"Facebucks" are not coming soon -- and certainly not to crush Steem

Allow me to respectfully disagree with Steemer @pressfortruth, who envisions a Facebook plot to wipe out Steem. Um, no.

“Facebucks” – to coin a phrase, if not a currency – are unlikely anytime soon. And if they do come, they’d have nothing to do with this modest and interesting little community of Steemtroopers.

• Zuck’s FB post said he sees encryption and cryptocurrency as “counter-trends” to the centralization of digital life. He’s right. He did not say "We're going to introduce cryptocurrency rewards for posting on FB." So what's he talking about?
• Facebook, along with its Big Tech pals Twitter, Google, Amazon, etc., are in a mess of trouble with global lawmakers for dominating – which is to say centralizing – the digital world.
• They’re also in a hot mess over how their services got used by Russians to influence the U.S. presidential election, and the lack of transparency therein.
• Oh, and the whole privacy thing.

Now the blockchain (and related encryption) technologies that lie under nearly all cryptocurrencies – including, it appears, Steem’s – can be used to make any sort of digital actions secure, transparent, anonymous and…wait for it…decentralized. Important. Transformative, maybe.

Smart move, Zuck!

Yet the lep to the thought that Facebook would adopt Steem’s m.o. of giving crypto-rewards for liking a post, sharing vacation pictures, “sad-facing” a pet’s death, or posting a nightclub video, is to miss the fact that it would risk killing its cash cow, which is based on sharing purely for personal connection. The Facebook approach is massively lucrative. It’s monstrously successful. It’s so powerful lawmakers fear it, some consumers feel trapped in it, and privacy advocates loathe it.

But from this high place for Facebook to make a giant bet on crypto-rewarded social interaction, due to a “threat” from a community that – let’s be honest – is just trying to figure out what the heck it is, using a cryptocurrency whose real-world value has barely been tested … Well, let’s just say that’s more Winkelvoss twins than Zuckerberg & Co. It’d be a little nutty, a little slutty.

Don’t get me wrong. There may be Facebucks in the future. Get a Facebuck, redeemable with a FB advertiser, if you’re active once a day for a month. Win Facebucks playing some of those addictive games.

But a wildly fluctuating Facebuck crypto used to reward FB users for doing what they are already doing without reward…it's not going to happen.

I love Steem, conditionally. I get it, conceptually. I want to see how it develops, curiously. I mull the hard value of Steem, regularly.

But here's the thing: I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg does.