Cold email marketing can be highly targeted. Like, reaching out to your 5 potential customers and telling them about your service in terms of their specific context.
You're right, although I think I'd just call that sending a few emails. Cold email marketing as a practice includes learning how to avoid spam filters and avoiding being detected, and it's unapologetically spammy.
I once got an email from PayPal where it claimed that I had been double-charged on my PayPal account, and they also misspelled my first name. It was a legit email, but it sure as shit didn't look like it.
Nice of them to cause confusion to make phoning easier. No, corp.paypal.com/news or PayPal.com/corp/newsroom etc weren’t a good idea. I’d love to hear how decisions like this get made.
This approach (using a separate domain for content that isn't part of their service itself) has security advantages-- for example, this way a compromise of their news site CMS can't expose users' PayPal session tokens.
It's decently common for websites to do this-- this is the same reason why Github Pages is hosted at github.io rather than github.com, and why static blobs are at githubusercontent.com. Those have a somewhat different threat model than PayPal's news site (hopefully PayPal isn't letting any random person add news stories...), but the premise is the same: if the thing does not need authentication tokens for the main service, make it so that it's impossible for it to get them.
(You could get some of the same effect by scoping your cookies to a specific subdomain rather than allowing them to apply to all subdomains, but (1) that's not always how you want to structure your site, and (2) it's really easy to mess up and inadvertently scope a cookie too broadly (or for the browser to misbehave and send to subdomains anyways, which was the default behavior of one very prominent browser for a really long time). Using a different domain entirely sidesteps all of this completely.)
Maybe I'm missing something but you can't separate you're session and authentication with a different subdomain? Eg. My session on corp.paypal.com would be locked down to solely corp.paypal.com.
From a practical sense, what different does a subdomain and a dedicated domain offer if you're managing your certs correctly?
You can, but a lot of people lack the discipline to do so correctly. I'd prefer them to use corp.paypal.com, but as a security guy it's easier to just get them a separate domain and let them have their less-secured stuff completely isolated.
You can, but is difficult and prone to errors. Separate domains solve the root cause of the issue. The alternative is an entry on the public suffix list.
From my point of view, a possible compromise of their news site CMS sees like a much less serious threat than phishing, so this seems like a bad tradeoff. If you're worried that cookie scoping will get broken, maybe you could have the news site CMS raise an alert if it sees PayPal-session-token cookie names.
This is common for corporate investor relations sites.
They serve entirely different audiences and are usually separately managed for the product sites, it’s also common for the latter to be blocked by the companies which are the target audience for the former.
I’ve always felt that we need a tool to be able to answer such a question.
My bank also uses a different hyphenated domain name on emails… another use case could be to check for legit social media profiles cause fakes are popular too and may not be discernible for regular grass touching not-so-online in 2025 individual.
Maybe we could introduce the concept of subdomains. Paypal could, for example, have a corp.paypal.com address that points to their corporate blog. I know, a bit out there, but maybe DNS2 will ship with this feature.
Then don't put anything on the root domain and use www.paypal.com for the main operations. corp.paypal.com's cookies are separated from www.paypal.com's.
But paypal.com's cookies are shared with corp.paypal.com and, depending on headers and fields, possibly vice versa.
My browser lists 8 .paypal.com cookies and 2 www.paypal.com cookies when I visit www.paypal.com. Those cookies are shared with https://fastlane.paypal.com/ (some random subdomain I found online).
They can separate those cookies out, of course, but they don't need to if they use separate domains and the cheapest work is work that doesn't need doing.
They also seem to own paypal.ai which mcp.paypal.com redirects to the docs of it could also just be a branding thing.
EV Certs used to do exactly that for me, that is until browser stopped make the visuals of it special. Don't think it would be even viable today given the short expiry (which is a good thing) of TLS certs necessary for browser
You can still do all the checks you need, they're right there in the connection properties. This website is OV-certified (not EV) to PayPal, Inc. in San Jose by DigiCert Inc.
I don't see why EV wouldn't be viable. ACME can work with any certificate. A certificate authority can just sign new certificates every week at the request of an authenticated ACME client. The biggest issue with this workflow is the CA's billing flow optimised for the "pay once, hand over a file once" workflow.
I talked about introducing a notability criteria in the US, and other jurisdictions where duplicate registrations are possible. The Chrome people weren't interested.
WHOIS used to be semi useful, though most records tend to be redacted for the average user now.
`dig` on DNS also, if it resolves to the same IP as paypal for example, that adds confidence. Though again, nowadays less useful due to a lot of things being behind Cloudflare.
I've had a PP merchant account for well over a decade, to sell a boring, non computer related gadget. I make roughly one sale per business day, with typical statistical variation. PP has been nearly 100% reliable.
Some advantages for me:
1. I don't touch your credit card or personal info. I don't want to know those things. I don't want to be responsible for keeping them secure.
2. Integration with the post office for generating shipping labels is seamless.
3. I think people are more confident to buy something from a little known business if they feel that PP is protecting them. The increase in sales probably covers the PP fee.
4. I can run my business from a passive web page. All of the other services require me to manage some kind of server, running code, that I become responsible for maintaining. I love coding, but don't want it to be part of this business.
From reading articles and forum posts two main sources of horror stories seem to be:
1. People who just seem to be "accident prone" in terms of getting into disputes with others.
2. Selling non-physical goods, which I can only imagine has its own pitfalls that I don't know about.
To your horror stories, while I'm sure many of them do involve legitimate disputes, I stopped accepting PayPal payments about a decade ago after what they did to a friend of mine. He and his wife owned a small hotel that took payment several ways, including Paypal. They didn't have too many customers paying that way and had allowed something over $10,000 to pile up in their Paypal account over time. When they tried to withdraw it, Paypal froze their account and requested all sorts of additional verification. But even after they provided all this, Paypal refused to unfreeze the account. This dragged on for over a year. By the time they paid lawyers and brought legal proceedings, it was hardly worth it.
So, I'll use PayPal these days to pay someone with my credit card, but I'd be extremely cautious about receiving more than a small amount of money through them.
I have my lived experience, which take it for the anecdata it is:
A few months ago, I checked an infrequently-used email address and noticed some unusual notifications about a "new user added to your PayPal account." I hadn't even remembered this was the email associated with my PayPal account - so after managing to reset my password and log back in, I managed to figure out that someone must have skimmed or brute-forced my PayPal password, set up a second account, attached their bank account to that new account, and begun draining my own bank account. By this point they'd gotten around $5,000 out of it.
Some features I noticed on the PayPal side that seemed obviously bad: PayPal sends no indication via email of these literal bank transfers, and there is a "feature" on the PayPal site where you can hide (but not, thankfully, wholesale delete) previously concluded transactions. The criminals had just hidden every one of the transfers. They also consistently used something like $499.99 as the transfer value, presumably because that amount prevents some automated level of scrutiny from kicking in.
Additional bad points: the interface for registering a complaint is in a highly counterintuitive workflow through the PayPal site, and seems almost entirely set up for people to register "normal" complaints, not fraudulent transactions.
The good side, however, was that I managed to find the right place, opened a case, and got the thing resolved and the money refunded to my bank account within 24 hours. So, excellent job, fraud resolution team at PayPal!
To tie back to the theme of this thread: my assumption is this fraud will become vastly easier after PayPal breaks (further?) with FDIC-insured fiat currency and people can just turn hacked bank accounts into BTC.
I believe that after 10k USD additional AML regulations kick in. Then there are a related class of pseudo-crimes around structuring payments to avoid the 10k threshold. Part of it may be PayPal's policies, but as I understand these things are generally to cover things on their end from regulatory risk factors.
That's just one of the headaches they deal with. Also one of the reasons for using cryptocurrencies. PayPal may be creating the worst of both worlds by combining the complexity of cryptocurrency transactions with the need to abide by byzantine regulations.
Yep 100% agreed here. I run a member management platform[1] for small clubs which generally use PP to fundraise and collect member dues.
Works perfectly well for us, we don't handle any PI or CC details and clubs can connect their PP account to our platform for their registration / event management needs.
Paypal is good as a consumer. You can buy stuff without giving random sites your card details, and paypal is willing to refund purchases if you have a legitimate issue and the seller refuses to cooperate with you.
My wife placed a large clothing order some months back, but the package got ripped in transit and we only received about a quarter of it. The seller company refused a refund because the tracking data said "delivered", even though I was able to get confirmation from USPS that the package weight in transit lost most of it's weight between two shipping centers. The fact that we placed the order through paypal ended up saving us, we were able to bring them in as a mediator and they got us a refund.
After waiting on the line with support for 4 hours and going through a phishing-tastic email flow, sure. (Maybe your credit card company has a better experience, but who wants to reach the point where you find that out?). With PayPal you just push the button.
My credit card company has a "dispute charge" button in the transaction history. It's one click. Sounds like you should look into a different provider.
Paypal has a bad rep from the merchants side. But for the users, it's just more convenient to link paypal email as payment method instead of others. To the consumers there is no difference between paypal, google pay, or apple pay. Paypal is more universal
with Paypal I can link either debit or credit card, so I can choose whether or not I'm going into debt for a certain amount.
Chargebacks, at least where I live, are much harder if you paid with a debit card. Paypal refunds are just the same no matter if you used debit or credit.
I had PayPal side with a clear scammer for almost $5k. PayPal declined, and I also tried leaving negative BBB feedback which I heard can help. In the end I had to do credit card chargebacks, which thankfully succeeded.
I think it's from people who are programmed from early e-commerce days to think using their credit card online is an extreme risk, and that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way.
That said, I know some small nonprofits where that's their preferred way to donate online.
> and that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way
Yes, I absolutely do think that. When I make a purchase through paypal, I am redirected to an authorization page hosted on paypal's domain. The recipient never sees my card number. I must authorize each charge. Whereas when I give my card number, the recipient can charge whatever they want, whenever they want, however much they want*
* subject to fraud protection.
This matters because sites do get hacked. The paypal horror stories you see are typically not consumer sided.
These are mostly the same features Bitcoin/Ethereum provides to senders. But the cryptocurrency transactions are nonrepudiable, which is beneficial in some contexts (a friend of mine had his laptop stolen via a PayPal chargeback, and porn sites have had lots of problems opening and keeping credit card merchant accounts) and a drawback in others (the ripped clothing shipment mentioned in a sibling comment).
And of course the main feature of cryptocurrencies is that PayPal can't freeze your account when you try to withdraw money.
> These are mostly the same features Bitcoin/Ethereum provides to senders.
