Facebook reportedly plans to launch its own cryptocurrency | Hacker News Reader

Facebook reportedly plans to launch its own cryptocurrency

theverge.com

95 pointsjohnhenry49 comments

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.

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.

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/...

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.

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

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...

> 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.

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.

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?

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.”

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.

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).

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.

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).

They do that to help their stock after mass selloff regarding Cambridge scandal. And its working charms as their stock is back where it was before it well off the cliff.

Kodak mentioned "blockchain" in news and same thing happened. Don't hope for un-centralized Facebook anytime soon :)

It’s called “embrace and extend” — part of the original Microsoft playbook. When you face an existential threat, give it the wettest lip service possible while slowly diluting it into your proprietary platform.

David Marcus's move felt to me (on the back of no evidence at all) more like a play for FB to launch an identity service.

> But anything decentralized is diagonally opposite to what FB is, not sure how they will pull it off.

Is it though? The fact they are centralized now doesn't mean they can "only" work in a centralized manner. They are in the ad business, and as long as they can keep doing that would it really matter who hosts what?

Keep in mind the data requirements for a social network the size of Facebook are huge, perhaps too bing for a blockchain. I wouldn't be surprised if this turns out to be a project tangential to their main product.

Facebook understands that it's the network effect that gives them their monopoly, not the centralization. Their users cant just take their coins and go play elsewhere because their friends are not there. They already offer their platform that gives you access to all their friend network , yet nobody managed to steal facebook's users.

A currency would make sense for facebook and their messenger (KIK messenger is experimenting with blockchain too, and now Telegram as well) , but it could also lead to more serious applications, for example verified digital ID or signing documents. At some point they may retire the facebook platform and move its functionality into the blockchain (that way they can't be accused when other companies stealing user's data). They might also use it as a way to reward users for videos / posts.

They ll probably have to acquire an existing blockchain company for that . I guess they need a blockchain with high transaction speed, like stellar or nano

There is a lot of potential here and Facebook is not averse to taking risks. Bringing blockchain to the masses will definitely help improve its image among developers / techies.

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

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

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?

Not long after they banned cryptocurrency advertising...

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

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.

>"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."

The point of cryptocurrency to some people is decentralization. The point of cryptocurrency to the average user is whatever they can do with it.

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

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.

That's v2

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

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

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.

1 friend = 30 pieces of silver?

More like 30 fbcoin!

Great! Every big company can launch its own cryptcurrency

Not every. Facebook has particularly good circumstances for launching one.

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.

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

Ah, the return of another 1800s practice: Company Scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

They'll find a plan to own a decentralized system

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

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

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

I hope they name it Zuckercoin

The Mark would be better ;)

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

now with WonderWallet.exe!

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com