People are talking about rumored plans by social media behemoth Facebook to launch its own version of a cryptocurrency, one that would further integrate all of the very intense capabilities of the platform.
This morning, news reports show CFTC Chairman Christopher Giancarlo as open to talking about the Facebook ‘Globalcoin’ while there is not yet any formal application on the table.
“We’re very interested in understanding it better,” Giancarlo said according to Financial Times reports. “We can only act on an application, we don’t have anything in front of us,”
In referring to Giancarlo as “Crypto Dad,” Mark Emem at CCN covers this new wrinkle in Zuckerbergian ambitions.
“Outgoing chairman of the CFTC, Chris Giancarlo, told the publication that the derivatives regulator and Facebook were in the ‘very early stages of conversations’.” Emem writes. “Per Giancarlo, this is with a view of understanding whether Global Coin falls under the regulatory purview of the CFTC.”
Rumored capabilities of a Facebook coin would include the capability to make in-app purchases and other features that would enhance what users can do inside of Facebook’s walled garden.
But critics claim that Facebook is already too pervasive in our lives, and too focused on aggregating data to its own ends.
“What’s on your mind?” wrote Brian Phillips at the end of 2018 in a now-famous diatribe against Facebook’s excesses. “That’s the question that appears in Facebook’s status box before you start typing, and it’s an essential question of the moment: What’s on your mind is either a commodity for Mark Zuckerberg to sell or it is something else, something that belongs to you alone, and which of those alternatives you choose will go a long way toward defining the next decade of life on the internet. I mean not only in terms of a regulatory framework that I do not believe is forthcoming, but also literally in terms of how you imagine what it means to a human being—how mechanized you’re willing to allow your conception to become, how in thrall to a handful of apps.”
In regardless of personal user’s views on Facebook as it is now, a Facebook coin would be a game-changer – for one, it would only increase the glut of mercantile activity on the platform already – the buying and selling of all kinds of goods and items with single-click Facebook marketplace technology.
It would also move markets, according to some analysts and those involves deeply in the crypto world.
“A senior executive of fellow U.S. platform BitPay suggested that once live, GlobalCoin would form one of the major motivating factors for catapulting bitcoin (BTC) into the public spotlight once more, along with boosting its price,” reports William Suberg in today’s Cointelegraph.
How else might a “FBCoin” move markets? Well, with more of a draw toward in-platform purchases, expect the “dinosaurs” of twentieth-century commerce, the brick and mortar chains, to get hit even harder by e-commerce. We are in the midst of technological growing pains that could be increased by a coin connected to the social media that we use to tell people “what’s on our minds.”