Sure, as does Apple & Google pay. I'm not saying PayPal is the only way, but I am frequently faced with either paypal or credit card, and in that situation I will do paypal every single time
> that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way
this is absolutely the case for me, multiple times I had a great experience getting refunds with PayPal and multiple times I regretted not purchasing something using PayPal because getting a refund was much harder.
I now use PayPal exclusively for any online purchase > $500 precisely for this reason[1].
[1] unless it's a vendor that I know has a good return policy, such as JB HiFi.
I like to use PayPal when signing up for subscription services with recurring charges. It keeps billers that you have authorised in a nice list and you can cancel/deauthorise them directly from PayPal. No surprise charges months/years later from something you signed up for and forgot about...
Only when it's the literal only option at checkout. Then it's the merchant's choice, not my problem. When possible, I'll always opt to use a different instantaneous method (e.g. iDeal or direct debit), or give the merchant my money directly and wait 3 days for the IBAN transfer to go through. Using paypal just risks the money being indefinitely frozen on either side and them taking a cut for the privilege, if it works on a particular day in the first place (no mysterious errors or infinite loading screens)
As for "the real world", there's cash and chip+PIN. Never used paypal IRL. Is that a thing in your country, did you mean that literally? If so, where are you from?
Same as if Paypal screws me, or the store I just bought something in... you talk to them and if they don't cooperate you take it to court (small claims hopefully). So far, nobody I know has needed to take a shop to court. It's extremely rare, but yes it sure happens
If I really don't trust the seller, I can always still get some sort of insurance thing, but an X% insurance fee needn't be the default for every transaction. (Even if the % is invisible to you, then the seller updates their product's prices. The seller won't choose to eat less just to finance your transaction fees... the only way to not pay those is operate a deficit, which eventually leads to bankruptcy and loss of your warranty, which isn't a desirable situation either)
PayPal is an excellent product for consumers. The periodic horror stories that appear on this site are relatively rare and typically only affect businesses.
I do art for a very queer market and lately I've been trying to get people to pay me via Zelle, because using Paypal is putting pennies in the pocket of rich dipshits like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, who put that money into Republican candidate pockets.
Next to nobody's budged. It's all Paypal. I'm taking a class and I paid the teacher via Venmo, which is a fucking Paypal company. It's so damn entrenched. When the fuck can I take payments for furry porn via FedNow instead of giving money to these jerkwads.
Do you think that the rich dipshits that Zelle enables are significantly better? They're just responsible for an older slower form of the same abuse. We desperately need a ethical alternative, buy I think were going to have to build it ourselves.
None of my clients can pay me for my work in bitcoin without first turning real money into bitcoin, with fees involved. I can't pay my rent with bitcoin without turning it into real money, with fees involved. I can't go to the market and buy food with bitcoin. I can't see someone begging outside Walgreens and help them out with some bitcoin. Bitcoin's also volatile enough that there's a significant risk of its value dropping on the floor between the time I receive it and try to use it. It's a fine Ponzi scam but it's utterly useless for replacing USD.
Maybe you live somewhere that your landlord takes bitcoin, that's nice for you, my landlord wants USD. If you would like to fund me finding out if my landlord will actually take bitcoin if I ask nicely enough then please feel free to send a couple bitcoins to 3CzUW828J2u5wCB2xD4iE9kH8dPTokjxow.
It's still more convenient than browser auto-fill (which I also use).
Paypal is still probably the most popular "easy" checkout option in the UK, more popular than Stripe, Google pay and Amazon pay.
Maybe not more popular than Klarna, but I don't have a debt problem so I don't want to use that. Never heard of Adyen and I can't recall ever seeing Apple pay.
I used to use both PayPal and Stripe for my online business
Stripe would occasionally charge me an obscene amount of money to pay for the bank "charge back" fees
I never had this issue with PayPal; i usually get dispute cases, but they always get positively closed
My only issue with PayPal is their devise conversion fees, i'd argue their behavior there constitutes fraud.. and their UX, their web interface is painfully slow
The whole purpose of crypto is to exchange money online like we exchange cash in person, so who wants PayPal as a middleman on a tech designed not to have a middleman? Who will use that
PayPal 20 years ago made it easy to engage in internet commerce across various world currencies. And now users of PayPal have an easy way to commerce with two more world currencies using a familiar trusted interface. Another way PayPal as the middle man helps: "Unclaimed links expire after 10 days", which sounds like it avoids the problem of accidentally sending bitcoin into the void.
I completely understand why I would want paypal as an intermediary in the unlikely case I wanted to send bitcoin to somebody. I think what makes less sense to me is why people who actually like crypto would want paypal.
I want a regulated middleman answerable to democratic legislation. Crypto people (largely) don't.
I guess this is mostly a play that crypto people won't actually care if there's a middleman if it creates some liquidity. That just seems like giving up to me.
>why people who actually like crypto would want paypal
this snippet is everything: "to PayPal, Venmo, as well a rapidly growing number of digital wallets across the world that support crypto and stablecoins"
this is effectively PayPal taking its "closed-loop" payment network, and opening it up to any wallet capable of receiving crypto/stablecoins - which is still a big deal.
your counterparty no longer has to have a PayPal account for you to pay them via PayPal - they can have any crypto wallet and get paid by you - which is in line with much of the crypto vision around global interoperability/payment acceptance/etc. you could compare to Visa/card acceptance as another global payment rail - but the difference here is closer to the difference between global card payments (easy) and global bank transfers (hard)
Easy answer: most people dont arent crypto people but may be open to accepting crypto from crypto people. Aka sending btc to friend/merchant who doesnt have any or vice versa. Crypto people are the small minority
That's the purpose of crypto, yes. As it turns out people like having trusted authority in their money movements, and so now we're watching the crypto world just re-invent the financial industry basically as a digital twin.
Just look at Tether, the darling of the stablecoin world, which is minted by a handful of institutional clients. If you squint hard enough, you can see the banks.
Corporations and businesses aren't the only middlemen in traditional finance. The federal reserve, treasury, and/or whatever settlement system (swift), clearinghouses, and networks (visa etc) exist.
As a naive consumer you might not see all the gears but the layers of complexity in traditional finance are vast compared to the bitcoin whitepaper.
I'm still amazed at how deeply this forum of supposed compsci gurus is hoodwinked by groupthink and a few "scam" headlines from info brokers.
What's the intersection of people who are afraid to set up their own wallet, want to use Ethereum and Bitcoin, and are happy to have PayPal as the one performing their transactions for them? Any of those might be reasonable independently, but it's hard to imagine someone fitting all three.
Quite a lot, because you're forgetting one key group - existing Paypal users who are interested in crypto but not interested enough to proactively pursue it.
I think the opportunity here is getting money from a bank account to an ETH or BTC wallet using "normal" means and not setting up a new account on a crypto exchange. Unless you're getting a paycheck in crypto, someone has to be a middleman.
Absolutely. Cryptocurrency should make payment middlemen obsolete. PayPal should get laughed out of the building here. It's incredible that this has any legs at all. This thread should be full of the names of Ethereum wallets.
You might still want an mediator, sure I can pay you directly on chain but what if you don't even ship my goods? I'm not going to court over an 5$ item but I don't mind engaging PayPal support.
I imagine that most people who use cryptocurrency for payment at all will still need to convert it to something else sometimes. Attempting to use it for everything would be pretty hardcore.
> The whole purpose of crypto is to exchange money online like we exchange cash in person
No, the whole purpose of crypto is to provide an unregulated financial playground for speculation and scams. As they say, "the purpose of a system is what it does".
Scammers, who will need to exit the scheme at some point, while laundering gains in the process. Good thing techbros at PayPal will help with that minor nuisance :)
Holding money (or crypto) in PayPal is a terrible idea. They are not a bank, they do not abide by banking regulations. They can lock you out of your account and your money at any time and leave you going in circles with their offshore support.
Yes, they are somewhat of a necessary evil if you do any online peer-to-peer buying/selling, since they are the only money transfer service that provides some level of "buyer protection", but you want to do the bare minimum with PayPal to avoid unnecessary risk.
Link one bank account (not your primary) to PayPal to receive money, and transfer received money immediately. Link one credit card for purchases. Nothing else. Do not link debit cards, do not sign up for their "balance account" where money is held in PayPal (no matter how hard they push it with UI dark patterns in their app), do not sign up for their crypto account.
If you link your bank, and approve direct debit (it’s just a popup with yes/later - very risky move), they will eventually withdraw from it when there are any issues. And most likely you’ll lose more disputes when your bank is linked - but no proof of this so take it with a grain of salt.
Mercury's personal banking product allows you to reject ACH transactions before they clear. They also allow you to generate virtual account numbers, so you can easily cut off an entity without having to change your main account number. Unfortunately Mercury charges a monthly fee.
I used Mercury when I had an LLC and had a great experience. It feels like they're the only bank that's not 10 years behind in technology. I've never tried their personal banking, but the ACH denial power makes me a lot more curious.
SEPA Direct Debit (the standard way to debit accounts within the SEPA, i.e. roughly "Europe/Eurozone") gives you 8 weeks to revert a debit that you disagree with. Whether a bank exposes this in the UI or not depends on the bank.
And they make it as difficult and hidden as possible. At the same time they advertise to "support sepa now" as if it's something new while by law they have to process such transactions within two hours for over 10 years now.
I use mbank.pl (Poland, EU regulations apply). What do consumers do if they have accounts in banks which don't have this feature in case they want to revoke DD consent?
Staring at a “you can no longer do business with PayPal” email myself. No clue what I did, no recourse, now locked out of a fuckton of global marketplaces and peer to peer transactions that uniquely only work on a platform like PayPal.
I had one of these. My account ended up eventually being reinstated. No reason was given for the initial account freeze or reinstating.
One thing I did - in response to them saying I could no longer do business, I told them that they also could no longer do business with me, requested a copy of all of the user data they had on me under CCPA, and told them to then delete all of my personal information.
They did not actually comply and I didn't pursue. I probably should, though.
you should get a lawyer and try to sue in small claims court, it is the fastest path vs. anything they will surface to you. even by saying this I put myself at risk but they are truly a demonic organization
Those are functions of a marketplace, a low-cost pseudo-legal system so that you hopefully avoid using a state's costly and slow legal system. But if marketplaces also own the medium of exchange, e.g. marketplaces that issue tokens and only allow transacting in tokens (Paypal behind the scenes), their economic incentive is not to resolve disputes, but to create as many barriers as possible to converting tokens back into value as they can get away with, since this becomes the profit center of the business.
And, when the only medium of exchange available to consumers and merchants is through one of these tokenized marketplaces, getting locked out of marketplaces means getting locked out of doing business entirely with no recourse or alternative.
