat currencies. They're even easier for central bodies to manipulate to the detriment of the working class. Heck, by all accounts there's 4 guys out of China playing the price of Bitcoin like a fiddle. And that's before the

    • They're even easier for central bodies to manipulate to the detriment of the working class.

      Currencies are not manipulated to the detriment of the working class. Lower classes tend to be debtors while upper classes tend to be creditors. Debtors benefit from inflation, while creditors benefit from deflation. Nearly all governments are debtors, and they also benefit from inflation. Most governments and central banks have inflation policies of at least a few percent. The Federal Reserve's QE programs were strongly opposed by "Country Club Republicans", and I doubt if their concerns were the welf

      • but one of the main arguments for ending fiat currencies is they can be manipulated in ways that hurt workers. I'm not saying any of that's true (I kinda like the stability that comes from a fiat currency), just that a lot of the Crypto currency cheerleaders list it as a feature.

        • How many of these "cheerleaders" are working class? Just because an argument is made, doesn't mean it is a valid argument.

          America's currency was deflationary from the end of the Civil War until the outbreak of WW1. This was the "Gilded Age", as wealth became concentrated. Most of the 20th Century was inflationary, with a dip into deflation during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The working class mostly prospered, home ownership soared, and we had far more economic equality.

          It is best to have a stable

    • Re:There's something wrong with a species (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SirMasterboy ( 872152 ) on Friday May 11, 2018 @12:32PM (#56596828)

      who exerts this much effort and energy (literally, it's a ton of electricity)

      Who says it's going to be proof of work? Maybe it will be a proof of stake coin. There are already other proof of stake coins out there that work.

      • you'll either get hyper inflation as an unlimited supply is created instantly or you'll get a heavily manipulated currency that a few players control by handling out stakes. The point of "proof of work" is to make things more egalitarian, which is one of thing features crypto currency proponents champion. Take that away and all you've got is a pyramid scheme or an out of control loop spewing coins.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sigma 7 ( 266129 )

      for yet another made up currency (and one mostly used to purchase illegal drugs because heaven forbid somebody smoke a little pot and not go to jail)

      No, this cryptocurrency is used to purchase Zynga credits, or whatever is the P2W thing de jour.

  • What's next? Facebook housing? Zuckerberg buys an island (or a small country somewhere), renames it "Zuckerbergland" or "Facebookland" or something, and everything there is Facebook owned and Facebook branded? Cameras and microphones everywhere, including in your bedroom and bathroom, so everything you do 24/7/365 is posted automatically on Facebook? Your entire life logged and tracked and sold to 'partner companies'? And, of course, Facebook money, in the form of cryptocurrency. Fuck that, fuck all that sideways with a rusty chainsaw. Facebook and Zuckerberg and the whole gods-be-damned mess needs to die and go away forever, and all of 'social media' with it. It's a CANCER infecting our entire species.

  • What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Friday May 11, 2018 @11:48AM (#56596478)
    Or, to put it differently, how could Facebook possibly get any worse?

    • at this point about the only thing that would make them even more evil is if they somehow positioned themselves as the gatekeeper for online voting. (i'm sure they've tried.)

  • The real news (Score:5, Funny)

    by Topwiz ( 1470979 ) on Friday May 11, 2018 @11:51AM (#56596510)

    The real news here is that Facebook has a female employee whose work is valued by upper management.

    • Oh boy, more identity politics. That's so fresh.
  • If Facebook is getting to the point where it can print money (which is why it wants it’s own cryptocurrency). Then it’s time for an investigation from the SEC.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Which is what this story basically is, an attempt at a Facebook share price pump up, after much bad news. Of course Facebook do a ponzi crypto currency and although the potential is there for Facebook to specifically target their users that are the most vulnerable to that kind of manipulation and what hooks and triggers to mist effectively use against them, problem is pressure to ban unbacked crypto would become immediately immense, do to the manipulative nature of Facebooks gambit, targeting the gullible p

  • I'm actually curious what "service" they will offer us that needs a decentralized database.

