Dear Zuck — Make The Trusted Network Pledge
Stay on your current stable coin payment path, and create a rewards program based upon a new utility token that offers even more upside potential for your members who contribute most.
Dear Zuck,
I am sorry it has taken me some time to provide you with Part 2 of my open letter to you. We are encouraged to see that in the meantime you have been keeping busy moving towards blockchain and crypto technology and applications. This is exactly what we have been talking about.
In our first letter to you last July 31st, — ’Your Bill Gates moment has arrived!,’ we clapped for Facebook’s noble cause of providing a connection lifeline to friends and loved ones all over the planet, but we emphasized that your business model is dated, often invasive and harmful to your customers, and not sustainable over the long-run.
We encouraged you to be bold and fully embrace the ‘blockchain revolution,’ and radically change your business model, just as Bill Gates once did when he finally succumbed to the inevitability of the ‘Internet Tsunami,’ in 1995. Hired guns don’t have the guts to make these kind of pivots but, like Bill Gates, you can do this because you to earned you way into the elite ranks of successful company founders. If you cared about what others think, you would have gone back to Harvard your junior year, given up on the Facebook dream, and would be pushing paper at McKinsey or earning a living as a spreadsheet jockey at Goldman and hating life. But you didn’t, and the world is a better place in a big way because you had the cojones to pursue your dream of bringing people closer together.
To get right to the bottom line, you greatest challenge is the overly politically correct, cultural elites (including your cofounder in recent NY Times Op-Ed) who thrive on schadenfreude. They built you up, and now they are trying to tear you down. These folks are playing megaphone for a large swath of millennials who want everything at their fingertips for free, but have little appreciation Facebook must make a living for its employees and a proper ROI for all the company stakeholders. Its this kind of dedication that creates the new jobs and wealth in America, not acting like a sniveling little child on the sidelines, crying victim on the Op-Ed page of the dying Gray Lady.
This Zeitgeist has been embraced and amplified by Congress, your competitors, and any number of the empty suits running for President. Their battle cry is you can no longer be trusted and you have accumulated too much power. In the words of Facebook “CoFounder”, Chris Hughes, in his rambling and incoherent editorial, “It is time to break up Facebook!”
Our advice is it’s time to fight back. It’s time to make a big statement that, to the contrary, you care very much about your members’ privacy choices. It’s time to admit that you have learned by your mistakes, and want to move to a business model that no longer tries to manipulate your members for their attention. It’s time to man-up like Bill Gates did. It’s time to join the blockchain revolution and fully commit to the decentralization of power. As your seed investor and board member Peter Thiel says, “A.I. is communism, and crypto is libertarianism.” It is time to set yourself and your loyal 2.5 billion members free.
You can prove you are all-in on the revolution by authoring, signing and staking a ‘Trusted Network Pledge’ on a splash page across all your communications platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp—that your billions of members must read and check before they can get back on your networks to play. This pledge should say something like this:
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Trusted Network Pledge
We pledge to offer our members straight-forward privacy policies, and a clearly visible, user-friendly dashboard where members can simply choose what information about themselves they are willing to show to whom, including advertisers.
We pledge to honor the First Amendment and freedom of speech and expression at all costs. In accordance with the spirit of the First Amendment, we pledge to be on the watch to delete any obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech that incites imminent lawless action, and regulate some commercial speech such as advertising. Any personal, political, religious, economic or other views that are outside these exceptions will be permitted.
We pledge to offer a $FB token reward program for members who flag “fake news,” over-solicitous commercial posts, and content that is outside the boundaries of the First Amendment as noted above
We pledge to offer a $FB token reward program for members who mutually verify and vouch for each other, as a means of identifying fake profiles and false identities, and encourage a community based verification culture.
We pledge to offer a $FB token reward program to your active and clever members based upon network contributions, community ratings, network influence and verified positive outcomes between members.
We pledge to offer an ad revenue and new member revenue sharing program paid out in $FB tokens for members who chose to participate.