Mediums of exchange should be neutral, and self-sovereign exchange has to be an option in order for marketplaces to offer competitive marketplace services, else they just abuse their monopoly on medium of exchange.
It's pretty nice, e.g. that when I buy a leash, it doesn't also have to walk the dog. Maybe for some, it's ideal to have someone else walk the dog, and the dog walker can even insist on bringing their own leash, but having the option of buying my own leash, putting it on my dog, and walking it myself means I don't need anyone's permission to own a dog, (not a big deal in the case of dog-walkers since there are so many) and substantially lowers the premium that dog-walkers can command in the marketplace for their services.
The problem is that there are two parties in any transaction, and power users/casual users swayed by marketing will be the ones that will choose the medium on which the transaction will take place.
So while you may want a self-sovereign exchange, your counterparty doesn't give a shit about your preferences, or is actively happy with using PayPal (Because their dispute resolution is better biased towards their side of the transaction, or because they just never gave it a second thought.)
One can argue about the difficulty of overcoming network effects to make mediums of exchange viable until the cows come home but that's orthogonal to the issue GP raised and ultimately impossible to predict.
As a counterpoint to the rhetorical impossibility of a challenger overcoming an incumbent (in almost all subjects this is true, despite challengers in the world regularly overcoming incumbents), exchange rates indicate markets are positive about the network effect threshold being overcome, since if it is impossible to overcome, the value of all cryptocurrencies combined is approximately 0.
"If only there was a technology which fixes this..."
"Those are functions of a marketplace"
Then it seems you should have said "If only there was a technology and a marketplace which fixes this..."
And no, it doesn't exist because handling disputes is a hard problem. It's the actual moat of PayPal (and credit card companies) and the reason why they can get away with their crappy behaviour.
> No clue what I did, no recourse, now locked out of a fuckton of global marketplaces and peer to peer transactions that uniquely only work on a platform like PayPal.
I am not saying there is a single technology that is completely at parity without paypal without the problems, I'm saying that there is a technology which can give you access to global marketplaces and peer-to-peer transacting if you are locked out of the paypal/CC system.
And the payment processors don't have a moat in their sophistication in dispute resolution. This is a hard problem, but a solvable one if you have lots of liquidity: e.g Amazon, AliExpress. Their moat is having lots of liquidity, regulatory capture, and network effects.
Good point. I should have clarified that I'm referring specifically to PayPal in the US, which themselves state that "PayPal is not a bank, does not take deposits and is not FDIC insured".
It isn’t subject to the EU statutory deposit insurance, however.
Edit: The above means that deposits on your PayPal account aren’t insured, different from regular bank accounts in the EU. This is a frequently emphasized caveat regarding the use of PayPal as a bank account in the EU.
You'd be surprised. A lot of sellers don't "cash out" from paypal all that often, letting tens of thousands pile up. (And inevitably, some of them get hit with arbitrary account closures and have that money seized)
> They are not a bank, they do not abide by banking regulations.
"In 2008, PayPal Europe was granted a Luxembourg banking license, which, under European Union (EU) law, allows it to conduct banking business throughout the EU.[173] It is therefore regulated as a bank by Luxembourg's banking supervisory authority" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Regulation
You're not wrong that they don't act like an honest bank, or abides by any sort of ethics about whose money it really is that they're holding onto... but know that they are regulated in case that ever helps you!
This is all true, but are they actually any worse than any other crypto exchange? I just take it as a given that a crypto exchange can lock me out and steal my money at any time with no legal consequence, and so I try to keep as little money in them as possible. And at least PayPal is older and likely to have more senior engineers and fewer vibe coders, and thus be less likely to lose everything because of an elementary security error.
> Link one bank account (not your primary) to PayPal to receive money, and transfer received money immediately.
Costs 1.5%. Or wait a few days.[1] Plus a fee for receiving cryptocurrency.
There are additional fees for buying cryptocurrencies, other than PayPal's own.
And none of this is FDIC insured.
Their fees for cryptocurrency are small (between 1.5% - 2.5% depending on amounts, higher amounts have a lower fee), but they take it on both the buying and selling end. So if the amounts you're moving require a 1.8% fee, then for both buying and selling you end up with 3.6% in fees. Coinbase and most other CEXes charge this and they claim part of the fee is due to instability in the price, so this fee acts as a spread they can use to not lose money.
How many banks do? Not just theoretically, but practically.
Mine does supposedly but does not let me, the account holder, use FedNow. Instead I'm stuck using Zelle which I can hit the limits of just by paying a mortgage payment.
With PayPal in the UK you can do an instant transfer for free or pay extra for a two-day transfer. I don't know why the option is still there or why anyone would choose it.
I assume you can't use Crypto instead of the bank account link, you probably require both. Otherwise this might have some use as another blast radius reducer for Paypal's antics.
I switched to a hardly used checking account for paypal after they held $20 hostage for a couple months after selling an old video card on ebay. I'd heard some one say their bank account had become frozen by paypal during a dispute and that event reminded me of it enough to get some separation.
> They are not a bank, they do not abide by banking regulations.
In the US, this is true with some important caveats.
"If you have opened a PayPal Debit Card Mastercard® account, enrolled in Direct Deposit, or bought or received cryptocurrency with your personal PayPal Balance account, we will place your U.S. dollar PayPal Balance funds at one or more Program Banks. Any other balance funds and all cryptocurrencies are not held in FDIC insured bank deposits. Cryptocurrencies may lose value." [1]
What’s odd is that Germans LOVE using PayPal. The pseudo banking system that PayPal offers is apparently light years ahead of traditional banking in Deutscheland.
The banking system is fine. It’s just that credit card use is not very widespread in Germany. PayPal (linked to bank accounts) is then fairly convenient online.
seriously. given how sellers and creators have had their accounts locked and sometimes not gotten their crap back. it would be unwise. if your going to buy crypto on paypal make sure they let you forward it to your own wallet.
I always keep a few bucks on the PayPal card to forget about until the next time I don't have my card and I'm like, "oh shit I have enough for a beer on this bastard" and it's like a mini-Christmas.
The thing that gets me is the 40% cash back on Walmart purchases up to 500$. It's such an incredible incentive it has to be shady af. Are the Rand oligarchs trying to buy out the poor? We'll never know because poor people don't have PayPal accounts.
"A something-or-another big enough to give you everything you want is a something-or-another big enough to take from you everything you have." -Voltaire
Why does their support being "offshore" matter at all? If they wanted to provide good, user-friendly customer support, they would, regardless of where the reps are?
They marked my account as hacked (it wasn't), and the first two submissions of a photo of my driver's license from my phone were rejected... not until the third time after calling the third operator was like.. yep, that's a driver's license with your name on it.
That's not even close to the worst stories I've heard... like running Rippa through the ringer.
Offshore support is unloved and powerless. They can't and won't fix any issue. They exist to fulfill the obligation to provide support in the cheapest form possible.
Fair enough, maybe "outsourced" would be a better way to put it. Basically they want support to cost them as little as possible and do not particularly care whether it actually offers any useful help to customers.
More specifically, their support cannot actually do anything to resolve problems. They read off what their computer screen is telling them. They can't take any actions to fix things.
This point is conveniently missing. There's simply more money to be made! Now get out of here with your nonsense ideas of decentralizing money. It's bad for business.
The point of cash is that it represents transferrable value that doesn't require an intermediary between you and the person you're transacting with. And yet, banks and credit card companies exist and deal with cash. This does not mean that cash is a useless concept.
Okay and the key difference between crypto and cash/credit/whatever is supposedly that it is decentralized. Or have we abandoned that false premise now?
Cash has centralized distribution, but it's very decentralized in use. That's what makes it useful. However, sometimes people might choose to use a centralized service provider (like a bank, or a credit card company) because it's useful. They still have the option of using cash. What's important isn't that every single transaction happens in a fully-decentralized way: it's that decentralized transactions remain an option. That means that banks and credit card companies have to compete with cash, and that they can never have full control of your financial life.
The same is true of cryptocurrency. It's not a problem that centralized service providers exist. If they stop providing useful services, people can just take their cryptocurrency and go home.
That credit cards exist didn't mean cash stopped existing. Likewise, just because CEXes and L2s exist doesn't mean L1 cryptocurrency doesn't exist. You can still grab a non-custodial wallet and still manage your own crypto. Today Coinbase has a debit card that can sell crypto at FMV, apply their spread (1.88% I think?), and immediately use that to pay off USD denominated bills. So if your crypto is in your wallet you can just send your Coinbase wallet the funds for the purchase and then swipe your debit card to pay.
Coinbase's spread isn't the worst thing to pay for the service of having a debit card and auto-selling, but if you also buy crypto using Coinbase, they double-dip on the fee.
That is the point! You don't need companies like Paypal... Companies often offer services that are "not needed" because people like convenience, ease of use, etc.
You don't need Paypal to use Bitcoin, but there's nothing in the spec that prohibits it.
I think their point is that in the end, most people want convenience. That convenience requires centralization, which eliminates a lot of the supposed benefits that something like cryptocurrencies were promoted with. We've already seen it play out very poorly several times in crypto already.
This adds convenience because I can instantly send ETH from Robinhood to PayPal to Coinbase to my Ledger, without dealing with banking rails or creating a taxable event.
I don't think convenience requires centralization. Centralization makes some things easier and other things impossible, and things in both of those categories can be useful for convenience. BitTorrent, the WWW, and VisiCalc on the Apple ][ are three examples of distributed or decentralized systems that were much more convenient to use than their centralized predecessors.
The power of not needing companies like PayPal does not preclude them from offering services that ease its use.
The benefit comes from having the option to go elsewhere. A business that cannot lock you in is more likely to try to retain your custom by offering a good service.
The Internet is decentralized but most of us use ISPs to connect to it. Most of can't access the Internet without these companies.
In practice, the word "decentralized" just speaks to whether anyone can join in the protocol if they want. But it doesn't mean the protocol is easy to implement.
Or Coinbase, or Cash App, or Venmo, or any of the other random places you can buy cryptocurrency. If it's not on the blockchain, it's not cryptocurrency; it's just an IOU until you withdraw to a private wallet.
Which can still be useful. Just like banks used to issue "IOUs" in exchange for depositing your gold coins, so that it was easier and safer to transfer small amounts.
It's not that simple, there's a niuance there - tradeoffs are to to be made if we want to have a decentralized system; it will not scale to the whole planet, if running a node is accessible; and it must be so, otherwise it's not decentralized.
