Tin foil hats on, people, I'm going in...
Big news recently has been Facebook's announcement that it will be launching its own cryptocurrency, 'GlobalCoin'. I think this has implications for the direction of travel of crypto as a whole.
Facebook, along with other major internet companies such as Google, offers its services 'for free'. Obviously 'free' is not really free, as these companies harvest all of the personal data that you provide and use increasingly sophisticated behavioural analytics programs to predict your future behaviour, and sell this on for big profit.
So the Facebook coin - they can harvest data on your personality, age, gender, politics and preferences, but the ultimate aim is to acquire everything, all data, including the most valuable one, which is what you buy and when (and under what circumstances) you buy it. This is surely the real purpose of Facebook's move into crypto. All of your purchase activity with this Facebook coin will be tracked and incorporated into the 'digital you' that Facebook sell on.
Is the rest of crypto heading the same way? I know there are privacy coins, but the overall trend is towards KYC - including on exchanges, and this will doubtless increase as mainstream adoption draws closer and governments become more hands-on in devising legislation. And then couple this with the privacy trade-offs that we are likely to concede in order to make use of the convenience of IoT and connected devices.
Are we heading inevitably into a future where crypto is used as a means for big companies to harvest your data for profit?
The direction cryptocurrency will adopt we'll be decided by the majority of its users. It’s understandable to feel apprehension regarding Libra's characteristics as general representation of the crypto future, and even more so as it is such a centralized, regulated and closed system that can’t be called blockchain anymore. But that’s just it, it doesn’t represent crypto and its trends any more than PayPal or any other current digital remittance service. Now, whether its going to be massively adopted or not its an uncertainty at this point, but what’s tangible now is that the diversity of the cryptocurrency environment allows the freedom to choose where we’ll operate.
In regards to this supposedly globalized and unified currency that Facebook wants to impose, there are visions and projects emerging that are truer to the blockchain principles without sacrificing the same scope and reach.