Most of you have probably already seen Facebook throw their hat into the payments circle these past few weeks with Messenger pay. Most people are saying Facebook is banking (no pun intended) on the success of other payment innovations like PayPal, Venmo, and recently on a smaller scale, Snapchat. Others are saying it’s not disrupting anything whatsoever. The latter would be correct.

If you look into the technical idea of “disrupting” a payment system you’d notice that Facebook isn’t even scratching the surface. The key thing to remember is that Facebook (like Apple with ApplePay and Samsung with Samsung Pay) is building a payment processing system that complies with existing rules and regulations. What’s so disruptive about that?

Absolutely nothing.

Why Facebook may fail in P2P payments

The success of P2P payments is the fact that it’s done (until Big Tech gets it’s hands on it) privately and seemingly unsupervised. If you wanted to give your friend $80 to do whatever the hell they want to do with it, there shouldn’t have to be a vague reason next to that transaction like “birthday gift” for “accounting purposes.”

This article’s headline poses the obvious question: Are Facebook Payments going to be a threat to Bitcoin?

The simple answer would be “No.”

The complex answer lies in this article. It points out that Facebook & Groupon are some of Adyen’s BIGGEST clients. If you didn’t know (as stated in that article,) “last month Adyen, one of the world’s top online payment processors, has just signed on to integrate Bitcoin payments into their systems through Bitcoin payment processor BitPay. This agreement will allow over 3,500 merchants worldwide to join over 100k merchants currently accepting Bitcoin all over the globe.”

If Facebook or Apple integrate Bitcoin into their payments, you better believe everyone else is soon to follow. Now that would be “disruptive” and the only way Facebook will succeed in P2P payments. It’s coming. Even entire nations are embracing the possibility of a disruption of legacy banking systems.

Hell, check out this PDF report/presentation written by the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser. The UK is poised to become the World Leader in FinTech (Financial Technologies.) That’s just the first example of an entire nation accepting the financial market trend towards disruptive, fee-less P2P payments.

For the time being, Facebook won’t disrupt Bitcoin payments or any form of payments. The reasons why are detailed below in a cool graphic I found. If Adyen actually manages to get Facebook to accept Bitcoin payments in Messenger by attracting then with BitPay integration, then expect $FB stock to skyrocket and everyone else competing in the P2P payment space to emulate.