What I think is also being overlooked here is that this would basically allow Facebook to “print” money.
They don’t need to spend any money mining these coins, they can just create them with the demand. There is no cost to them for creating more of it, no reason to make the algorithm they use for “mining” take any effort at all. If users want more face-coins they will have to buy it for real dollars. Facebook will get those dollars in exchange for performing basically no labor.
If Facebook has 2 billion users and 10% of those buy 1 dollar worth of Face-coin that is already a hefty sum of money.
If you think this can’t be that successful you are probably not looking hard enough, there are a lot of countries where reliable ways of transferring money digitally (either in person or at a distance via the internet) is still really hard. Facebook could easily become a big player here. Even in the western countries most of us are reading this from, there is plenty of opportunity for a method of making digital (micro)transactions .
