Facebook on Steem: Would you sell?
A day or two ago, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fortune announced he is, 'looking into crytpocurrencies' and will 'assemble a team' as if he hadn't really heard of them before and hasn't already got people working on it. Well, this is to be expected really and I am surprised it has taken him this long to announce.
This is great news of sorts for cryptocurrencies as you don't get many more mainstream people paying attention than when their dealer speaks of changes in their supply. Have him talk about this makes it 'safer' for the majority and will likely drive prices up even further in time.
What does this mean for Steem and Steemit though? If he is investigating cryptos what is he going to find? What blockchains are able to support 2 Billion users and all of the assorted transactions associated with them? Can the Steemchain even handle that volume?
The next question that should be asked of course is what he would see in Steemit. As much as we like it here, it is not really a threat to Facebook itself froma social media perspective, at least, not yet. How would he perceive it? At their size they have two basic options, buy or break.
Breaking is relatively easy for them as potentially they could adopt or create another blockchain that essentially stifles the uptake of Steem and restricts growth potential or any number of other techniques open to them.
However, what would happen if they chose to buy in stead?
Currently, the market cap of Steem is 1.5 Billion at about 6 dollar Steem. Pretty good considering a week or two ago it was about 300 million or something like that.
They paid 19 Billion for Whatsapp. Let's say they offered the same deal to all Steem holders which would mean an increase in current price by about 12 times. That is 72 dollar Steem. How many will sell?
I know that this isn't how it works but I find it quite interesting as for the most part, if the prices shot up to 70 dollars now, how many would continue to hold even if they knew that the buyer was planning on destroying the core philosophies of Steem and instead using it to do what it was created to avoid? What does @ned and @dan think would happen, did they plan for this?
We see already that as the prices go up how many power down. He wouldn't even need to pay 19 billion as he could just ladder in all the way until the last holders give up. What witnesses does he and his many alts vote for, how many are under his control in the top 30, do you think... he will go for a vote4vote if I send him 0.001 to his wallet and call him sir?
It is also possible that he instead uses an SMT to monetize and screw over facebook users. Wow, can you imagine the pressure that would put on Steem?
He said:
"There are important counter-trends to this – like encryption and cryptocurrency – that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people's hands...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."
Do you think that the positives and negatives he sees are the same as ours or, vice versa? Will he be using the granular views and prime fields for algorithmic controls to improve the quality of life for users in the developing countries or, sell them something? Perhaps a pay-to-play upvote charity service?
I don't really know what he would do or all of the technical ins and outs to help him or protect us from mega conglomerates like his but, there are definitely more threats to the Steem existence than people seem willing to recognise.
Taking on Goliath is going to require a hell of a lot less shitty behaviour from the relatively small group of current users though. What does that mean? I am not sure yet but what is happening here daily needs to change a great deal most probably and, do it pretty fast.
We often talk about being better than Facebook, youtube and the other manipulative social medias full of censorship and control but, at what price would we sell to them? Who is buying all this expensive SBD and Steem we are mining through our words and so many are taking to market?
I am largely at a loss for all of these questions and even though I have opinions, I am not optimistic about their accuracy. I am however wondering how others here see the future when Facebook enters into the cryptosphere.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
it might push up the steem price...
If Zuckerberg wants to monetize Facebook, he does not need a cryptocurrency for it. Facebook is a centralized system and a centralized money system could be implemented on it right away. If Facebook wanted to, it could become a bank for two billion individuals and organisations at any time. In fact, it is strange that Facebook hasn't implemented money on it already.
It is strange but I think it is about trackability across borders perhaps and similar. This would be much more easily implemented with their own blockchain. Likely, a private one.
Facebook is a single corporation. If it wanted to implement money for internal use, it could use conventional centralized databases just like it uses to store all other information.
The only reason such a technology as the blockchain exists is to provide a consensus mechanism for the independent nodes of a network. In a centralized system, there is a single source of truth. In a decentralized system such as network of peers, there are potentially competing truths. That's what we need proof-of-work or proof-of-stake for: to make it costly for the network participants to participate in block creation. The purpose is to guarantee that the system will prevent fraud assuming that no fewer than a certain percentage of its participants are honest. If a blockchain is controlled by a single entity, that entity is able to do what it wants anyway and none of the elaborate and costly jumping of hoops consensus formation in a blockchain serves any purpose.
I suspect the reasons why Facebook has not yet implemented money transfer internally may simply be that there hasn't been strong popular demand for it, yet, and that it has been in the corporate interest to hide value flows inherent in content creation from its users. But in my opinion, money is an essential part of any large scale social network. Two billion individuals and corporations have Facebook accounts. It should be the most natural thing for them to be able to settle their debts on the network using an internal currency. But for interfacing with other social media, of which there are many in different parts of the world Facebook could use a distributed blockchain based system together with many other services providing a user interface to it. Being a stakeholder of Steem the blockchain, I wouldn't mind at all if the two billion users of Facebook became its users through Facebook as the UI.
