Yes, Facebook is going to coin money.
According to the New York times, citing sources, Facebook is working on a cryptocurrency, the token name FBC, designed to allow users to send money directly to contacts in its messaging system, as PayPal does for online cross-border remittance transactions.
Mark zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, said in a lengthy post titled "the vision for a privacy-centric social network" on March 6 that "the vision and principles for building a privacy-centric messaging and social networking platform" are intriguing.
Everything was foreboding.
In late February, zuckerberg said in an interview with video that he was seriously evaluating the potential of blockchain, a truly distributed alternative to services like Facebook Connect that would allow Internet users to log in to various services with a set of credentials without relying on a third party.
In February, Facebook acquired Chainspace, a blockchain company founded by ucl researchers, according to CCN. Chainspace described its project as "a line-star smart contract platform" that USES "distributed networks for scalability, speed and privacy."
On March 8, on the recruitment page of Facebook's official website, Odaily planet daily searched by the keyword "blockchain" and found 20 related positions such as product manager and data software engineer.
All this suggests that Facebook may be ready.
Not only does Facebook issue COINS, it also does encrypted communications
On March 6th Facebook's founder, mark zuckerberg, caused a stir with a long post. The article, titled 'A privacy-focused Vision for Social Networking,' Focused on Facebook's latest focus on protecting users' Privacy.
The move comes a week after the New York times raised eyebrows by reporting that Facebook would issue stable Facebook coin (FBC). According to the report, FBC has the following three options:
The first potential scenario is that Facebook has talked to some exchanges about selling FBC. FBC will then be anchored at $1 to $1 and operate as a subsidiary.
The second would link the FBC to the dollar, the euro, the Chinese yuan (and, in another case, the Indian rupee) and reserve all three in the international accounts of the companies to which the stable currency is linked.
The third option is quite different from the first two. It is a "mixture of credit currency and mortgage currency", and the value is generated through "behavior mining + user recharge". The value of the behavior mining part comes from the product use value provided by Facebook ecology, while the coin generated by user recharge is generated by the legal currency mortgage of the user's own country.
at the end of the day, FBC's launch is primarily about Facebook's need for instant payment for its users. "The founder of the public communication chain TOP Network, Steve, told the daily planet.
"Facebook users are global, basically non-us users, and it's very difficult to do bitcoin, you need to talk to the financial bureaus of each country, and you're going to miss out on mobile payments. "" with stable bitcoin, Facebook can easily make daily and cross-border payments, allowing small amounts of capital to flow through the system." " Steve said.
"I'm willing to pay the price."
Currently, WhatsApp is the only one of the three communication applications of Facebook system (Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram) that USES encryption technology.
Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014. One of WhatsApp's strengths is that it is a social app for acquaintances, while Facebook is a social app for strangers.
Now that Facebook has more than a billion users, Facebook's product managers are managing user data more and more crudely, making it inappropriate for people to pay more attention to privacy. So Mr Zuckerberg wants Facebook to look like WhatsApp.
'even though we've built a feature in WhatsApp that allows for broader sharing, it's still less public,' Mr. Zuckerberg described it. When creating groups, people can set a limit to ensure that every interaction is private. When we posted the story on WhatsApp, we limited the extent to which it could be Shared in public Spaces, and we worried that it would erode the sense of privacy.
In an effort to make Facebook feel that way, Mr. Zuckerberg laid out several product guidelines, including increasing the amount of personal space an individual has on the network, encrypting communications, destroying data, securing services and storing data securely.
For example, encrypted communication means that people's private communications should be end-to-end encrypted, and no one (including Facebook) other than the two sides of the communication can see the content of people's communications.
Like data destruction, zuckerberg doesn't want people to worry that what they share will hurt them later. As a result, Facebook won't keep messages for long; only the content you want to keep will be left.
Zuckerberg said he was prepared for the possibility that some countries and regions would oppose or even block these aggressive privacy measures. "We are willing to pay that price," he said.
Finding an "antidote" to a dilemma
"" there are too many fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to trick fans into stealing digital currency.
In April last year, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of italf, lamented that he had reported fraud to the platforms, but that they had allowed the "copycat" accounts to continue to exist without deleting or processing them.
In addition to the fake Vitalik Buterin on Facebook, there are also fake "iron man" Elon Musk and even Donald trump.
God V says there are only two social media platforms - Twitter and Reddit.
The number of people like god V who do not or do not use Facebook is growing.
The number of Facebook users in the United States is estimated to be 15 million fewer than in 2017, according to a study released March 6 by Edison Research and Triton Digital. The decline was most pronounced among children and young adults, with a 17 percent decline among those aged 12 to 35.
Those young people have moved to Snapchat and Instagram, which are owned by Facebook, according to a 2017 eMarketer analysis.
According to Facebook's semi-annual report for 2018, since Q2 2016, the number of daily and monthly active users of Facebook has shown a downward trend, especially in Q1 and Q2 of 2018, when the growth rate of both dropped to 2%.
"" Facebook is in a tough cycle right now," "said elliot schrager, former vice President of global communications and public policy at Facebook's staff meeting on November 16, 2018.
Facebook generates most of its revenue from advertising, which accounted for 98 percent of the company's total revenue in 2017, according to its annual report.
Advertising has long been Facebook's Achilles heel, bringing in $39.9 billion a year (in 2017) and exposing the company to criticism.
According to the Odaily planet daily research institute's study on blockchain social communication: "from a business perspective, internet-based social infrastructure still carries the 'original sin'. People have been using social networking products for free for a long time, but we have found that the price of being free is that personal information is sold as a platform commodity. Because the main profit model of Internet social media is to analyze user behavior data and provide accurate advertising for advertisers.
