Facebook meet “Black Mirror”

Facebook founder Mark Zukerberg has a habit like most billionaires do, send out a letter every year ( Gates Notes, Buffets Yearly shareholder letter) to his community members, which outlines his vision of the year and his desired accomplishments. Being a crypto-nut that I am , I was surprised to see “cryptocurrency” being mentioned in full, not the fig-leaf block-chain, but cryptocurrency , and alarm bells started ringing in my head.

The rest is my imagination, read it for your pleasure.

I started thinking what if Facebook does believe in a borderless world, a 2B community which smashes across identities, beliefs and ideologies.

Community — kəˈmyo͞onədē — a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.

A set of 2B human beings until Facebook, could never have been called a community, Facebook obliterated the geographical boundaries and connected everyone. Fantastic !

It even transcended the social boundaries or what I call “personal worlds” which never collide — to collide, smash and create new relationship discoveries . For example : Until the advent of facebook , it would be been nigh impossible for your dad to know your boss’s vacation plans ; or your boss to know your cousins marriage plans.

All that is fine, you share your life, facebook enriches it , keeps you connected , all good!!

So what can a community do next ?

As one can see in the chart below, technically, the 2B people on facebook are possibly the set of folks are the only ones who are employable, being employed and working. It is the entire “ECONOMIC WORLD” .

Facebook user profile : https://sproutsocial.com/insights/facebook-stats-for-marketers/

This 2B folks interact, they work for each other, they create value and earn money.

What if : The “ECONOMIC WORLD” transacted in FB-COIN only ?

Off-course, there would be some transactions which needs interaction with other currencies . To give you an analogy, for a $23T GDP country like USA, total exports are roughly $2.3T , imports are of the order of $2.9T. Only 25% of the economy needs a money translation. 75% of the US economy runs on a concept called Dollar and has nothing to do with FOREX rates. If you extend the analogy to “ECONOMIC-WORLD” , I would take a wild guess, the number would be down to 5% (should be similar to the GDP of the rest 5B). Only 5% or lesser amount of transactions needs to emigrate the FB borders.

Now, you could always use banking systems, payment gateways and established institution but then you can NOT use them at all and make them obsolete.

What if you create a blockchain based system with a crypto token, which uses Facebook ID verification, utilizes Facebook credit scoring ( they know more than Fair Issac), ZERO BANKING INFRA, and smashes supply chains, small trades, remittances etc.

Facebook + Fedex = Remittances + Cross Border Trade

I dont think it is going to happen tomorrow, but can happen. Now where can it start , how about India.