An article published by forbes a few days ago aroused the hilarity of the community as soon as it started circulating on social networks, yesterday, inevitably ending up generating a great engagement even if not particularly positive, given the reactions; the article says, provocatively, that the advent of FAANG (an acronym that identifies large technology companies and that stands for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) in payment services will inevitably end up killing Bitcoin. Let's start by saying that many of these companies, which today seem to be giants, do not actually go through a particularly positive moment; Facebook loses market share among the younger users and seems destined to a slow decline, Apple suffers the growth of the Asian giants and after the death of Jobs it seems she also destined to slip into oblivion (it was Jobs himself who brought the company back into vogue after being sidelined), Netflix will soon find itself having to compete directly with producers (like Disney) who are about to break into its market with a series of services aimed directly at the web, Google has been ringing only failures for years now (see google plus, google glass and now we will see what happens to Stadia) while for Amazon the same is true for Netflix, producers will soon understand that it is worthwhile to develop proprietary e-commerce, as demonstrated by the recent choice by Nike to abandon the platform created by Bezos.

In short, the technology giants with a keen eye seem to be beginning to falter, the choice to diversify their offer as much as possible by going to cover market segments that are not part of their core business is there to certify it. Before competing with Bitcoin, then, services like Facebook Pay and Google Cache will have to compete with PayPal and it is by no means certain that they will be able to win the challenge. As for the service announced by Google, it will be managed in partnership with Citigroup and this poses a series of major problems in terms of trust; if already today users no longer trust Google because of the way it treats their confidential data, even less do they trust Citigroup, one of the banks most involved in the 2008 crisis. Without going too much into the merits of the answers they gave some prominent figures in the world of cryptocurrencies, something that different sites in the sector have already done reporting tweets from people of the caliber of Stephen Cole and Vitalik Buterin, what we want to highlight is that the payment services implemented by FAANG oversee a completely different market from that of bitcoin; meanwhile all these services contemplate, unlike BTC, the need to have intermediaries, as well as the need to send their documents with consequent risks to privacy, on the one hand, and the impossibility of accessing the service for those who just do not have of the necessary documents, on the other hand, while those features that have made bitcoin strong are lacking, that is to protect users' money from inflation (at least in the long term and net of volatility) and be incensable. Moreover, if the problem were only to manage payments via internet, bitcoin would not have had to be born or in any case would not have had to find space since in 2008 PayPal already existed and practically all banks already had their active HomeBanking services; if Bitcoin has managed to make room despite the existence of PayPal, Skrill and all other similar payment services is precisely because with these services it shares almost nothing. Hence the great hilarity aroused by the article published by Forbes, which may perhaps convince those who know cryptocurrencies only by hearsay but can only arouse sarcasm in all those who know well what we are talking about.