Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday his company plans to study cryptocurrencies and other decentralizing technologies as part of a larger bid to improve the social networking service and give power back to the users, CNBC reported.
In a Facebook blog post, Zuckerberg outlined what he called personal challenges noting that one is to study the “positive and negative aspects” of cryptocurrency and encryption.
“There are important counter-trends to this — encryption and cryptocurrency — that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands,” Zuckerberg wrote in his 2018 mission statement.
Zuckerberg went on to state his aspirations for this year noting that he wants to”fixing important issues” in technology, media and government. “I’m looking forward to bringing groups of experts together to discuss and help work through these topics,” he wrote.
“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,” he said.
Billionaire investor Peter Thiel who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook has also endorsed Bitcoin saying the cryptocurrency has “great potential” to become the “cyber equivalent of gold.”
“If Bitcoin ends up being the cyber equivalent of gold it has a great potential left,” Thiel said, “Bitcoin is mineable like gold, it’s hard to mine, it’s actually harder to mine than gold. And so in that sense it’s more constrained,” he added.
Bitcoin surpassed PayPal’s $70B market cap in August when it was worth only $4,300; at the time Bitcoin was valued at $71,141,374,550, Coinivore reported.
Facebook’s market cap is currently 542.95B trading at $186.85 a share, up 1.37%, according to Google Finance NASDAQ summary at the time of this report.
With platforms such as Facebook embracing cryptocurrency, mainstream adoption may come sooner than later. Already, websites like Yours and Steemit pay users, with more sites like onG.Social planning to do the same in the near future. Maybe Facebook sees it is getting behind the pack?
Bitcoin is currently trading at [FIAT: $17,093.30] up 8.91% at the time of this report according to Coin Market Cap.
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