Facebook cryptocurrency in the works

This quotes anonymous sources who claim the social media giant is “very serious” about plans to roll-out an in-app virtual coin. The news closely follows the announcement that David Marcus, head of Facebook’s Messenger offering, is set to front a new blockchain division. In a Facebook post, Marcus said: “After nearly four unbelievably rewarding years leading Messenger, I have decided it was time for me to take on a new challenge. I’m setting up a small group to explore how to best leverage blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch.”

Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg wrote that one of the most interesting questions in technology right now is about centralisation vs decentralisation. “A lot of us got into technology because we believe it can be a decentralising force that puts more power in people’s hands. (The first four words of Facebook’s mission have always been “give people the power”). Back in the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralising force. But today, many people have lost faith in that promise,” he said.

“With the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens — many people now believe technology only centralises power rather than decentralises it. There are important counter-trends to this, like encryption and cryptocurrency, that take power from centralised systems and put it back into people’s hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services. This will be a serious year of self-improvement and I’m looking forward to learning from working to fix our issues together.”