This is worrisome, mainly for one reason. Maybe one of the many ICOs might turn out to derail Facebook's centralised + ads approach. With this Facebook is basically attempting to prevent competition - or am I totally off?
That hypothetical one magic ICO to derail Facebook would surely not have to rely on Facebook ads to succeed. And besides that, I'd consider Facebook to be "sufficiently evil" to individually black out an advertiser they secretly consider a threat, of it ever came to that.
This move is easily explained by the long term cost of being perceived as the place worth the shitty scam ads. The existential threat Facebook is trying to avert is people thinking "I would not have lost that money if I had not been on Facebook all the time, reading all those stories about bitcoin geniuses" one day. Everybody likes to blame the messenger.
I'm more referring to Mark Zuckerberg's new year post about investing in decentatizlized tech and the power it provides. Will be interesting to see if FB will do an ICO themselves or at least built there own blockchain to address some of the data centralization concerns.
This move is easily explained by the long term cost of being perceived as the place worth the shitty scam ads. The existential threat Facebook is trying to avert is people thinking "I would not have lost that money if I had not been on Facebook all the time, reading all those stories about bitcoin geniuses" one day. Everybody likes to blame the messenger.