Bitcoin Forum

With the money and investment that facebook made to buy Whatsapp, Facebook could have invested massively in bitcoin at that time.
How many bitcoins would they have now if they chose bitcoin instead of WhatsApp acquisition?
And how much would those coins be worth now? How much did it cost to make such a mistake?

Around 50 million bitcoin coins, that would now be worthing: $ 2,617,000,000,000 USD

But we are clear on the part where there will never be that many, right?  So it's kind of pointless to discuss.

Besides that, no company can buy more than are currently available for purchase at any given time.  Supply isn't something we can just remove from the equation.

Not sure how the acquisition of Whatsapp could ever be considered a mistake. Facebook not only own the most popular social medias around today, e.g Facebook, and Instagram, but they also own the most popular messaging application around. Remember, Facebook doesn't just make money by visitors they make money by selling data. Now, despite Whatsapp being encrypted on the user end, I almost guarantee that they collect certain data to better serve advertisements to their users. I don't even want to estimate how much Facebook are earning per day because of advertisements.

So, despite the flawed logic that was pointed above about not being able to buy more than is available in the market, its the fact that Whatsapp was a proven product, and wasn't that much of a risk. Bitcoin, is risky. It might be 50k today, but it can easily slide down that margin, just because of its volatile nature. Obviously, we probably have high hopes for Bitcoin, and sit on the more optimistic side of things, but Facebook is a business, and the risks they take are usually going to be calculated risks, instead of outright risks. Whatsapp was always going to make them money,  Bitcoin wasn't guaranteeing anything at the time.

So, although it might have been a good investment for them at the time, it is by no means a mistake.

Lots of "what if" scenario that time, we don't need to go further with big companies to compare what could have been ours today. Just look at average joes who sell their stash way before the massive bull run in 2017, those early bagholders, millions if not billions but today's standard.

Bitcoin is not on anyone's radar in 2014, not even Facebook, and they made success acquiring WhatApp as well so nothing is lost for them. Regrets are for those who have sold early when they have thousands and thousands of BTC in their hand.

Yeah first I thought OP has mistaken the total number of supply that's available for us! In-fact being it's limitation to 21 million, we only have 88% of circulating supply which would be around 18 million bitcoins. Moreover let's not forget the fact that there is 3% holding with the institutions and around 6-9% is held by Satoshi himself.

Most of the bitcoins are also locked away forever due to human errors with their wallets. Some of them are in Cold Storage! It would have been impossible to buy that much.

However, they could have done one thing for us, but bitcoin at expensive rate and increase the liquidity of bitcoin. If they were that much gracious.  :P

There is the money but there isn't a lot of bitcoin to go around though not to mention that there are more lost coins every day, Facebook could've easily monopolized on bitcoin but they didn't chose to do so and my guess is that they didn't see bitcoin for a long term investment and they had plans to develop Libra but my guess is as good as any guess. Imagine if they were to bought bitcoin back then instead of Whatsapp, Facebook could've been the biggest company to hodl bitcoin in history but they didn't.

I'm totally with Welsh here. And the fact is, Facebook is not in the business of investing in non-productive assets; the same with them not buying a car manufacturing business even though if it's extremely undervalued. They mostly only acquire businesses and assets in general that are supplementary to their main business, which is collecting data to sell advertisements.

Not sure about Facebook and Whatsapp buy this is just an example. Back in 2014, we could stop buying useless, unwanted stuff and buy bitcoins to earn million dollars of profit during this time. Also, they would have around 50 million bitcoin as you said it yourself buy that's impossible and there is no point to discuss about such impossible thing. Generally, it's not just about Whatsapp and facebook anyone could many huge amount of profit during this time by being more patient while investing and this can be a great lesson.

Regardless of WhatsApp, FB is in a completely different race when it comes to crypto - they don't want to buy it, they want to create it. Their coin known as Libra (now Diem) is still something the company wants to launch, and according to available information it should happen later this year.

So is it even serious to think about what FB could or should have done in 2014, because who at the time even considered Bitcoin to be something serious? FB paid $19 billion for WA back then, and over all these years that investment has certainly paid off. Of course FB did not pay everything in fiat, a good part of the price refers to FB shares.

Well if they tried to buy bitcoin with all that money they would have run up Bitcoin price a few thousand percent real fast. They would have been able to buy millions though.

And they would have made hundreds of billions at this point, even just assuming the price was only as high as it is today despite the fact that FB would own millions of BTC.

Instead they bought Whatsapp, a product they paid what like $19 billion for and it hasn't made them a single dollar in 7 years haha. I think they just bought it cuz they were scared of it though, but one would think at some point they will try to monetize Whatsapp, because so far it just looks like the worst acquisition in all of history lol

Yeah, and that's what it all boils down. Their business plan is basically buying already established business that generate money. I'm sure they would have liked to invest into Bitcoin, and maybe they did personally, and not as a company. However, its hardly a mistake for the company when they've successfully created companies which generate money on a constant basis.

To be honest, I don't think Bitcoin suits the narrative of Facebook. However, didn't they have their own coin implementation? I don't follow Facebook enough to know how that really turned out?

*do you mean that shitcoins...
Over time, I didn't know what Facebook was really aiming for by launching their own coin, which until now is not clear. I like Tesla and Elon Musk, Tesla and Elon support Bitcoin and don't make other shitcoins like Tesla Coin or Elon Coin for example 'lol'.

Bitcoin was probably not on Facebook's radar because it was a much smaller asset at that time. I don't blame them. I could see them taking interest in Bitcoin going forward when their Libra experiment eventually fails.


I wouldn't call it a mistake. Facebook is doing well and their WhatsApp acquisition also paid off well.

We can all go back and say "xyz should've bought Bitcoin instead of ---" now that we have the hindsight. Would you have pushed for buying billions worth of BTC instead of WhatsApp if you were a Facebook board member at that time? I know I wouldn't have.

Point is Bitcoin was a speculative asset at that point in time, and it still is. If you invest in Bitcoin you better be ready for a potential loss as much as you are ready for a potential profit.

What one considers a good investment for him or his business, another see's as not profitable. What is good for the goose, is not in this case good for the gander. Because Facebook decided to purchase WhatsApp instead of bitcoin in 2014 is what their board of decision makers deemed fit at that point.

" 31,666,666$
Assuming mark invested in bitcoin at the time instead of buying WhatsApp.  Currently he would have become one of the highest holder of bitcoin or probably  the richest man alive at the moment  thereby leaving a very thin line for anyone to surpass his wealth, investing  in bitcoin would have been a wiser choice though.

they already bought whatsapp, Instagram, and facebook users privacy. it's priceless.
Facebook purchased WhatsApp in February 2014 for $16 billion.
bitcoin price in February 2014 is $600.
then, you do the math.

Facebook can buy all the supplies if they want to, but surely it will make bitcoin "centralized" and worthless.

I don't know about priceless, but "big data" is probably still a bigger industry than crypto, yep.

Annoyingly, it's also one that people are generally less fearful of than they are about crypto, even though big data is arguably far more hazardous to their daily lives right now.  People talk about the dangers of market manipulation when it comes to crypto, but hardly anyone wants to talk about the dangers of social engineering and all these companies that are harvesting everyone's information and selling it on.