The reality is, we will have a mix of custodian - through third-party - and self-sovereign usage; depending on the context and user's skill
It’s a grift, that’s why. Pedophile protector administration has silently dropped all of the regulatory lawsuits related to digital currency. There is minimal or no oversight right now. The pedophile in chief and family himself have also rug pulled their own tokens and not many people are caring.
I used to work at a few big banks, and because of the "friendly" nature of digital currencies. The traditional banking entities are trying to get in on the grift while they can.
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real question because i don't know, what do people actually buy with crypto other than other money or illegal stuff? i presume paypal won't be happy with you buying/selling drugs with it
There are legit uses that enterprise companies are using today, but they are few and far between in comparison to day trading/speculation/etc. For example, moving money from different currencies usually requires foreign exchange fees which can be hefty - whereas if you buy some stablecoin in a local currency and then sell that stablecoin in the currency you want to have in your bank account, you pay tiny transaction costs and thats it. This is a real problem for companies who have operations in tons of countries, and have to manage bank accounts and local entities in all of those countries. Imagine reducing your profit by 1-2% just because you want your profits in ireland instead of mexico. Stablecoins make that into <0.5%, which is many millions.
To answer your question, I hardly buy anything with crypto because there's barely support... Hopefully this is a catalyst for change.
I feel like this is the wrong question to ask. Instead try "why would someone purchase with crypto over fiat?".
I prefer to use crypto for international online purchases because the transaction and conversion fees from my native currency are way too high. With crypto it's a one off deposit fee and then gas is trivial these days.
I have a virtual crypto card and gave it to my daughter and she added it to the Google wallet on her android. She uses it anywhere to buy anything. My bank didn't want to open bank account to minor. Everything was set up in 10 minutes. I transfer to her some random coins and it just works.
I also use it myself as a backup abroad when my regular bank foreign account doesn't work for any reason.
I got the card in the middle of the night in 10 minutes.
Used everywhere to buy everything? Some serious evidence is required to support this claim. I bet she can't even buy candy at your neighbourhood convenience store.
Fwiw you won't find a supermarket in this country that accepts buying things on credit, much less a local candy store. If that worked for you, it's very specific to wherever you live
Huh, okay, I didn't know buying things constantly on credit was common in Europe. Certainly not around Netherlands/Germany (so Austria seems odd, they generally share a culture). The only one of these countries I've been to is Italy but I was young enough that it was probably all cash then
Not sure what you mean. Nobody buys anything with cache anymore. I keep some cache in my car for bazaar and similar stuff, but all but few stores accept cards everywhere in EU I go. The convenience of having all your cards on a phone is unparalleled.
I think there's some confusion here, you can use a credit card and have it processed on the back-end as a debit transaction, for a consumer the distinction is almost unnoticed.
This differs greatly according to global region. Germany from what I've observed is an outlying for noticing the distinction (mostly because they suffered from very high credit card surcharges for decades vs the rest of the world).
Side note, but you can say you have a debit card, then pay with a credit card and usually it will go through. Or vise versa. No idea why they make the distinction, maybe the fees are different but the cashier usually can’t tell.
Venmo and Coinbase also offer debit cards (Venmo -> Mastercard, Coinbase -> Visa) that work for this purpose. Like OP says it's trivial to get (just open the app, enable the Debit Card feature, read the disclosures (pretty standard stuff but do read them), then add to Google Wallet.)
So it is indeed a Mastercard, plus some extra fees:
What are the fees associated with using the Bybit Card?
Here's a breakdown of the fees:
– Foreign Exchange Fee: 1% (on top of Mastercard's exchange rate)
– Crypto Conversion Fee: 0.9% (on top of Spot trading fees)
– Annual Fee: None
– Dormancy/Inactivity Fee: None
– Card Cancellation Fee: None
– Card Issuance/Replacement Fee: None for Bybit Virtual Card; 5 USD/USDT for Bybit Physical Card
– ATM Withdrawal Fee: 2% (applies after reaching the monthly free ATM withdrawal limit of 100 USD)
I don't want custodial or joint accounts. Then my kids call me to ask about stuff on their accounts. I want them to have their own thing. I want total separation of my own accounts from anything else in the world, including my family.
I got this in 10 minutes and have 0 maintenance, and you want me to have account at bank A and B which can take days, if not weeks, along with the constant management. I have a life, you know.
Nah, I am gonna keep using a crypto card while my neighbor still waits for a card of the local bank 3 months later, after a tone of back&forth.
Cross border money transfer is one reason. People in 3rd world countries don't want to hold their money in the country. Many want to get paid by stablecoins.
I agree the AML laws of old are out of date for the current state of things. More and more workers in developing countries are doing remote work, and AML is unfortunately unfairly affecting this demographic (I used to be part of that demographic).
But enabling everyone to skirt around it completely is not a good outcome IMO.
They aren't old. They were passed this century—because, in democratic countries, they were politically radioactive until the 9/11 attacks allowed the Intelligence Community to get its wishlist passed into law.
Enabling everyone to skirt around it completely would be in effect a return to the state of affairs that prevailed throughout the entire 20th century, and that would probably be a good tradeoff.
>Drugs that arent like, go to jail illegal but ship internationally direct
I was so angry when Vision Direct lost the ability to ship prescripting contact lenses to US customers — my prescription hasn't changed in two decades! The only crime being committed here is the cost of my annual examination.
Most large company entries into the crypto space seem to fizzle out and disappear due to lack of use, and how annoying it is to deal with currencies which fluctuate in value between the time you've spent them and the time the transaction is approved (I understand there are lightning networks), and then there's the issue with maintaining wallets.
It really just adds nothing but extra complexity to the existing electronic payment methods. And takes away tons of things like regulators, regulations, consumer protections, strong case law.
there's lots of places to spend crypto if you look, and I don't feel like needing to associate my identity just to purchase digital goods. Crypto facilitates that. People forget it's even an option.
The only use-case I've heard for cryptocurrencies that doesn't just sound like a get-rich-quick-speculative-betting-scam is providing financial services to the un-banked.
I know quite some Russian companies using bitcoins t to trade with western companies. For example large ad networks and bookies that operate there and pay in bitcoins. Malta, Switzerland are quite popular for these constructions.
Probably not. Most Russian companies are not subject to sanctions even in the US, but many of their banks are. And most Western companies are not in the US and consequently aren't bound by US sanctions.
Coinbase and Venmo offer debit cards that you can fund with crypto. Coinbase offers to auto-sell crypto assets you choose to fund it. That means you can hold money in crypto and sell it off when you want to buy something. Be cognizant of taxes, but if you're willing to hold your crypto for a year then LTCG kicks in and you're getting taxed at pretty reasonable rates.
Investment accounts on the other hand take a while for sales to settle before your funds are available as cash.
Stablecoin payments are currently a hugely growing business, mainly for B2B payments as I understand it. I think its really hard for people who have absorbed 10 years of anti-crypto groupthink from HN to digest the fact that crypto is here to stay and is finding legitimate use cases.
Stablecoin payments really are just better:
- Instant settlement
- Extremely cheap
- Extremely reliable
- Highly programmable
- Built on open protocols
- International
There are no traditional banking systems that offer all of these properties!
If anyone is tempted to reply with "okay but that could have been done with a database" I would really encourage that person to try to think hard about why that didn't happen.
Yeah, its amazing how much anti-crypto HN is. I decided to invest entire year in learning technology and I couldn't be happier on that decision. The entire ecosystem of mainstream coins is mind-blowing and too big to fail at this point.
I once had to go through a SWIFT certification and it was a nightmare… They make you jump through so many rings… They make you buy hardware from them (for their certification runs), their documentation is awful. Their test environment is awful (no logs, no clear error messages, etc). Sadest time of my life.
Funny thing is, most Coinbase or Kraken or Binance transactions of BTC and Ethereum are simple SQL transactions in a normal database.
An immutable ledger to put information is the best invention since sliced bread, and that can only be achieved by an underlying economic system to maintain such a ledger.
That being said, probably all crypto (except one) will go to zero very soon. Crypto is a bubble, but it doesn't mean that the underlying technology is useless.
I bought a Go board and some stones from GoGameGuru back in the day. A bitcoin was only 200-ish Euros back then. Funny to think how much that's gone up.
Tax evasion mostly. Tokens are used to obscure movement of assets from both governments, but then you need to safely exit into real money in the recipient country, and preferably make them all clean and legal. Now you need to use some P2P exchanges, rely on some less reputable intermediaries, while PayPal will streamline the process.
Once upon a time, their corporate and developer sites were x.com even, before they moved to a more professional domain and later sold that one back to Elon.
Someone mentioned this kind of thing in the npm breeches last week. You get desensitized to non-standard “official” urls and it makes it easier for phishers.
I’ve happily avoided Paypal in the last .. 6 years or so. Ever since Revolut came up with disposable cards I’m much less hesitant to give my card details to someone, also PP never stopped being shady and user-hostile in the meantime.
So I’ll continue to avoid them in the next 6 years as well.
One of the reasons I don't think crypto can succeed is because people will only use it if it's convenient, which very likely means corporate involvement, which of course ultimately defeats the whole argument of being decentralized.
Without convenience it will not be successful as a common currency. It does not need convenience to succeed in other ways. For example, as a store of value.
Literally any scarce and durable good can be a store of value. A pound of Osmium is about a million bucks. So building massive server farms to store something equivalent to an inert rock is kind of uninteresting.
This is more about regulatory compliance than technical capability. PayPal already had the infrastructure - they've been waiting for clearer guidance from regulators.
The interesting part will be how they handle the AML requirements. Traditional payment processors have decades of experience with compliance, but crypto transactions create new challenges for transaction monitoring.
Just to echo other sentiments. Don't use PayPal to hold your crypto. Yes it will open the gateway to existing PayPal users and enable them to transact in these currencies. But the reality is that these centralised entities do not operate under an ethical code the way you would expect them to. They make unilateral decisions about what happens to your account and funds without asking you a single question. Be very careful. I was not a banking skeptic before. I have quite happily used my bank account, credit cards, PayPal and everything else. But now. I am not so sure. The level of control they have over your finances and ability to transact is unnerving. What they do with your money you can't control. When they decide you are no longer a favourable actor you can't control. Minimise exposure to these entities please.
Title: PayPal [..] Reimagining How Money Moves to Anyone, Anywhere.
Text: PayPal users in the U.S. can begin [..] today, with international expansion [..] starting later this month.
So immediately out of the box it is exactly NOT for "anyone" and NOT "anywhere".