In March 2018, Facebook was exposed by the media, more than 50 million Facebook users of information by a company called Cambridge analysis (CA), Cambridge analysis by information users' personal information and friends to the user "portrait", then push targeted network oriented political ads, and about the U.S. presidential election, and control the by Facebook at all.
Facebook shares immediately fell 6.8 percent, wiping out $50 billion in value in a week. Facebook is facing lawsuits from 80 million users, congressional hearings and an investigation by the federal trade commission.
The world's largest social network is Mired in a crisis of confidence.
On May 25, 2018, the European common data protection regulation (GDPR) came into effect, which poses new challenges for Facebook and other models that rely on personal information to achieve accurate advertising.
In lengthy posts on Facebook before and after the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, zuckerberg again declared that "my personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on the most important issues facing our community -- whether that will stop election meddling, hate speech, and the spread of misinformation."
The 15-year-old silicon valley giant is experiencing unprecedented anxiety and hardship, and mark zuckerberg is in desperate need of an antidote.
Could it be blockchain?
Back in 2009, Facebook launched its own virtual currency, Credits, which users were supposed to use to buy virtual goods in games.
In any case, Facebook formed its blockchain unit in early may last year, led by David Marcus, a Coinbase board member and former President of PayPal -- four months after Facebook banned cryptocurrency advertising.
May widen the virtual currency market
How will Facebook's coinage affect Facebook or reality?
On the one hand, it may change the revenue model of Facebook. Currently, most of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising. When Facebook coin is released, it may open the payment market that Facebook has no chance to enter.
"The vast majority of foreign users do not trade on social networks because of their sophisticated credit card systems and concerns about the privacy of their personal information." One industry source said Facebook had been trying to do payments and finance, but couldn't.
But blockchain seems to be the answer.
If FBC is a stable currency for global payments, privacy, and user trust, then Facebook is likely to charge some transaction fees for it.
On the other hand, Facebook will have the potential to broaden the virtual currency market and expand the pool of currency holders.
Morgan Creek founder Anthony Pompliano tweeted on December 20, 2018: "" if Facebook launches stable bitcoin product, it will be the most used product." "
According to the New York times, Facebook coin could be used for three apps: Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, which together have 2.7 billion users worldwide.
But those 2.7 billion people accept Facebook bitcoin, which also broadens their knowledge of cryptocurrencies and makes them more receptive to other cryptocurrencies.
The success of Facebook is uncertain, but what is certain is that Facebook's push for cryptocurrencies has dragged it into a dogfight between blockchain and social networking on the Internet.
Hit the blockchain social space
What will be the ripple effect when Facebook COINS become a reality?
The first to be threatened are likely to be social blockchain projects.
According to a report by the institute of Odaily planet daily, at least 11 blockchain communication platforms such as Telegram and 19 blockchain social platforms such as Steemit currently exist in the world.
Internet giants including Facebook, Telegram and Signal are all planning new cryptocurrencies next year. Line and Kakao, the two biggest messaging apps in Japan and South Korea, are also pushing their own cryptocurrency projects.
Facebook's entry with FBC will fuel the battle for blockchain social or blockchain communications.
Is this still an Internet monopoly?
"Not necessarily." A blockchain social entrepreneur interviewed by the daily planet Odaily said that because of its token issuance mechanism, whether the blockchain social network can be used by people is based on whether the consensus mechanism can be accepted, rather than the number of users in the Internet.
From the perspective of user demand, blockchain social communication mainly solves two demands: first, privacy and security needs in the process of end-to-end instant messaging; second, ownership and storage of information property rights produced on the social platform.
From the perspective of business model, the decentralized operation mechanism of blockchain system and fuel currency model provide a new business model.
A social battle over blockchain encryption is about to open. Can Facebook stand out?
"One of the big questions facing Facebook is how much control it will retain over its digital currency, and if Facebook is responsible for approving every transaction and tracking every user, it's not clear why it would use blockchain instead of a traditional centralized system like PayPal." So says the New York times
On the other hand, Telegram, a key rival to Facebook, sent a letter to investors in January saying that 90 percent of its key positions on the main network had been completed and that those parts would be available as Gram (the Telegram token name). Telegram completed two rounds of private placings totaling $1.7 billion in February and March 2018, at one point setting an ICO financing record.
Telegram has about 300 million users worldwide, but its daily life is declining. According to the data of the third party big data agency Rating Token monitoring on February 27, the Telegram blockchain project active group decreased by 21.73% compared with last month, and the message mood continued to decline, and the overall message mood was negative.
It is conceivable that the ICO chronology project represented by Telegram or the blockchain project and the traditional Internet giants like Facebook will have an inevitable battle.
Mark zuckerberg could also take on his arch-rival jack dorsey. In addition to being the CEO of Twitter, jack dorsey is also the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payment company.
Square's share price was around $37 when it tested bitcoin trading in its Cash payment App in November 2017. Today, Square is trading above $74.11, with a market cap of $31.1 billion, surpassing Twitter's market cap of $23.097 billion.
In addition to Square's huge success in commercial payments, it is also well known for its virtual currency payments -- Cash has long been among the top 10 free apps in the App Store in the us, and a key introduction to the App is "Buy Bitcoin", which is geeky and attractive.
And once regulation is relaxed, it is hard to deny that jack dorsey will not use the cryptocurrency features of the Cash App on Twitter. Twitter and Facebook will be locked in a battle.
"Move fast and break the mold." That was Facebook's motto in its first decade. 'If you're not making mistakes, you're not moving fast enough,' Mr. Zuckerberg said.
