Facebook founder, chairman, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has posted his annual challenge – this is usually a review of major events of the previous year and an appraisal of what’s to come. This year, Zuckerberg ended the post with something that will be very exciting to members of the cryptocurrency world that also happen to be Facebook users. In 2018, Facebook could be venturing into blockchain in a bid to “take power from centralized systems” by innovatively utilizing the underlying resources that included encryption and cryptocurrency.
In Zuckerberg’s Thursday posting, he reaffirmed the company’s commitment towards correcting persistent problems that have been dogged the popular social network with the most daunting being misinformation, fake news and hate speech.
Could Crypto Solve These Problems?
“There are important counter-trends to this — encryption and cryptocurrency — that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands,” Zuckerberg wrote. “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.”
Evidently, Zuckerberg’s endeavor seems to point to a debate that has raged on for a while now, that is, centralization versus decentralization. He pointed out that he and most of his tech counterparts got into technology because they believed it would be a decentralizing force which would give the people more power. However, the people themselves have lost faith in tech companies especially because of reports of tech-based companies that are co-conspirators with authorities who gather large amounts of personal information.
The Facebook CEO acknowledged this problem in his post and he believes that encryption and cryptocurrency have the potential to take back power from centralized systems and give it to the people. While it is not clear what exactly Facebook intends to do with the technology, its entry into the crypto world will be very dramatic. Numerous tech gurus have suggested that crypto and blockchain could have a revolutionary impact that will surpass its current utilization in decentralized digital currencies. For instance, it would be very useful as a decentralized data store that will free information from the influence of companies such as Facebook itself.
As far as we can tell, Facebook is very serious about this venture. The company’s vice president of messaging products, David Marcus, also recently joined the Coinbase.Inc. board late last year. The Facebook executive has been a follower of cryptocurrencies since 2012 and he was very impressed by how Coinbase started to democratize access the new asset class. The prospects of what is come are clearly very promising.