We pledge to always offer a free membership program to encourage democratization of high value content and personal and professional networking and communication across the entire planet.
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Important note: Don’t let your lawyers touch this pledge and muck it up with a bunch or legal jargon. Your message needs to be loud and clear, and easy to remember.
Obviously built into this pledge is the assumption that Facebook launches its own utility token — the $FB, to compliment the stable coin you all are developing that will be tied to the U.S. dollar (Project Libra). And this shiny object is going to sit at the center of Facebook economic and member affinity strategy for the rest of your life.
Facebook’s Tokenomics
With 2.5 billion monthly users around the world and still growing, you will need to create billions and billions of tokens. I am not a tokenomics whiz, but don’t underestimate the number of $FB you mint, as you won’t be able to change the number. For one, you have to consider that on the day of your token launch, you are going to ‘airdrop’ all your members some $FB tokens to reward them for showing up.
As an example, the view of award winning economist, author and futurist George Gilder, is that, by capping the number of Bitcoins that can be minted to 21 million, the Bitcoin creator significantly limited the long term potential of Bitcoin as a stored value. By Gilder’s estimation, if you want to correlate it with the history of gold, it would have been better for the Bitcoin mint number to be more like 360 million.
We highly recommend you call George and let him tell you why he picked that number and read his book Life After Google — The 10 laws of the Cryptocosm, if you have not already.
Rewarding Your Members
The core premise of the new Facebook is to emerge as a modern, trusted social network where members join together to create a more private, secure and safe environment, and are rewarded in $FB tokens for their contributions. The new Facebook will also leverage their new utility token to build more network affinity with their members, and help further gamify all the other distributed apps and services you offer. This way, members can build and trade the $FB tokens they earn or buy in the open market, to pay for games, virtual goods, or exchange for cash on outside exchanges.
On the advertising front, consumers are increasingly uncomfortable with the online giants making millions of dollars trading their online activity like a commodity on the ‘attention economy’ exchange. Facebook can break this psychology and business model by rewarding members with $FB tokens for the advertising dollars they generate. What we believe is a cool example of such an ad sharing approach is the new blockchain-based browser Brave, founded by Brendan Eich, the creator of the JavaScript programming language and cofounder of the Mozilla project. The Brave blocks ads and website trackers, the company has proposed adopting a pay-to-surf business model by giving users BAT (Basic Attention Tokens) for viewing advertisements that can be tipped to creators or converted into another crypto-currency of fiat currency out in the open market.
Zuck, this is the future, I promise you.
As we understand it, in the social networking world, 10 percent of the members of any given social network drive 90 percent of the activity. The new Facebook will reward this 10 percent $FB for contributing original, clever and entertaining posts and sharing provocative outside articles, and encouraging open discourse, as well as shouting out fake news and over the First Amendment line content.
We will predict today, that your members who start hoarding $FB tokens and will end up putting their kids through college by cashing in on these tokens as the nicely appreciate over time. What’s not to love about Zuck when people watch $FB tokens rolling into their wallets?
Rewarding Your Distributed Workers (dWorker) Who Will Be Your Foot Soldiers
The $FB token reward program will put to work and reward millions of crafty young Facebook members who already look to you as their hero. Residing in largely developing nations such as India and Africa, what we call ‘dWorkers’, will be your globally distributed digital workers who you will reward with $FB token for validating and authorizing transactions, and thereby contribute to the governance and security of the greater Facebook network. dWorkers will also help you drastically lower your infrastructure costs by doing much of the work out on the Facebook blockchain at a fraction of the normal cost. They can also serve as your SWAT team on the front lines of the battle to identify fake news, violent and incendiary speech, and flush out the bad actors.
Setting Off A Huge Global Economic Boom
We are certain you know all this, but less than one billion out of the 7.6 billion people on our planet have access to the modern economy. Given that many of the dWorkers will be from developing nations, a reward of $20 worth of $FB to these folks is HUGE, and $100 reward would be a life game-changer.