This is contagious: a couple of years ago Gnosis tried to launch their Gnosis Card[1] on Berlin DappCon with the exact same slogan: "Anyone, anywhere" while only accepting applications from a select group of people living in select EU countries.
I have had discussion with their CEO right there regarding this marketingspeak but he did not seem to grasp what's the problem at all here.
"Look how global we are… as long as you have a U.S. address, the correct passport, a bank account in a supported country, a smartphone with the correct OS."
Well in fairness they really have reimagined how money moves to anyone anywhere, they just haven't changed it yet. Plus they used a verb tense suggesting the process is ongoing. If they said "we changed how money moves to anyone anywhere" then that would be inaccurate, but that's not what they said.
It is almost like there were two departments in play. One that did reimagine how the global crypto money works, and the other who cannot image transacting without a recent utility bill. And they met in the press release.
So hold on, does this mean I can pay with crypto anywhere that accepts Paypal? Because if so that's kind of a big deal, but not at all clear to me if that is the case...
Oh absolutely. They even explain it right in the press-release: "users in the U.S. can [...] with international expansion [...] starting later this month".
Of course it will be as far from "anyone" or "anywhere" as possible, because they will start the crypto expansion in a much more restrictive fashion than TradFi.
Huh, I was basing this on NFT gas prices since that's the part of blockchain I've always been most curious about, I didn't realize that simple ETH transfers required far less gas than things like minting and selling NFTs.
Minting and selling NFTs in general require more computation, but many smart contracts with NFTs have been gas optimized compared to 2021, sometimes requiring less approvals and transactions.
A lot of activity moved to L2s, making L1 gas cheaper, and so simple ETH and token sends are cheaper. L2s will continue to get cheaper, with the next hard fork around November and L1 gas should be even cheaper with the hard fork after the next.
I hate paypal, because they froze my money for 6 months and destroyed my mental health for weeks. Compared to other people my situation was not even bad.
What's not to understand? If you have a specific question about the 'immediate negativity', perhaps comment on one of the puzzling comments to ask for clarification
When Bitcoin first hit public consciousness the knock from economists was that it had a built-in deflationary spiral and that seems to be true. The price keeps going up and up with a few noted bumps. Rising value is great for speculators but it's a death knell for an actual spending currency. You'd be nuts to spend it if you expect it to appreciate. That's why central banks aim for low but positive inflation.
It's rational to buy stuff when it's cheap and sell stuff when it's expensive. Not the other way around. In other words, if the money gets suddenly more valuable, people would go on a shopping spree, which would cause inflation and the value would return back to normal. They wouldn't wait for it to be even more valuable. The situation would be different if there was a guarantee of deflation, but there isn't.
Economic demand is driven by human needs and wants. Lot of everyday consumption, like food, is bought when it's needed, and can't be bought 5 years later, because you'd be dead already. Other things, like a computer or a car you can buy later, but then you'll have to make a calculation whether the thing is more valuable today or after 5 years if you'll get it 30% cheaper. There's no situation where you sit on a pile of bitcoins and just die there waiting.
You're trying to rewrite decades of economic theory in a single comment. You can just Google "deflation great depression" and "elasticity of demand". Think about the opposite side of the coin. You have car that is ok but want a better one. The better one costs $35k. In a few months, it will be $30k and a few more $25k. When will you buy it? Deflation is kryptonite to consumer spending.
I'm not rewriting anything, this is called time preference, a well-known concept. High-% deflation happens to consumer electronics all the time. You get the same product much cheaper or a better product with the same price if you wait. Still people buy these products, because they want / need them now. Sure, the rate of inflation / deflation will shift the average time preference, but it's not that drastic and doesn't cause a spiral.
I think the difference here is that Bitcoin is predictable deflationary vs fiat being unpredictable. If you can know in advance the rate, it becomes sorta like an investment vehicle, where instead of dividends you get appreciation of the assets.
To look at it another way - why one would spend $100 from their brokerage account if they know a year later they can spend $110?
Bitcoin is not remotely predictable. The value has swung wildly over the past 5 years. Dropping more than 50% then gaining 200%. By comparison, USD has been rock solid even with the recent run of inflation. An actually circulating currency causes a panic at an 8% drop in value and yet there was zero macroeconomic impact from BTC dropping 50%. BTC is less stable than Turkish Lira.
The same can be said for stocks, and they are considered a good investment if you are in the knows. As an example, Tesla lost a third of its value this year.
Stocks convey equity, pay dividends, must do quarterly disclosures, must disclose insider trading activity and, most importantly, are never used for payments. The topic is payments, not investments.
Trades made by actual insiders are disclosed. That's a narrower definition than what qualifies at illegal insider trading (or an insider sharing inside information with an outsider). That's also not likely to be what is happening with members on Congress who may be trading on nonpublic information that isn't legally insider information.
Aside from tax implications, there's no difference between spending $1000 from your salary, and spending $1000 in Bitcoin and rebuying that amount from your salary.
In the early days of Bitcoin (like 2013 and earlier) there were soo many entrepreneurs that tried to use Paypal for their fiat on-ramps. There even used to be a service that let you buy Bitcoins with credit cards and used Paypal to process payments. They did their own KYC and everything, with very low fraud rates despite the double-spend risk. Even with an interesting result: Paypal caused them nothing but misery. Every single merchant, trading system, wallet, or platform that tried to rely on Paypal came to regret it.
Paypals reputation in the FinTech space is that of creating a service that restricts as much as possible what can be done with your own money. All in the name of "security." Even though they seem to offer the worst security of any platform, coupled with the now infamous risk of having your funds "frozen" for any arbitrary reason. In short: I literally cannot think of a company I would trust less with digital currencies than Paypal. And seeing them support any of them just makes me think "wow, you fucking phonies."
I tried some Woo-Commerce? plugin to accept Bitcoin on my sites a few years ago and Paypal baulked at it or made it incredibly complicated to the point that I gave up. Stripe said to wait until their cryptocurrency was released.
The main issue at the time seemed to be that it couldn't really work as a medium of exchange. Eg; $100 paid on the Monday might be $80 or $150 by the time it actually cleared. Maybe I was really inept but I got sick of the complexity and bailed, even though I liked the idea of having these options.
I wouldn't try Paypal's offering as they don't have any kind of quality support for merchants.
I will never trust Paypal with anything again after they completely botched up the closing of my deceased parent's account. It was a dystopian nightmare to try and get them to understand the situation, and every support person who replied to the ticket started from scratch to give a wholly new, and yet equally unhelpful, take on the situation.
It took nearly six months to fully close down the account and many, many phone calls, which were equally difficult because it's nearly impossible to speak to a real person, and when you do finally get connected to a real person they just hang up on you when they realize they can't solve your issue in under five minutes. Paypal is one of the worst companies I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with, and money or crypto is the last thing I would trust them with.
Like with most things, if you put a serious amount of money through your account they will assign you a personal account manager who will bend over backwards for you. Otherwise they couldn't care less :( source: experience
Paypal has supported Ethereum and Bitcoin for years, in the US, most of the comments on this thread are irrelevant and unrelated to the current press release
I've bought bitcoin a few times using paypal, and while it says you can transfer it to any address, it would never actually let me complete the process. Support was utterly useless. Presumably it's some fraud risk sort of issue, but ultimately just cost me a few dollars in losses and fees to get my cash back.
Yes, I switched my bank account to a Cash Management account (Fidelity) and get ATM fees and international fees reimbursed, this has renewed my cash usage and eliminated my card usage. I love it!
what's the end goal of stablecoins, besides the immediate grift?
do they think countries' populations will "opt in" into dolarizing that country econony (a la argentina in the 80s) bypassing their central bank opinions?
or is this much simpler and is just "ebay now works as crypto escrow for your bids"?
That's not how any of this works. You may not receive any interest on your stablecoin balance, but the issuer certainly does. Why would they offer to lend money to the US government at zero when they can get the market rate and pocket it? What's more, these are mostly short-term instruments This means any increase in inflation will be reflected in their yield.
> You may not receive any interest on your stablecoin balance, but the issuer certainly does
A bunch of zero marginal cost capital funding purchases of U.S. debt would absolutely push down rates, possibly lower than inflation, because if you’re a stablecoin issuer you’re not constrained by yield.
This is a dumb-money venture. And if there is this much money that is this dumb, Treasuries aren’t the worst place for it to go.
Even if every dollar of market cap for every crypto currency in the world was invested into us treasuries, it would still be a drop in the bucket and wouldn't drastically change rates.
> those trilions and trilions of dollars of stablecoins sure are bringing down the us' cost to borrow
If you think trillions of dollars in de novo price-insensitive demand doesn’t move a market, even one as deep as the Treasury market, I’ve got a stablecoin to sell you.
Yes, trillions of dollars of new price-insensitive demand would move the treasury market. That's why I named that number! But, there just isn't that much value in stablecoins.
It’s actually more of a win-win situation if you look closely.
Stablecoin issuers earn yield from holding U.S. Treasuries, which sustains their business model. Meanwhile, people in distressed economies get practical access to a digital dollar, often cheaper and faster than navigating restrictive exchange rules or paying steep conversion fees at money-changers. That’s meaningful when local currencies are unstable or losing value.
Of course, not all stablecoin issuers are trustworthy, and some governments under economic distress may ban or limit these instruments. But when the setup works, both sides benefit.
The foreign individual is likely better off in game theory terms, but their country is collectively likely worse off due to a reduction in their central bank's independence and ability to perform seigniorage/print money. Difficult to ban for the foreign nation, and probably results in a greater need for dollars for their government also.
Probably not. You would be right if we were talking about honest, competent central bankers. But most people live in poor countries. Why are those countries poor?
Every country is different, but poor countries are mostly poor because they are governed by kleptocrats, generally including their central bankers, and hyperinflation in particular is a constant menace. When the central bankers aren't directly kleptocratic themselves, they are very often incompetent but loyal, similar to most of Trump's nominees. In this situation, generally speaking, things that put power over individuals' lives back in the hands of those individuals, instead of the kleptocrats' hands, will improve the situation not just of the individuals but of their whole country.
I agree that kleptocracy and incompetence are a important factor, but I'm not sure it's the only one. There's a correlation between corruption indices and low GDP but I'm not sure it's causal. For example the US scores only moderately in corruption index terms, but does quite well in GDP terms. Arguably GDP growth rates are a better measure, in which case there's possibly a inverse correlation.
For example China, India and Malaysia have grown quite substantially are not particularly transparent, but they are alike in their resistance to dollarization. On the other hand Ecuador and El Salvador are examples of countries that have fully embraced dollarization with less than great outcomes. There are examples in the middle as well, but there is not a clear trend that it's necessarily a change for the better of the country and it's citizens.
