Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of social media giant Facebook, has vowed to explore the growing world of cryptocurrencies and decentralization in 2018 according to his most recent Facebook post.
In a post to his Facebook page, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that every year he takes on a new personal challenge and so far has, “visited every US state, run 365 miles, built an AI for my home, read 25 books, and learned Mandarin.” Now this year, the billionaire CEO has turned his sights towards cryptocurrencies in 2018. Zuckerberg first began discussing the work that Facebook needs to do saying, “The world feels anxious and divided, and Facebook has a lot of work to do — whether it’s protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”
Zuckerberg then vowed to do a better job in enforcing Facebook’s policies in the new year saying, “My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues. We won’t prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools. If we’re successful this year then we’ll end 2018 on a much better trajectory.”
The billionaire CEO then focused on a topic that is often discussed within cryptocurrency circles, decentralization. “For example, one of the most interesting questions in technology right now is about centralization vs decentralization. A lot of us got into technology because we believe it can be a decentralizing force that puts more power in people’s hands. (The first four words of Facebook’s mission have always been “give people the power”.) Back in the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralizing force.”
Zuckerberg acknowledged that many people’s opinion on the power of technology had changed. “But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. 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. 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.”
This would seem to imply that Facebook may be implementing cryptocurrencies in their platform to some degree in the future. Zuckerberg ended his post saying, “This will be a serious year of self-improvement and I’m looking forward to learning from working to fix our issues together.” Read the full post on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
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