Ugh. This will pass too. The value of Bitcoin is in the fact that nobody can control and censor it. It's black market money. If it didn't have this quality, it'd be useless. Nobody (meaning customers) cares about Facebook launching a coin. Facebook will not be the champion of freedom. How do I know? Ask yourself, if Facebook Coin is going to be available in Crimea (currently under sanctions) or Iran (currently under sanctions) or China (where facebook is banned). The answer is of course not. Bitcoin is available in all of those places and not a single government was able to do anything about it yet.
I'm just going to add to this: it's been 10 years. Hacker News is still hoping very hard this so called libertarian wet dream cryptocurrency called Bitcoin will soon be out of the picture, replaced by something proper, that is fair and doesn't make you feel angry. And yet, it's still here, angering a whole bunch of people who didn't buy early and think the distribution is unfair & the political ideas behind it are awful and yet, Bitcoin is still #1 and widely used. "Blockchain not Bitcoin" hype is gone (remember how big banks invested millions blockchain projects?). Ethereum scammy ICOs hype is gone. This big-corp-coin thing will soon be gone too.
And all the issues people talk about here - like solving micropayments - are already being successfully solved by Lightning Network. Quietly.
Except next to no one is using Bitcoin, not to mention Ethereum or Lightning Network.
It's very much like the Linux Desktop - it exists, some people love it, it's never going to disappear, but it is very much a niche interest that will never be mainstream, for a multitude of reasons.
Well, sure, but then the 4 year chart of returns on my high school summer lawn moving business went up 13,500%, from $5 net my first week, to $675 on my last. Behold my 15 year old financial genius. /s
Any asset that doesn't crash back to a penny likewise goes up astronomically from the day trackable value is first created. Bitcoin's chart appears to have outperformed the market so dramatically, percentage-wise, because its chart tracks price from effectively zero (depending on how you would price a 1/10000th slice of pizza) or a dozen or so pennies (if you're starting from the first BTC-E numbers). But this is really not any different from what happens to shares in a private company, which also start at effectively zero as well.
Publicly-traded share values aren't visible to the public until they have already risen a hundredfold or more from their inception (in terms of percentage gains). Sure, Bitcoin was visible to "the public" but only if you happened to be in the right place at the right time and knew the right people - which in practice are opportune circumstances no different than those available to people who happen to be close to the founders of a privately owned company.
You're forgetting how much credit card transaction suck. As I see it this is the main problem facebook could solve through sheer volume of use: microtransactions.
Granted this is about the worst way this future could come about....
Isn't this a lot like asking why Tyson invested in Beyond Meat when BYND is a threat to Tyson? Maybe you could call this defensively "investing in the future" of your industry (if this turns out to be anything at all).
if your company were under threat and you had the option to invest in your competitor at an early stage, wouldn't you? I don't think I agree that this is a threat to credit cards, but even if I did I think I would understand the investment.