Facebook’s Cryptocurrency is a YawnCoin, Not A ‘Blow to Bitcoin’
Facebook is developing a cryptocurrency but it is no threat to bitcoin. | Source: Photo by Alain JOCARD / AFP)
As Mark Zuckerberg outlines his vision for Facebook as a trusted digital brand for secure and private messages and payments between users, Billy Bambrough writes at Forbes :
“Blow To Bitcoin As Mark Zuckerberg Warns Facebook Payments Are Coming – Bitcoin, which has recently attracted the attention of some of the world’s biggest technology entrepreneurs, is likely to soon get a major competitor: Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking giant Facebook.”
Last week Nathaniel Popper and Mike Isaac at the New York Times revealed leaks from multiple sources that Facebook is secretly working on a cryptocurrency to rival bitcoin for digital peer to peer payments, hoping to accomplish with scale, trust, and clout what Bitcoin has forged out of a trustless, distributed, peer to peer network architecture:
“Facebook and Telegram Are Hoping to Succeed Where Bitcoin Failed
“The most anticipated but secretive project is underway at Facebook. The company is working on a coin that users of WhatsApp, which Facebook owns, could send to friends and family instantly, said five people briefed on the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.”
Facebook’s Cryptocurrency Sounds Like It Will Be JPM Coin All Over Again
Facebook payments is not a blow to bitcoin.
First of all news of FB Coin hasn’t scared the price of BTC down, so the money doesn’t think news of Facebook’s cryptocurrency for its message app is a blow to bitcoin.
This is probably going to be the same thing as J.P. Morgan’s JPM Coin, a stablecoin used as an accounting system to move dollars around. Nothing interesting to see here. And nothing that comes close to dealing a blow to bitcoin. It doesn’t even compete with bitcoin.
And it isn’t “hoping to succeed where bitcoin failed.” Bitcoin didn’t fail. It succeeded. It’s the largest scale deployment of public key cryptography in history.
By civilians. To secure banking and financial transactions on an open, transparent, trustless, decentralized, peer to peer network governed by checks and balances that encode an economic philosophy into a network architecture.
Facebook isn’t even trying to compete with that. It’s building something else that’s the opposite of that, something that has already existed in many forms.
Facebook Payments is A Blow to Bitcoin Like Google Plus Was a Blow to Facebook
Facebook says just trust us to be responsible for not only your privacy, but now your financial privacy and the security of your money? People would have to go crazy to buy into that!
Letting Facebook do your banking. Does Zuckerberg think we’ve all lost our minds?
Get your popcorn ready and enjoy the show. Facebook’s attempt to create a cryptocurrency might fall just as flat as Google’s attempt to create a social media platform with Google Plus.
Sometimes all the brute scale in the world isn’t enough to successfully copy something truly special and completely different someone else has made.
Do you think people will honestly use the most popular messaging app to send Facebook’s coin that isn’t good for anything else except sending to someone else over Facebook?
Or the most popular cash app that they are already using for payments to keep sending dollars and to send bitcoin, the world’s most highly sought after digital currency?
