Agreed. Big companies are reviewing blockchain adoption and may well take it forward. There is talk of a Facebook currency based on blockchain. If that was implemented it would remove the use case for many existing cryptos and if implemented well, would have a captive user base of around 2 billion instantly! Food for thought!
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Facebook is an interesting example. It has the potential to build a currency in support of its own ecosystem. But their advertising ban of cryptos could become questionable in terms of competition law. If it would get mass adopted is questionable too, given the privacy-scandal. The topic you bring up here is defenetly interesting and worth a post discussing these issues and more.
I think their ad ban is to avoid being sued by people who lose money to one of the many scam ICOs.
I think Facebook could implement a currency which would be adopted by a large portion of its users. If they integrated it to their site and made it simplistic at the front end it would likely launch in top 5 of cryptos. At present crypto is too complex for mainstream use. It is used by geeks and speculators (who never take it off of exchanges). If Facebook (or similar) could integrate a currency they control, to their platform, I think it would be widely used. Imagine sending your niece money for her birthday, pay local bills (gardener etc). 2 billion people have a Facebook account so no need to create new accounts etc. Massive benefits.
I think the only reason they haven’t done it yet is because of legislation. They will want to thrash out all the legal issues first.
I would love to look into this in more depth but I just don’t have the time unfortunately.
That is the publicly communicated reason for the ban. They could be sued by law-abiding ICO's as well. No one is guilty until proven otherwise. The presumption of innocence does apply for ICO's too. So whole argumentation smells like discrimination. You could also argue that the ban and an upcoming issueing of an cryptocurreny , is a breach of competetion law and an abuse of marketpower. As I wrote, it's worth an own article.
I think that their legal duty to protect customers from scams will easily outweigh any perceived conpetition law issues. ICOs are not cyypton but a token representing an investment. And coins are usually not owned by any one company, so I don’t see who could complain about competition. Start ups don’t usually generate funding by advertising share issues or bond issues on Facebook so why should they be forced to accept ads from ICOs, the vast majority of which at best have no viable product, business case or plan and at worse are blatant cons.!i think that bitconnect exposes just how easy it was to generate huge sums of money whilst running an obvious scam and if Facebook continued to tacitly endorse it by running ads promoting it, they would be sued!