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David Marcus is a great name in fintech. He was the president of PayPal before taking his place on Facebook. There is no word on Facebook about what David Marcus is working on, as well as the potential acquisition of the Internet via an Internet 3.0 platform raised directly by WeChat.
I'm joking, Facebook did not admit it.
While the details about what the Facebook blockchain is working on are scarce, they have sent employees to major international blockchain events, perhaps with the intention of bracconing talent for their growing blockchain division.
News Network Cheddar reports that the Facebook blockchain team now has more than 40 employees and is looking to add more talent. Apparently they are working to launch a "decentralized digital currency", which would leverage on their existing global user base.
Facebook is a strange reader
For a platform that started out as a MySpace killer, Facebook's business model has come a long way. Mark Zuckerberg has learned how to exploit his massive amount of data for political gains and could be an integral part of the Western intelligence system.
The West has a very different view of personal privacy, which is why the Cambridge Analytica affair has created a scandal. If it happened in China, it would have been seen as usual.
If it has arrived at all the media.
While Mark Zuckerberg had to do some laps around Capitol Hill, the highly controversial Facebook business model emerged unscathed from Cambridge Analytica. The title has been a success, but people all over the world are still lining up to offer their sensitive personal data to Zuckerberg.
Read: Putting personal identities on the blockchain: the solution to data loss?
WeChat has an incredible business
Users of social media in the West are just waking up from the Chinese online juggernaut that is WeChat. If you do not know, check out this short New York Times video.
The kind of money that Facebook could generate with a platform like WeChat is amazing. From a technical point of view, they are not far away. Facebook has a deep infrastructure to support digital platforms, a popular messaging service, and could easily fill gaps with their software as it develops.
A major obstacle that Facebook should overcome is the payment barrier that still exists in the West, since most people use their credit or debit card as an electronic payment solution.
Enter the new "decentralized digital currency" of Facebook, which is overseen by the former president of the most successful digital payment platform in the history of mankind.
The One-Stop Identity Shop
Identity theft is a big problem. If Facebook wants to challenge banks and use a digital currency that looks very much reserved for online payments, it will have to overcome data security problems. The personal identity of their users has been compromised during the summer, and also seems to be on sale.
If people trust the Facebook platform with their money, there should probably be additional safeguards for data theft in place.
So, there are the problems of personal privacy. Probably WeChat was successful also because the Chinese population is used to living already in a state of surveillance. The Chinese government can do as it pleases with its own population, so WeChat's personal information treasure probably does not disturb the average user.
Perhaps Facebook Stasis
Many people in the United States do not seem to care about the surveillance status that they finance their tax dollars, but other areas of the Western world may not accept the platform that collects an absolutely incredible amount of personal data.
The communist-led surveillance state that the USSR has installed in European nations is still fresh in the collective mind of many, which could create problems for the adoption of a catch-all life platform created by a company who consciously and unconsciously blew sensitive personal data.
In many ways, blockchain increases mail for privacy issues. The data collected with blockchain would probably be extremely accurate and very difficult to delete once created.