To me it seems like a continuation of the IMF's dollarization as described by Joseph Stiglitz in 'Globalization and its discontents', in terms of mechanisms and effects on recipient countries. From this perspective it's less like transferring power from kleptocrats to the people, and more like choosing kleptocrats that are offering a better deal.
I don't think corruption indices do a great job of measuring kleptocracy. The PRC's national government, for example, has clearly prioritized enriching the general population through economic development and reducing poverty over lining their own pockets, despite not being transparent or accountable. The indices do provide some information; extremely kleptocratic countries like Venezuela, Eritrea, Yemen, and Nicaragua reliably come out on the bottom of the CPI. But the most damaging effects of kleptocracy are very subtle.
I do agree that dollarization hasn't been resoundingly successful, and that does undermine my thesis somewhat. I agree that cryptocurrencies are like super-dollarization: not only do they remove domestic government control of monetary policy, they remove or weaken domestic government control of and visibility into capital flows, banking services such as savings and lending, and payments. If that would be great, you'd expect dollarization to at least be good. And it isn't clear that it has been. It hasn't been obviously disastrous either—you can make credible arguments that Ecuador or El Salvador would be either better off or worse off without it—but it hasn't been obviously beneficial.
I think "choosing kleptocrats that are offering a better deal" is a good description of dollarization and, for example, Tether, USDC, or CBDCs. But, as a description of Bitcoin and Ethereal, it's comprehensively incorrect; there haven't ever been any credible allegations of corruption in their blockchains, unless you count Ethereal's DAO rollback. They've so far been completely immune to the kind of politically-motivated currency manipulation that is the actual official job of central banks behind fiat currencies like the dollar.
> congrats if you buy a stablecoin - you've effectively financed the US gvt at 0%.
USDC on Coinbase yields interest. The USDC people make a little spread on it, but you aren't financing the US government at 0%, you're financing them at market rates. There is counterparty risk just like with a bank. Unlike a bank, there are liquid markets onchain for other fungibles.
It doesn't cost a stablecoin anything but a bit of electricity to manufacture a "coin". The coin is valued at whatever the peg is, but it doesn't move the m2 needle or any other measure of circulation, until they purchase a treasury (or whatever they claim is backing). How much did it cost mr stablecoin to do all that? And you better believe the US Gov NEEDS this to happen.
Russia's take on the system is correct and we're seeing ASIANs and BRICS run away as fast as possible from $.
Ways out include total protectionism/mercantilism or war.
Gold is parabolic now. 10k by March is completely doable.
US govt is financed at whatever rate the stable-coin issuer finances at, which is likely a mixture of T-bills, fed overnight interest rates (via bank accounts), and other assets.
Having access to USD is still a lot better than whatever local currency most of these countries have. All those without any real central bank independence (though FED independence has become more questionable in the US as well).
...fleecing the poor worldwide...stablecoins don't change much in this
Just Devil's Advocate, but isn't that a reason not to use stablecoins? I mean, I can participate in the fleecing of the poor without changing anything at all apparently.
I don't know what the effect is called, but suddenly some unrest in some country or inflation in another calls for creating a whole new money system. It seems unreasonable and I'm a bit suspicious of where it comes from.
"Usually" in the countries that need it. The problem with the 102 countries with less inflation is that some years it may be less, but other much more.
IIRC in hindsight at the beginning of 2024 the best was to exchange all your saved dollars to pesos, invest them in bonds or the bank, and exchange them for dollars at the end of the year. Probably you can get a 20% yoy increase. But there was a risk or many unexpected problems that would let you with a lot of monopoly money that is worth only a 50% of the initial value... So the safe option was to keep your savings in dollars.
Euros are another safe option. Pounds are very difficult to exchange. The money of nearby countries is sometimes better, but they may have unexpected surprises too.
> I don't know what the effect is called, but suddenly some unrest in some country or inflation in another calls for creating a whole new money system. It seems unreasonable and I'm a bit suspicious of where it comes from.
This is the worry of globally-available USD stablecoins.
By swapping the volatility from crypto to lower USD volatility, they effectively create a funnel from riskier currencies into dollars.
Which is the same state that previously existed... except now facilitated by the crypto industry's global accessibility/UX and with less international regulation.
Blessing USD stablecoins at the US federal level was a smart move (from the US-perspective) as it creates a much bigger demand for dollars, and if the US didn't do it then China or OPEC would have eventually gotten around to it as an end-run around dollar hegemony.
Winners:
- Crypto industry (more volume to skim)
- US Treasury (more demand for debt)
Losers:
- Countries with less-stable currencies (lose further control of monetary policy)
- China / OPEC (miss opportunity to push dedollarization further)
TBD:
- Money laundering (once volume grows, KYC and traceability will follow)
Oh yeah, if you get a USD savings account from major nationwide banks you'll be getting exciting interest rates of up to 0.02% [1], assuming you have a 'relationship bonus'. BofA gets up to 0.04% [2], with the right tiers.
> congrats if you buy a stablecoin - you've effectively financed the US gvt at 0%.
As MMT teaches us, a government that issues its own currency does not need to borrow to finance itself, as it can create the money it needs, though it may still issue debt for other reasons.
I mean if the US gov moderately lowers the amount of debt it issues (and starts printing more to cover the difference), inflation will go way up, which seems pretty bad.
The total stablecoin marketcap is not that high relative to US debt, and open question whether they're actually buying all the treasuries they claim. Tether has never been audited.
> The GENIUS Act requires permitted payment stablecoin issuers to maintain reserves backing outstanding payment stablecoins on at least a one-to-one basis, and provides that reserves may only consist of certain specified assets, including US dollars, federal reserve notes, funds held at certain insured or regulated depository institutions, certain short-term Treasuries and Treasury-backed reverse repurchase agreements, and money market funds.
> In addition, the GENIUS Act requires stablecoin issuers to provide monthly public reporting as to the composition of their reserve portfolios on their website, and requires larger issuers (with more than $50 billion in consolidated total outstanding issuance) to publish annual audited financial statements. These monthly reports must be examined by a registered public accounting firm, and the CEO and CFO of a permitted payment stablecoin issuer must certify the accuracy of these reports to the primary federal payment stablecoin regulator or state payment stablecoin regulator, as applicable.
With regard to Tether none of this is applicable as they aren't compliant with the GENIUS Act. They are in fact attempting to launch a totally separate stablecoin to try to get some of that market: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Right, and who is looking at it anyways? Let's not kid ourselves, noone at the SEC will be enforcing "genius" act. Does anyone realistically think otherwise?
If it really is the goal to increase treasuries demand by means of stablecoins, then I would expect them to enforce this. If the stablecoins aren't really buying the assets then they do nothing for demand.
If another goal is to enrich the Trump family, then the SEC could forgo enforcement on the World Liberty Financial stablecoin. But they could still enforce the act for everyone else.
Increasing demand for treasuries, thus keeping interest rates down, also directly benefits Trump because he's bought at least $100 million in bonds since becoming president.
Stable coins can print anytime they want, there's no one at the SEC that will regulate it in this admin. As a matter of fact it's pretty well accepted in some circles, especially on subreddits, that Tether did exactly that, printed usdt, purchased btc at effectively 0 cost basis, inflating bitcoin prices by decreasing supply and then turned around and purchased treasuries. Cantor Fitzgerald ran that for them.
Further, stable coins / crypto are almost certainly being used to slop up as much liquidity as possible and has essentially so far pulled 4 trillion out of circulation. If not for that sleight of hand trick, hyperinflation, at least in the USA, would have already happened. Probably still will as there's only so much can kicking that can occur. I know of 30 year olds that literally live in mom's basement and dump nearly all of their just above minimum wage checks straight into Robinhood to blindly purchase crypto. Will forever beat inflation is the mentality.
Sure looks like there's going to be lots of pain for poor and middle class people in the next 5 years.
Wake me when eBay accepts BTC in exchange for silver dollars or even collector coins. They're still afraid to do the very hard thing and challenge the status quo on an even playing field.
The current administration is fully embracing crypto - the Trump family is reaping significant benefits. Hence, all the banks are getting into all the action as well.
Is this a legitimate alternative domain name for PayPal, or is it a parody or phishing site? It's not paypal.com.
Apparently it's legit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45250319
It’s so dumb because they are training everyone to be phished by scammers.
I was learning about cold email marketing earlier this year, and it's all about learning to be a spammer:
- Registering lots of domains (launchmyapp.com, trymyapp.com, myapp.info, gomyapp.biz, etc.)
- setting up a limited number of mailboxes per domain
- warming email accounts up for 2 weeks by signing up for a service that sends to and receive messages from your accounts
- setting up a meta inbox to track messages sent and received across all of your accounts
Now pretty much every domain that isn't myapp.com looks like a spammer's domain to me.
> cold email marketing earlier this year, and it's all about learning to be a spammer
You sound surprised. What's the difference between "cold email marketing" and "spamming"?
Cold email marketing can be highly targeted. Like, reaching out to your 5 potential customers and telling them about your service in terms of their specific context.
Spamming is not that.
You're right, although I think I'd just call that sending a few emails. Cold email marketing as a practice includes learning how to avoid spam filters and avoiding being detected, and it's unapologetically spammy.
One term ist slightly longer
They do the same with emails. I've got emails from them with links to paypal-communication.com. It's stupid.
Related: https://dev.to/phalkmin/comment/30pjg
I once got an email from PayPal where it claimed that I had been double-charged on my PayPal account, and they also misspelled my first name. It was a legit email, but it sure as shit didn't look like it.
Nice of them to cause confusion to make phoning easier. No, corp.paypal.com/news or PayPal.com/corp/newsroom etc weren’t a good idea. I’d love to hear how decisions like this get made.
This approach (using a separate domain for content that isn't part of their service itself) has security advantages-- for example, this way a compromise of their news site CMS can't expose users' PayPal session tokens.
It's decently common for websites to do this-- this is the same reason why Github Pages is hosted at github.io rather than github.com, and why static blobs are at githubusercontent.com. Those have a somewhat different threat model than PayPal's news site (hopefully PayPal isn't letting any random person add news stories...), but the premise is the same: if the thing does not need authentication tokens for the main service, make it so that it's impossible for it to get them.
(You could get some of the same effect by scoping your cookies to a specific subdomain rather than allowing them to apply to all subdomains, but (1) that's not always how you want to structure your site, and (2) it's really easy to mess up and inadvertently scope a cookie too broadly (or for the browser to misbehave and send to subdomains anyways, which was the default behavior of one very prominent browser for a really long time). Using a different domain entirely sidesteps all of this completely.)