The $FB will also be a currency that they will be able to trade between each other with no fees, and redeemed for fiat when needed. When you combine the launch of the $FB token with the stable coin-based cryptocurrency payments system you are building, you will make global economic history, and stimulate unprecedented economic growth. One-third of the world’s people log on monthly to Facebook, and they all need to buy things. The more you increase the buying and reward power of $FB, the higher the price will rise in the open market, and your members will be thrilled.
If you want to be really clever and bold, set up a special arm of Facebook Ventures whose job is to identify high quality consumer brands that have loyal members. If these brands agree to adopt the Facebook wallet and set up their own rewards program using the $FB token, your VC arm could airdrop a ton of $FB tokens on them at no cost. Over time, the buying power of the $FB token could become so strong, you will give Amazon’s inevitable reward token a run for its money, and even compete favorably with the U.S. dollar over time as well.
As part of the new Facebook, you will have to prepare yourself for the public envy you will confront for becoming the richest person in the world. Well, you will be the richest man in the world until Amazon launches its own token (which they will) and then Jeff Bezos will catapult back to the top of the rich list and will most likely become the planet’s first trillionaire. This boost in your net worth will come from the fact that a high percentage of Facebook’s annual revenues will come from trading $FB tokens, and the fees generated by your complimentary stable coin. In March, Barclays analyst Ross Sandler said Facebook stable coin could ultimately add $19 billion in additional annual Facebook revenue from your new payments system. You can at least double that amount if you successfully execute your utility token.
Decentralization of Power, Transparency, and Security
Blockchain value-exchange protocols offer Facebook members a whole new level of decentralization of power, transparency, security and verification. Greater member ‘trust’ will be achieved by moving Facebook toward more peer-to-peer, peer-to-merchant interactions. While Facebook will govern its community by establishing its network protocols and rewarding tokens — members power the edge of the network and ultimately determine the value of the Facebook tokens.
By its very nature, the new Facebook will be part of a broader populist, cryptocurrency-driven, movement challenging the old balance of power. By executing on this pivot, you will be betting that decentralized, egalitarian, currency-rewarding networks will ultimately disrupt the other big brands, as it will disrupt Facebook unless you join the revolution.
Freedom of Speech is More Than a Value
As noted in the Pledge, you must commit to honor the First Amendment principles of freedom of speech and expression at all costs. It is downright scary, that people conflate their own political ideologies, and those they are against, with the First Amendment. We can not live in an increasingly digital society where people are simply erased off the web, just because they espouse a set of values different than those of the centralized powers running the network.
Freedom of speech is not just another value, but a critical component to the creative process. By exercising the freedom to engage, we can discern everything from the problems in our society, to what features we should include in the next version of our apps, and uncover possible solutions, and reach a consensus. In this sense, freedom of expression is a mechanism that America has always embraced and cherished, and it’s the very reason aspiring entrepreneurs from all over the world flock to the U.S.
As the renowned Canadian clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto Jordon Pederson has pointedly expressed, “I regard free speech as a prerequisite to a civilized society, because it means that you can engage in a combat with words in the battleground of ideas. And the reason that that’s acceptable, and why it’s acceptable that people’s feelings might get hurt during that combat, is that the combat of ideas is far preferable to actual combat.”
We Will Watch Your Back
So there you have it. We are encouraging you to stay on your current stable coin path, but create a rewards program based upon a new utility token that offers more upside potential for your members who contribute most. In terms of privacy and transparency, by moving data, particularly member data, out onto blockchain applications where you give up central authority, and empower your members, the less your naysayers can complain.
If you post and commit to a version of the “Trusted Network Pledge” showcased above, bravely embrace the freedom to engage ideas, we will be happy to work with your team, fan out and continue to be your ardent advocates.
Zuck be bold. Think Bill Gates 1995, and take the blockchain leap!
 | A guest post by
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