Mark Zuckerberg in this New Year , says his “personal challenge” for 2018 is to fix the social network’s many problems which bubbled up in 2017 also said he plans to study encryption and the blockchain “see how best to use them in our services.”
It’s really is a no-brainer for Facebook to look into these technologies since there is serious potential to advance the current tech status quo in meaningful ways.
In his post, Zuckerberg makes mention of international censorship and, in theory, a decentralized service could circumvent such measures — such China’s blocking of Facebook and Twitter, or Iran’s recent clamp down on Instagram and Telegram.
We know that appeals to Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder has long believed his company’s mission is to connect the world and the blockchain is a technology that, if utilized correctly, could give Facebook a platform to beat censors worldwide, even in China.
The Facebook CEO has declared a goal each year since 2009. Past challenges have included wearing a tie every day, learning to speak Mandarin and eating meat only from animals he killed himself.
Last year, he visited every U.S. state he hadn’t been to yet. Zuckerberg wrote Thursday that he now wants to focus on protecting Facebook users from abuse, defending against interference by nation-states and “making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”