Why Facebook's upcoming cryptocurrency will fail to displace Steem, and prove to be ineffectual

There's a lot of speculation about Facebook's planned upcoming launch of its own cryptocurrency, as detailed in this article:
https://busy.org/@dragosroua/facebook-to-launch-own-cryptocurrency-in-first-half-of-2019-signal-and-telegram-to-follow#comments

And in the original New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/technology/cryptocurrency-facebook-telegram.html

The stakes are high for the Steem community the case of FB currency taking off. Will this "FB Coin" be just like Steem, but better and larger?

Here I want to argue that this "FB Coin" will do nothing to displace Steem. I'd even want to argue that it will be of little benefit to FB itself. The major difference between Steem's currency and any FB currency, no matter how well designed, is this:

Facebook (and any closed system) can never have the trust and reliability of an open system, by the very definition of it being closed and proprietary. Even if if the "FB Coin" will live on a bona fide blockchain (which is far from certain), that blockchain will never be exposed to the world, because to open it up would mean opening up all "FB Coin" transactions to the outside world. That goes against the ethos of not only Facebook but all legacy proprietary systems like Google and Microsoft. A key component of Facebook's ethos remains its control of every process within its ecosystem, including the ability to suppress and redirect transactions, posts, content, and everything else within, according to the desires of the designers and engineers. A true blockchain would be more difficult to control, but an open blockchain would be entirely impossible to control. Even if a FB engineer erased a transaction (for example), it would still be possible to dig it up on the blockchain and expose it to the world.

(Incidentally an open blockchain would make it possible to create a copycat FB Coin marketplace, just like Steemit.com has Busy.org and countless others. Can you imagine a bunch of "FB Coin" copycat websites, where you could (at the very least) expose all FB Coin transactions, and maybe even initiate the transactions yourself, entirely outside of FB's control?)

For these reasons it is inconceivable that the FB Coin will live on an open blockchain. Rather the blockchain will be hidden and proprietary, by the necessity of Facebook's current culture as an organization. And a hidden/proprietary blockchain is a very strange and odd, not to say a useless, creature.

At most, the "FB Coin" will function as just another form of paper/fiat FB currency, no different from Farmville money or something like that -- basically an empty fiat platform "currency" that has no value other than what the powers that be have assigned to it. It will not have transparency, and will never be trusted enough to function as money in the outside world. You'll have just a mechanism for the transfer of value from User A to User B. Which arguably they aren't obligated to build on a blockchain in the first place.

Money quote from the NYT article:

The big question facing Facebook is how much control it would retain over the digital coin. If Facebook is responsible for approving every transaction and keeping track of every user, it is not clear why it would need a blockchain system, rather than a traditional, centralized system like PayPal.

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For all these reasons, Steem's architecture as an open blockchain, with countless front-end implementations, none of which have control over the underlying blockchain; where transactions are rewarded with tokens from that blockchain, based on the social approval of the community, remains on track to be the dominant social platform of the next generation.

TLDR: Facebook's foray into blockchain will prove abortive and ineffectual. Steem remains the sole king of blockchain social platforms.