Thanks for sharing this @ew-and-patterns. I have had this conversation with a lot of people over the past two or three weeks.. and it needs to be looked at from a financial point of view in my opinion.
Jumping in to cryptocurrencies could really tarnish their reputation if the market turns sideways (which I don't think it will) and people lose a lot of money. Facebook are a corporate giant, and are not going to risk losing their reputation until the market has become stable, which is the right thing to do.
If you look at companies like Deloitte, Accenture and more, you can see that they are all running blockchain labs, which are centres of innovation on the blockchain. Surely it makes sense for Facebook to follow these footsteps, and create some innovation labs where they have software engineers develop some blockchain based applications, so that they are not fully immersed in this industry.
I could see Facebook actually oulling something similar to Farmville; integrating a decentralised game where users are rewarded with a small amount of crypto. Then, I imagine that they will move in to a more serious position (something like having their marketplace integrate with something like LitePay, except I imagine that Facebook would create their own processing system, and possibly their own crypto, but I am unsure). Then, once they have a lot of data, I could see them fully integrating a cryptocurrency. For corporates, it's all about slowly building to be a part of the industry when it is stable, so they are still early movers in the corporate world, but don't need to endure a volatile market.
Thanks again for sharing this @ew-and-patterns!
Good points made! I did not see it from this side yet. You are right with outlining that a giant like FB is not gonna take a huuuge risk like this until the market is stable or a crypto has superseded fiat money.
Thank you! I have been thinking about putting together an article about it, as not many people have had this outlook yet. I'll let you know!
I don't know much about crypto but I watched some videos the other night someone posted about a crypto currency and how it's run and personally, in my opinion, it would be another generation or two away from ever superseding fiat money. I base that on two different view points, one being people are not ready to let go of their money on a blockchain everyone else has access to and two, probably one most haven't thought about, religion...people will feel they are one step away from being implanted with some numerical device depicted in the end of times.