Maybe I'm missing something but you can't separate you're session and authentication with a different subdomain? Eg. My session on corp.paypal.com would be locked down to solely corp.paypal.com.
From a practical sense, what different does a subdomain and a dedicated domain offer if you're managing your certs correctly?
You can, but a lot of people lack the discipline to do so correctly. I'd prefer them to use corp.paypal.com, but as a security guy it's easier to just get them a separate domain and let them have their less-secured stuff completely isolated.
You can, but is difficult and prone to errors. Separate domains solve the root cause of the issue. The alternative is an entry on the public suffix list.
Which would not be easy to get, considering PayPal is not running a public suffix.
you can request entries on it, the list is not just for TLDs
Yes, but the list is for public suffixes, i.e. domains under which users can get their own subdomains.
From my point of view, a possible compromise of their news site CMS sees like a much less serious threat than phishing, so this seems like a bad tradeoff. If you're worried that cookie scoping will get broken, maybe you could have the news site CMS raise an alert if it sees PayPal-session-token cookie names.
This is common for corporate investor relations sites.
They serve entirely different audiences and are usually separately managed for the product sites, it’s also common for the latter to be blocked by the companies which are the target audience for the former.
I’ve always felt that we need a tool to be able to answer such a question.
My bank also uses a different hyphenated domain name on emails… another use case could be to check for legit social media profiles cause fakes are popular too and may not be discernible for regular grass touching not-so-online in 2025 individual.
Maybe we could introduce the concept of subdomains. Paypal could, for example, have a corp.paypal.com address that points to their corporate blog. I know, a bit out there, but maybe DNS2 will ship with this feature.
With subdomains, you might leak cookies accidentally or maliciously to the root domain. They are not as separated as real domains are.
Then don't put anything on the root domain and use www.paypal.com for the main operations. corp.paypal.com's cookies are separated from www.paypal.com's.
But paypal.com's cookies are shared with corp.paypal.com and, depending on headers and fields, possibly vice versa.
My browser lists 8 .paypal.com cookies and 2 www.paypal.com cookies when I visit www.paypal.com. Those cookies are shared with https://fastlane.paypal.com/ (some random subdomain I found online).
They can separate those cookies out, of course, but they don't need to if they use separate domains and the cheapest work is work that doesn't need doing.
They also seem to own paypal.ai which mcp.paypal.com redirects to the docs of it could also just be a branding thing.
www.paypal.com can create cookie for paypal.com and that cookie will be sent for corp.paypal.com requests. And vice-versa, of course.
EV Certs used to do exactly that for me, that is until browser stopped make the visuals of it special. Don't think it would be even viable today given the short expiry (which is a good thing) of TLS certs necessary for browser
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Validation_Certificat...
You can still do all the checks you need, they're right there in the connection properties. This website is OV-certified (not EV) to PayPal, Inc. in San Jose by DigiCert Inc.
You do need to know what US state PayPal is registered in for them to work, of course, as proven by https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/12/nope-... during the time EV certificates were still considered special.
I don't see why EV wouldn't be viable. ACME can work with any certificate. A certificate authority can just sign new certificates every week at the request of an authenticated ACME client. The biggest issue with this workflow is the CA's billing flow optimised for the "pay once, hand over a file once" workflow.
I talked about introducing a notability criteria in the US, and other jurisdictions where duplicate registrations are possible. The Chrome people weren't interested.
Shouldn't be an issue to deliver two certificates an short lived one for TLS, an long lived one for the identity
WHOIS used to be semi useful, though most records tend to be redacted for the average user now.
`dig` on DNS also, if it resolves to the same IP as paypal for example, that adds confidence. Though again, nowadays less useful due to a lot of things being behind Cloudflare.
I'm both surprised they didn't already, and am more surprised people are still willing to even use PayPal at this point.
I've had a PP merchant account for well over a decade, to sell a boring, non computer related gadget. I make roughly one sale per business day, with typical statistical variation. PP has been nearly 100% reliable.
Some advantages for me:
1. I don't touch your credit card or personal info. I don't want to know those things. I don't want to be responsible for keeping them secure.
2. Integration with the post office for generating shipping labels is seamless.
3. I think people are more confident to buy something from a little known business if they feel that PP is protecting them. The increase in sales probably covers the PP fee.
4. I can run my business from a passive web page. All of the other services require me to manage some kind of server, running code, that I become responsible for maintaining. I love coding, but don't want it to be part of this business.
From reading articles and forum posts two main sources of horror stories seem to be:
1. People who just seem to be "accident prone" in terms of getting into disputes with others.
2. Selling non-physical goods, which I can only imagine has its own pitfalls that I don't know about.
To your horror stories, while I'm sure many of them do involve legitimate disputes, I stopped accepting PayPal payments about a decade ago after what they did to a friend of mine. He and his wife owned a small hotel that took payment several ways, including Paypal. They didn't have too many customers paying that way and had allowed something over $10,000 to pile up in their Paypal account over time. When they tried to withdraw it, Paypal froze their account and requested all sorts of additional verification. But even after they provided all this, Paypal refused to unfreeze the account. This dragged on for over a year. By the time they paid lawyers and brought legal proceedings, it was hardly worth it.
So, I'll use PayPal these days to pay someone with my credit card, but I'd be extremely cautious about receiving more than a small amount of money through them.
Indeed, my orders never exceed 100 bucks, and I have an automatic sweep into my bank account when it exceeds X dollars.
Might not be enough. PayPal is notorious for draining connected bank accounts in some cases.
That would be next level... do you have any links to examples?
I have my lived experience, which take it for the anecdata it is:
A few months ago, I checked an infrequently-used email address and noticed some unusual notifications about a "new user added to your PayPal account." I hadn't even remembered this was the email associated with my PayPal account - so after managing to reset my password and log back in, I managed to figure out that someone must have skimmed or brute-forced my PayPal password, set up a second account, attached their bank account to that new account, and begun draining my own bank account. By this point they'd gotten around $5,000 out of it.
Some features I noticed on the PayPal side that seemed obviously bad: PayPal sends no indication via email of these literal bank transfers, and there is a "feature" on the PayPal site where you can hide (but not, thankfully, wholesale delete) previously concluded transactions. The criminals had just hidden every one of the transfers. They also consistently used something like $499.99 as the transfer value, presumably because that amount prevents some automated level of scrutiny from kicking in.
Additional bad points: the interface for registering a complaint is in a highly counterintuitive workflow through the PayPal site, and seems almost entirely set up for people to register "normal" complaints, not fraudulent transactions.
The good side, however, was that I managed to find the right place, opened a case, and got the thing resolved and the money refunded to my bank account within 24 hours. So, excellent job, fraud resolution team at PayPal!
To tie back to the theme of this thread: my assumption is this fraud will become vastly easier after PayPal breaks (further?) with FDIC-insured fiat currency and people can just turn hacked bank accounts into BTC.
I believe that after 10k USD additional AML regulations kick in. Then there are a related class of pseudo-crimes around structuring payments to avoid the 10k threshold. Part of it may be PayPal's policies, but as I understand these things are generally to cover things on their end from regulatory risk factors.
That's just one of the headaches they deal with. Also one of the reasons for using cryptocurrencies. PayPal may be creating the worst of both worlds by combining the complexity of cryptocurrency transactions with the need to abide by byzantine regulations.
Yep 100% agreed here. I run a member management platform[1] for small clubs which generally use PP to fundraise and collect member dues.
Works perfectly well for us, we don't handle any PI or CC details and clubs can connect their PP account to our platform for their registration / event management needs.
[1] https://embolt.app
Plus the convenience for users. Don't make me fill dozens of fields on some forms every time I want to buy something.
Paypal is good as a consumer. You can buy stuff without giving random sites your card details, and paypal is willing to refund purchases if you have a legitimate issue and the seller refuses to cooperate with you.
My wife placed a large clothing order some months back, but the package got ripped in transit and we only received about a quarter of it. The seller company refused a refund because the tracking data said "delivered", even though I was able to get confirmation from USPS that the package weight in transit lost most of it's weight between two shipping centers. The fact that we placed the order through paypal ended up saving us, we were able to bring them in as a mediator and they got us a refund.
Credit cards do the same, no? You can initiate a chargeback.
After waiting on the line with support for 4 hours and going through a phishing-tastic email flow, sure. (Maybe your credit card company has a better experience, but who wants to reach the point where you find that out?). With PayPal you just push the button.
> who wants to reach the point where you find that out?
Enough people to steal 20 billion USD a year according to https://stripe.com/en-fr/resources/more/chargeback-fraud-101
My credit card company has a "dispute charge" button in the transaction history. It's one click. Sounds like you should look into a different provider.
Paypal has a bad rep from the merchants side. But for the users, it's just more convenient to link paypal email as payment method instead of others. To the consumers there is no difference between paypal, google pay, or apple pay. Paypal is more universal
A lot of the world doesn't have credit cards.
with Paypal I can link either debit or credit card, so I can choose whether or not I'm going into debt for a certain amount.
Chargebacks, at least where I live, are much harder if you paid with a debit card. Paypal refunds are just the same no matter if you used debit or credit.
I had PayPal side with a clear scammer for almost $5k. PayPal declined, and I also tried leaving negative BBB feedback which I heard can help. In the end I had to do credit card chargebacks, which thankfully succeeded.
In the real world, not in computer user world, people use what is avilable to them that works. Paypal is that.
I think it's from people who are programmed from early e-commerce days to think using their credit card online is an extreme risk, and that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way. That said, I know some small nonprofits where that's their preferred way to donate online.
> and that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way
Yes, I absolutely do think that. When I make a purchase through paypal, I am redirected to an authorization page hosted on paypal's domain. The recipient never sees my card number. I must authorize each charge. Whereas when I give my card number, the recipient can charge whatever they want, whenever they want, however much they want*
* subject to fraud protection.
This matters because sites do get hacked. The paypal horror stories you see are typically not consumer sided.
These are mostly the same features Bitcoin/Ethereum provides to senders. But the cryptocurrency transactions are nonrepudiable, which is beneficial in some contexts (a friend of mine had his laptop stolen via a PayPal chargeback, and porn sites have had lots of problems opening and keeping credit card merchant accounts) and a drawback in others (the ripped clothing shipment mentioned in a sibling comment).
And of course the main feature of cryptocurrencies is that PayPal can't freeze your account when you try to withdraw money.
> These are mostly the same features Bitcoin/Ethereum provides to senders.
Sure, as does Apple & Google pay. I'm not saying PayPal is the only way, but I am frequently faced with either paypal or credit card, and in that situation I will do paypal every single time
Right!
