Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he will research cryptocurrency in 2018. The goal is part of his yearly personal challenge, which is mainly focused on fixing Facebook's problems.
Zuckerberg outlined what he called personal challenges for the year ahead, noting that one is to study the "positive and negative aspects" of cryptocurrency and encryption.
Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post that while most people believed technology would be a decentralizing force back in the 1990s and 2000s, many people have lost faith in that promise.
“With the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens — many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it,” the Facebook founder said.
“There are important counter-trends to this -- encryption and cryptocurrency -- that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands,” Zuckerberg wrote.
“But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.”
Zuckerberg wasn't explicit in his post about what Facebook is going to do with cryptocurrencies.