Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that he is interested in learning about encryption and cryptocurrency.
The effort will mark Zuckerberg’s personal challenge for 2018 to learn something new. He made the announcement in an online post on Facebook.
Zuckerberg said that one of the most interesting questions in the technology sector currently revolves around the centralization vs decentralization debate. He noted that while most people believed that technology would be a decentralizing force in 1990s and 2000s, they seem to be losing their faith in the concept today.
“With the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens — many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it,” he said.
“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. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. 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.”
While it remains to be seen if and when Facebook will embrace cryptocurrency, experts see a lot of potential for a token that could be used within the Facebook networks by users.
Mark Højgaard, CEO and co-founder of Coinify, said (as quoted by CNBC):
"It definitely makes sense for Facebook users globally to send some kind of token to each other. This could be currency or something else like points that you can redeem them for things within the Facebook ecosystem, like premium content."
