Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Plans To Create Its Own Cryptocurrency: Report (cheddar.com)
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."
Noooooooooooooooo!!!!! God nooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!
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.
Or, to put it differently, how could Facebook possibly get any worse?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The real news here is that Facebook has a female employee whose work is valued by upper management.
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...
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
But you can totally trust them to handle your money, right?
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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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 currency with mild inflation of 1-2%. Excessively strong currencies (deflation) hurt the poor more than the rich. Excessively weak currencies (inflation) hurt the rich more than the poor.
The conspiracy theory that "the rich" are scheming to oppress the working class by debasing the currency is absolute nonsense. It is completely backwards and makes no sense at all.
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 performed using money. In other words a cryptocurrency is a commodity being used as money. For whipper snappers this is a foreign concept. For old farts like myself, we still recall the days when gold was used as a common medium of exchange in the barter system. "Money" was invented to make payments easier, because large amounts of gold are bulky, and heavy. Instead paper was traded, initially the paper notes were issued by "banks" (I use that term loosely), and that paper could be redeemed from said issuer for gold. That function was eventually taken over by governments, first state, then federal. The US dollar was backed by gold from 1879 to 1933. A cryptocurrency is the electronic equivalent of this system.
What makes cryptocurrencies possible is the invention of "blockchain" technology. A blockchain is essentially a public ledger that has been distributed. What's unique is how the blockchain uses cryptography to ensure a consensus among untrusted parties over what transactions are on the blockchain, and thus valid. That is the "proof of work" idea, whereby the network only accepts blocks which included the requisite proof of work. Cryptographic signatures are used to create transactions, where a signed transaction transfers a given unit from one private key to another. The holder of the associated private key is in essence the holder of the units, as anyone with access to the private key can create valid transactions which transfer (or spend) that unit. The blocks themselves are linked together cryptographically, using hashes, such that a modification to a given block would invalidate all of the blocks that follow it. That is why we talk about confidence in transactions, which that confidence governed by the number of blocks which follow it.
It's worth noting that many cryptocurrencies don't use true blockchains to record transactions. They only use cryptographically signed transactions to validate transfer. These are essentially gift cards, as the ledger can be altered, modified, etc, if the group in charge wants it.
Like I said above, with bitcoin, and most cryptocurrencies, you can see every transaction that has ever been made, and how much was transferred. If you determine who controlled the addresses (aka private keys), you know who was behind a transaction. This is incredibly easy. That is why, I exclusively hold and use Monero, which is an improvement on the original blockchain concept (aka bitcoin) which makes use of cryptography to validate, but also mask transactions. This provides significantly more privacy.
All the talk in this article is about blockchain, not any coin offering. A coin isn't required to use blockchain for something.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.