Bitcoin vs. Facebook Coin

It has been over a decade since the heralded Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin to the world and the new electronic cash system caused quite the disruption. The price has risen from a fraction of a cent to thousands of dollars and “Bitcoin” became the second most searched global news term of 2017.

In the last 12 months, we have seen some of the largest corporations in the world invest time and money into the new digital technology to harness its potential.

Despite Jamie Dimon discarding Bitcoin as a “fraud” roughly 18 months ago, JP Morgan recently unveiled their stable coin, pegged to the USD, designed to make instantaneous payments using blockchain technology. Similarly, Facebook Inc. is working on a cryptocurrency transferrable over its WhatsApp messaging app. Having hired former PayPal president, David Marcus, to run its Messenger app in 2014, the company has long been expected to enter financial services.

On the one hand, these are amazing developments that validate blockchain technology and its potential as a currency system, however, they are also drifting us away from the original vision of a decentralised monetary system. In February 2009, Satoshi wrote on a P2P online forum:

“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work…but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust”

With banking institutions investigating digital coins that could one day find consumer use, we might be losing the highly important decentralised and trustless nature currently attributed to cryptocurrencies. The same applies for large-scale corporations such as Facebook, people would be trusting a company responsible for the grossly dishonest Cambridge Analytica Scandal whose CEO described his trusting users as “dumb f**ks”, with vast amounts of payment data. As Ex-Facebook CISO (Chief Information Security Officer), Alex Stamos, says, FB Coin could be “a massive source of security and privacy risk”.

It is far too early to tell if these developments are positive or negative for the cryptocurrency ecosystem, but we may be witnessing an arm wrestle between decentralised cryptocurrencies and centralised digital currencies as the new form of money.

Plutus

Plutus is the only finance app incorporating cryptocurrencies in a way that stays true to the decentralised culture. The app allows users to…

• Manage their regular currency holdings
• Access their cryptocurrencies from the same user interface
• Securely exchange between the two asset types through a built-in DEX
• Spend anywhere in the world via a Plutus Debit Card
• Earn blockchain-based tokens as loyalty rewards

Plutus lets you hold and manage your regular fiat holdings without lending it out to others like regular banking institutions. The company has also integrated a well-known 3rd party decentralised wallet provider so you can access and manage your cryptocurrencies from the same user interface without Plutus ever holding the assets or knowing the private keys. Users can also exchange between the two asset types without experiencing any fees using a built-in decentralised exchange, another feature that prioritises the users’ interests and security. You can find out more on the company website here.