Yes, but if you look at it from a supply chain perspective, to implement money requires more than Facebook itself. So using a blockchain to connect partners up and for ease of accounting, cost of transfers and paying of contractors, a Blockchain can streamline many of their business activities without ever needing to be seen by a user or even implementing any user payout at all.
Plus, the scrapability of the data for sales and marketing and the usage of bots for discovery and dissemination become easier.
Well yes, you they could better and more securely and reliably co-operate with their partners while attaining the benefits you mention.
Do you ever wonder why more Finnish companies and people aren't more heavily involved? I have my theories..
Well, Finland's GDP is generated to a large degree by the public sector and large corporations. The idea of a public blockchain as a data layer to form a basis of application ecosystems is not very appealing to the big players. Did you have something along those lines in mind?
I meant more the game developers like, information management systems like M-files and the investment firms.
My question is why would they buy the network or buy control of the network if the lack of control and community governance is what makes it valuable.
Steem is not valuable because it is a platform that pays you to produce content. Steem is valuable because it has the potential to be the backbone of internet content and provide community governance on top of that.
Once you look past Steem being an internet entity (a social network) and see it as a potential protocol layer behind the content of the internet, you find the value. That why Ned is neglecting us. Because he sees this vision and knows protocols are magnitudes more valuable than apps.
If you buy the network and control it, you kill "community" governance and you get a protocol layer that Facebook controls (granted they buy it after SMTs). Why would other sites bow down to Facebook? They wouldn't. Thus, you kill Steem's true value proposition and simply get a pseudo-blockchain that grants you money with Facebook having the ability to alter blocks at a whim.
That isn't worth 19 billion dollars. That's worth almost nothing. The whole thing becomes an inefficient secure distributed database with money generation powers.
Exactly. It would be absolutely unnecessary for Facebook to create a blockchain to implement an internal money system.
However, if Facebook gave its users an UI to access, for example, the Steem blockchain and use Smart Media Tokens, or some other public and permissionless blockchain, that would be actual use of cryptocurrency through Facebook.
I agree. The social aspect of it is the surface of a much deeper potential.
My guess is his crypto adoption is letting you buy an advertisement with etherium. I could be totally wrong but I don't know if Steemit is even on his radar
exactly - everybody assumes he's looking at a model that rewards users for their content - i highly doubt that. He would be looking at a model that allows cryptocurrency transactions within the facebook ecosystem. Advertising, Marketplace, and maybe general transfers between facebook users.
The idea would be for them to have more data that they can use to make more money from.
I think they are much smarter than that. Their value is in data mining, blockchain is their heaven.
It's a very insigtful article. For many, earning on social media with your posts is very new and many just don't realize how much money they 'lose' by not trying Steemit. I hope FB will soon adapt blockchain technology.
This is what decentralization can do to any giant. Come on Mark its blockchain age and now no one will eat his fingers all day just to fill you bags with dollars. We are a community where we earn by sharing things among each other and we love our community! STEEMIT long Live!
@tarazkp Great points raised! I believe in Steem and think that this wonderful blockchain is the future. The fact that Mark makes such statements should be perceived as an opportunity to make Steem and Steemit famous, and not as a threat of any sort. Steem does have great potential, all it needs is recognition and such news might attract attention and investors to Steemit.
And if the attention is a smear campaign that digs through the worst of Steemit's short history? It is all there to be scraped.
I'm not happy with this 🤔
mark is someone who has the power to adversely affect the going trend
@tarazkp
Many have the power, many are getting heavily involved now. xrp is the banks and now has 2nd overall value. Adverse?
I won't sell simply because the price is higher. If I could use the Steem somehow then all I need is a transfer and the SBD will redistribute among the users only.
I wish that happens. Lets see
Steemit isn't close to where facebook was years ago in terms of a social media platform if we are being honest. As it sits the actual platform is not a threat to FB.
But, the concept of putting the power and profits into the hands of those who create, curate, and cultivate content and social groups has to scare the crap out of FB. For it's those people who currently not only don't profit from FB, but they don't even understand how much their content is worth.
Just don't see why FB would come along and buy all the Steem when they can just start from scratch and create their own blockchain. They have the brain power and cash to do this. FB buys out tech companies for their patents if it's cheaper to do so verse attempting to reverse engineer the tech and change it enough not to end up in court.
They wouldn't most likely buy, it was just a discussion point. I find it interesting to see where people would sell though, don't you?
It is interesting for sure. A lot of people would jump on $20, forget $72. The power down cycle from Steem Power keeps the price of steem inflated as so much is locked which means supply is artificially low. It's doesn't take a ton of buyers to drastically increase the price of Steem over the short term. But higher it goes more people will power down and cash out balancing the demand/supply issue.