Facebook entering blockchain, 1984 or 3001?

Hello amigos y amigas! As my first content blog post, I wanted to talk about Facebook and their intent of using blockchain. I will let you know what my opinion is at the bottom; but first let me give you some background and some quick insights into use cases.

Facebook launched in 2004 as a social media site mostly targeted at college students. Today it is more resemblant of a conglomerate amassing large portions of technology infrastructure like messaging, E-commerce and even news. Mark Zuckerberg the now infamous CEO is on the hot seat for a number of reasons. So why might this man and his company suddenly be interested in the space and what impact could this have?

It seems long ago that Facebook seemed to be against cryptocurrencies when early in the year they banned cryptocurrency ads. This ban was then lifted in June and has then seen a team of Facebook employees instructed to work on blockchain lead by David Marcus.

For anyone in cryptocurrencies long enough the advent of using blockchain has been spat out for nearly every existing industry, including social media, but what are ways in which Facebook could actually use it.

One area where blockchain could be deployed is in E-commerce. Evidently the low fees and traceability of payments that run on blockchain could seem like a winner for their over 60,000 merchants. An easy payment gateway could avoid the use of credit cards on the site.

A second area where blockchain could serve well is in content management. This might be more helpful to their child company Instagram. Let's take memes as an example. These are easily replicable and the hard work that content creators put in is often stolen by some other account. Traceability of images and signatures that show the creation of x,y,z content could lead to decrease in piracy of content on their platforms.

This use might be tricky but it would completely change Facebook’s business model and might help restore the lost confidence. There are companies like Datum, which are trying to tackle data management for users in a way that is more symbiotic. Facebook could set up a system in which users allow for certain information to be scrapped or used by Facebook’s over 2 million advertisers or a portion of them. Said pieces of information could only be provided by the user itself. Packets of data could be created and sold to advertisers and these would be programmed to be destroyed once the completion of the task at hand is done.

Facebook´s old school ad revenue can no longer be tolerated as we see that at this point it has become a data mining and selling company. Zuckerberg (or whoever the next CEO will be) must emphasize the transition out of that cash cow and into other avenues where the revenue is not made from exploiting the naivety of people.

On a personal note. I am not bullish on this, I do not trust the company’s leadership nor do I trust their intentions. Only time will tell if this might be the missing piece of the puzzle that finally enables full blockchain adoption by large portions of the population paving the way to “3001” or make the walk to “1984” that more torturous.

Let me know what you think down below and we can start a conversation about the pros and cons this moving forward!

Thanks!