  • Monetizing Users (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Friday May 11, 2018 @11:58AM (#56596554) Journal
    I see this as yet another way for Facebook to monetize its user base.

    "Your friend sent you a message. To read it, please mine 0.05 FBCoin."

    I'm giving them too much credit, they won't even ask...

  • But you can totally trust them to handle your money, right?

    • It would presumably be a way to monetize their service, although why anyone would want to trade Zuckerbucks for USD is beyond me.

  • Marcus said Facebook didn’t have plans to integrate cryptocurrency into its apps anytime soon.

    What ? That seems to be only logical use case for them, and they're not doing it ? Makes no sense.

    "Payments using crypto right now is just very expensive, super slow, so the various communities running the different blockchains and the different assets need to fix all the issues, and then when we get there someday, maybe we'll do something,” Marcus said.

    That's stupid too. Facebook can slash transaction costs by keeping them off-chain, just moving virtual balances from one account to the other, and then only occasionally settle on-chain.

    • Exactly, large entities do NOT need blockchain for this. Sure, banks are using blockchain now? My guess is that they want to try new - perhaps highly mobile - financial services, and they use clockchain to get around their existing cumbersome infrastructure with 1 year development cycles.

  • Facebook is not content with spying on your behavior on their web site, your mobile device, and "partner" web sites. Now they want your lifetime purchase history---in full or in part, whatever they can get.

    Hell no.

    This is pretty ballsy, especially after the way they flailed around publicly in response to the Cambridge Analytica fiasco.

    I've got three words: Fuck the Zuck.

  • Gotta regain all that stock value lost with the recent fiasco. Hey, it worked for other companies.

  • Concerns about Facebook taking over the world aside, this makes some sense.

    The biggest problem any virtual currency has is the onboarding problem -- how do you get people to actually start using your currency, and to assign any non-zero value to it?

    Facebook already has millions (billions?) of users "onboard" so it has a big head start in that area, which it could use to its advantage.

    My hope is that Facebook doesn't just try to create "yet another virtual currency", however; that's been done to death alread

  • Didn't seem to work for Pied Piper, why should it work for Facebook.

  • Facebook has no more use for a cryptocurrency than PayPal ever has. The currency is controlled by a single entity so there's no trust problem to solve, and therefore no potential gain from the immense amount of resources that would need to be expended to run a blockchain (storage at best, and also heaps of processing power at worst). The relatively glacial pace of blockchain transactions would also be for naught.

    If Facebook were just using cryptocurrency buzzwords to generate hype around yet another plain-jane online payment system, that would actually make a lot more sense.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday May 11, 2018 @01:18PM (#56597138)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The headline is misleading. It sounds like Facebook actually wants to leverage blockchain technologies to accomplish tasks, and provide value/security for their services. That is distinct from a "cryptocurrency." The latter makes use of a distributed ledger (typically a blockchain, more in a second) to create a medium of exchange. This medium of exchange is essentially a commodity, like gold (difficult to acquire, with a limited supply), which is traded to settle debts (i.e. buy stuff), a function typically

  • There's already plenty of crypto-currencies out there, some are even targeted toward social networks usage such as Reddcoin.

  • There is no "coin" (Score:3)

    by jbmartin6 ( 1232050 ) on Friday May 11, 2018 @03:19PM (#56597904)
    All the talk in this article is about blockchain, not any coin offering. A coin isn't required to use blockchain for something.

  • Name (Score:2)

    by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
    It should be named Facebook Universal CryptoKoin or FUCK on the exchanges.
  • ... or a red herring perhaps.

    Companies are trying to leverage the decentralization of blockchain tech for stuff that is unrelated to mining - cf. https://cointelegraph.com/news/walmart-is-ready-to-use-blockchain-for-its-live-food-business . Facebook is probably looking to do so as well, maybe something like use blockchain voting to evaluate its news articles and sift thru the fakes better ;-)

    There doesn't seem much point to them jumping into actual crypto mining, unless there is some new tie-up with nVidia

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