The Dominance of Facebook Tokens
Once all of Facebook’s users are using the Facebook currency, there would be ridiculous network effects at work that could make the money more valuable than Bitcoin. Does that mean it would have an insurmountable advantage, compared to other currencies? No, I don’t think so.I see the future world as having tons of competing currencies.(this has already happened, but the competition will be much more fierce. Maybe Google, Amazon, and Facebook will all be fierce crypto competitors soon)Perhaps there will be one dominant currency at any given time, perhaps not. Just like brands mean so little to so many people in many of the older industries like carbon-emitting autos and pharmaceuticals, one day the “brand” of your digital currency may make little difference to you. In that world you may want to own a bunch of currencies just in case one becomes dominant over some of the others, if only for a short time.Currency trading could be the last way to make a significant profit on Earth, and then even that could disappear. Or maybe something will crop up in its place as the way to make bank―something still unimagined by everyone but Satoshi Nakamoto. (the one thing I can imagine is that there are things that no one has yet imagined… but I can’t yet imagine what those things are)In the ancient world, salt had extreme value and wars were fought over bars of salt. Today, salt has little value, and few would imagine trying to make a living or substantial profits from trading salt. Someday, digital currencies could be like salt. Or perhaps they will be the last store of value, since everything else we will have in abundance except for the one thing that can be well-limited: an algorithmically-controlled, decentralized currency.We could all have an abundance of Bitcoins, but the creator, the code, the miners, the built-in economic interests of key constituents, and now the community at large all ensure that there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins.Perhaps land and buildings and robots and software and ultimately algorithmically-limited currencies will go the way of the salt bar, or maybe not.