The Facebook cryptocurrency

Kroszner and I wrote about related possibilities in our 1994 book Explorations in the New Monetary Economics.  Here is a not very informative WSJ article.  Here is Ben Thompson speculating from his email newsletter:

This, then, is what I suspect is the overall motivation for Facebook’s efforts: having its own currency will allow for transactions on Facebook’s terms, not the credit card companies, which should, in turn, allow for both more kinds and more total transactions. Consider a Facebook currency on a theoretical level: if there were no fees attached to a transaction, micropayments suddenly become much more viable; peer-to-peer payments are simple — for both users and Facebook — as clicking a button; tipping models actually make sense.

None of these benefits are new to be sure, the question, though — and this is always the question generally, but with payments especially — is how you get from here-to-there. Remember, payments is a multi-sided network: users have to be one board, merchants need to be on board, and there has to be some sort of liquidity in the market. From a user perspective, how do you get them to buy into the network? Then consider merchants: how do you prevent them from taking money out of the market, killing liquidity?

In fact, Facebook is well-equipped on both fronts, particularly the merchant side: remember, merchants are the most likely culprits when it comes to killing liquidity in a market. They are going to transfer a cryptocurrency to fiat as soon as possible. Merchants, though, are also paying Facebook a lot of money for ads: that is, they are already putting money into the system. To that end, it is easy to see Facebook giving a discount to merchants willing to leave their money in the system and simply buy advertising using their Facebook tokens.

Users are trickier: certainly Facebook will push things like peer-to-peer payments to get users to connect up their bank accounts or debit cards to Facebook’s network, but I also suspect this is where the rumors about Facebook paying for ad-viewing comes in. This is not, in my estimation, some sort of genuine acknowledgment that user attention is worth compensating directly, but rather a plausible way to seed user accounts such that they are motivated to use Facebook’s currency; ideally, at least for Facebook, there will end up being lots of ways to use that currency.

…I don’t think that Facebook wants to impose any fees at all: thinks about it — what could possibly be more valuable to an advertising-based business than knowing exactly what customers are spending their money on?

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