In a blog post published today by Rob Leathern, Facebook Product Manager, a new ad policy was announced by Facebook:
We’ve created a new policy that prohibits ads that promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, such as binary options, initial coin offerings and cryptocurrency.
Facebook is a private company and it has all the rights in the world to implement whatever ads policy it wants. So I see nothing inappropriate here for Facebook. After all, it has to protect its investors, right?
But I do see something else, something more interesting than that: Facebook finally recognized publicly the threat cryptocurrency poses to its own business. It think it cannot get more public than that.
Because, let's face it: who is going to decide what is misleading and what is not? Where do you draw the line between a legit campaign for, let' say, a new exchange, and a really scammy ICO for an inexistent product?
There's only one small step from this position to a new "cryptocurrency", that is not misleading at all, because, well, it's made by your good ol' Facebook site, that you all know and respect, despite its fake news campaigns, its Russian ads and all the other crap that is feeding you, just to be able to sell your data to advertisers...
Of course, this may be just a step in the right direction, in which real scams are fenced, but given Facebook history of "divide and conquer, and if you cannot conquer, then just buy it, and if you cannot buy it, then copy it", I simply don't buy it.
I'll buy some real, decentralized crypto instead...
Later edit: according to a short piece published on the site recode.net: "Facebook’s board of directors includes two investors — Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel — whose firms have been prominent crypto backers. Facebook Messenger boss, David Marcus, is also on the board at the popular crypto exchange Coinbase." . Talk about unfair advantages...
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me 
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