> that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way
this is absolutely the case for me, multiple times I had a great experience getting refunds with PayPal and multiple times I regretted not purchasing something using PayPal because getting a refund was much harder.
I now use PayPal exclusively for any online purchase > $500 precisely for this reason[1].
[1] unless it's a vendor that I know has a good return policy, such as JB HiFi.
I like to use PayPal when signing up for subscription services with recurring charges. It keeps billers that you have authorised in a nice list and you can cancel/deauthorise them directly from PayPal. No surprise charges months/years later from something you signed up for and forgot about...
Nonprofits are major targets of card testing fraud, I wonder if that is related
Only when it's the literal only option at checkout. Then it's the merchant's choice, not my problem. When possible, I'll always opt to use a different instantaneous method (e.g. iDeal or direct debit), or give the merchant my money directly and wait 3 days for the IBAN transfer to go through. Using paypal just risks the money being indefinitely frozen on either side and them taking a cut for the privilege, if it works on a particular day in the first place (no mysterious errors or infinite loading screens)
As for "the real world", there's cash and chip+PIN. Never used paypal IRL. Is that a thing in your country, did you mean that literally? If so, where are you from?
If the merchant screws you on a transaction paid via IBAN transfer, how do you get your money back?
Same as if Paypal screws me, or the store I just bought something in... you talk to them and if they don't cooperate you take it to court (small claims hopefully). So far, nobody I know has needed to take a shop to court. It's extremely rare, but yes it sure happens
If I really don't trust the seller, I can always still get some sort of insurance thing, but an X% insurance fee needn't be the default for every transaction. (Even if the % is invisible to you, then the seller updates their product's prices. The seller won't choose to eat less just to finance your transaction fees... the only way to not pay those is operate a deficit, which eventually leads to bankruptcy and loss of your warranty, which isn't a desirable situation either)
PayPal is an excellent product for consumers. The periodic horror stories that appear on this site are relatively rare and typically only affect businesses.
I do art for a very queer market and lately I've been trying to get people to pay me via Zelle, because using Paypal is putting pennies in the pocket of rich dipshits like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, who put that money into Republican candidate pockets.
Next to nobody's budged. It's all Paypal. I'm taking a class and I paid the teacher via Venmo, which is a fucking Paypal company. It's so damn entrenched. When the fuck can I take payments for furry porn via FedNow instead of giving money to these jerkwads.
Do you think that the rich dipshits that Zelle enables are significantly better? They're just responsible for an older slower form of the same abuse. We desperately need a ethical alternative, buy I think were going to have to build it ourselves.
They're not as openly shitty at least.
Crypto was supposed to be an alternative to all this but, well, look how that worked out.
It hasn't solved the problem it set out to solve. We still have to chose between untrustworthy middlemen for handling our payment infrastructure.
It gave up a decade ago. I wouldn't call that "working out".
None of my clients can pay me for my work in bitcoin without first turning real money into bitcoin, with fees involved. I can't pay my rent with bitcoin without turning it into real money, with fees involved. I can't go to the market and buy food with bitcoin. I can't see someone begging outside Walgreens and help them out with some bitcoin. Bitcoin's also volatile enough that there's a significant risk of its value dropping on the floor between the time I receive it and try to use it. It's a fine Ponzi scam but it's utterly useless for replacing USD.
Maybe you live somewhere that your landlord takes bitcoin, that's nice for you, my landlord wants USD. If you would like to fund me finding out if my landlord will actually take bitcoin if I ask nicely enough then please feel free to send a couple bitcoins to 3CzUW828J2u5wCB2xD4iE9kH8dPTokjxow.
So you admit all of the problems would disappear if everyone used it?
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It took AI until it was about 70 to be useful for the things that people initially wanted it for. Crypto is a teenager. We may yet get it there.
I would never pay for digital goods with Zelle.
It's pretty convenient when it's offered as a checkout option and it lets you avoid filling in your details yet again.
I wouldn't store any money in it though.
Major browsers have been doing that for what, 10 years?
And today I mostly see Adyen, Stripe, Klarna, Apple/Google Pay... in Europe PayPal is comically expensive.
It's still more convenient than browser auto-fill (which I also use).
Paypal is still probably the most popular "easy" checkout option in the UK, more popular than Stripe, Google pay and Amazon pay.
Maybe not more popular than Klarna, but I don't have a debt problem so I don't want to use that. Never heard of Adyen and I can't recall ever seeing Apple pay.
I used to use both PayPal and Stripe for my online business
Stripe would occasionally charge me an obscene amount of money to pay for the bank "charge back" fees
I never had this issue with PayPal; i usually get dispute cases, but they always get positively closed
My only issue with PayPal is their devise conversion fees, i'd argue their behavior there constitutes fraud.. and their UX, their web interface is painfully slow
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The whole purpose of crypto is to exchange money online like we exchange cash in person, so who wants PayPal as a middleman on a tech designed not to have a middleman? Who will use that
PayPal 20 years ago made it easy to engage in internet commerce across various world currencies. And now users of PayPal have an easy way to commerce with two more world currencies using a familiar trusted interface. Another way PayPal as the middle man helps: "Unclaimed links expire after 10 days", which sounds like it avoids the problem of accidentally sending bitcoin into the void.
I completely understand why I would want paypal as an intermediary in the unlikely case I wanted to send bitcoin to somebody. I think what makes less sense to me is why people who actually like crypto would want paypal.
I want a regulated middleman answerable to democratic legislation. Crypto people (largely) don't.
I guess this is mostly a play that crypto people won't actually care if there's a middleman if it creates some liquidity. That just seems like giving up to me.
>why people who actually like crypto would want paypal
this snippet is everything: "to PayPal, Venmo, as well a rapidly growing number of digital wallets across the world that support crypto and stablecoins"
this is effectively PayPal taking its "closed-loop" payment network, and opening it up to any wallet capable of receiving crypto/stablecoins - which is still a big deal.
your counterparty no longer has to have a PayPal account for you to pay them via PayPal - they can have any crypto wallet and get paid by you - which is in line with much of the crypto vision around global interoperability/payment acceptance/etc. you could compare to Visa/card acceptance as another global payment rail - but the difference here is closer to the difference between global card payments (easy) and global bank transfers (hard)
Is your legislation answerable to democracy? Citizens having some power in that case from outside the system could be very useful.
Easy answer: most people dont arent crypto people but may be open to accepting crypto from crypto people. Aka sending btc to friend/merchant who doesnt have any or vice versa. Crypto people are the small minority
> I think what makes less sense to me is why people who actually like crypto would want paypal.
To pump their stock.
Wait until democratic legislation in the USA starts freezing liberals' accounts.
That's the purpose of crypto, yes. As it turns out people like having trusted authority in their money movements, and so now we're watching the crypto world just re-invent the financial industry basically as a digital twin.
Just look at Tether, the darling of the stablecoin world, which is minted by a handful of institutional clients. If you squint hard enough, you can see the banks.
Corporations and businesses aren't the only middlemen in traditional finance. The federal reserve, treasury, and/or whatever settlement system (swift), clearinghouses, and networks (visa etc) exist.
As a naive consumer you might not see all the gears but the layers of complexity in traditional finance are vast compared to the bitcoin whitepaper.
I'm still amazed at how deeply this forum of supposed compsci gurus is hoodwinked by groupthink and a few "scam" headlines from info brokers.
> Tether, the darling of the stablecoin world
...huh?
For people who won't setup any wallet this can be useful. Self custody wallets are scary for some users.
What's the intersection of people who are afraid to set up their own wallet, want to use Ethereum and Bitcoin, and are happy to have PayPal as the one performing their transactions for them? Any of those might be reasonable independently, but it's hard to imagine someone fitting all three.
Quite a lot, because you're forgetting one key group - existing Paypal users who are interested in crypto but not interested enough to proactively pursue it.
"Trust PayPal with your not-wallet" oh sure.
I think the opportunity here is getting money from a bank account to an ETH or BTC wallet using "normal" means and not setting up a new account on a crypto exchange. Unless you're getting a paycheck in crypto, someone has to be a middleman.
The duality of crypto.
"Paypal is horrible. With bitcoin, you won't need Paypal anymore!"
"Paypal supports bitcoin. This is good for bitcoin."
Absolutely. Cryptocurrency should make payment middlemen obsolete. PayPal should get laughed out of the building here. It's incredible that this has any legs at all. This thread should be full of the names of Ethereum wallets.
MetaMask, Trezor, MEW, Status
You might still want an mediator, sure I can pay you directly on chain but what if you don't even ship my goods? I'm not going to court over an 5$ item but I don't mind engaging PayPal support.
I imagine that most people who use cryptocurrency for payment at all will still need to convert it to something else sometimes. Attempting to use it for everything would be pretty hardcore.
>so who wants PayPal as a middleman
The governments that are threatened by private citizens transacting outside their purview obviously.
Decentralized Finance!
> The whole purpose of crypto is to exchange money online like we exchange cash in person
No, the whole purpose of crypto is to provide an unregulated financial playground for speculation and scams. As they say, "the purpose of a system is what it does".
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Scammers, who will need to exit the scheme at some point, while laundering gains in the process. Good thing techbros at PayPal will help with that minor nuisance :)
With their history of freezing clients funds, no thanks PayPal.
Worst of both worlds!
Holding money (or crypto) in PayPal is a terrible idea. They are not a bank, they do not abide by banking regulations. They can lock you out of your account and your money at any time and leave you going in circles with their offshore support.
Yes, they are somewhat of a necessary evil if you do any online peer-to-peer buying/selling, since they are the only money transfer service that provides some level of "buyer protection", but you want to do the bare minimum with PayPal to avoid unnecessary risk.
Link one bank account (not your primary) to PayPal to receive money, and transfer received money immediately. Link one credit card for purchases. Nothing else. Do not link debit cards, do not sign up for their "balance account" where money is held in PayPal (no matter how hard they push it with UI dark patterns in their app), do not sign up for their crypto account.
If you link your bank, and approve direct debit (it’s just a popup with yes/later - very risky move), they will eventually withdraw from it when there are any issues. And most likely you’ll lose more disputes when your bank is linked - but no proof of this so take it with a grain of salt.
Fortunately I can review direct debit consents and revoke them via my bank's web app UI.
I've seen such features on business accounts (Wells Fargo ACH Fraud Filter, JPMorgan ACH Debit Block, etc).
What bank allows that on a consumer account?
Probably every EU bank: https://docs.adyen.com/risk-management/chargeback-guidelines...
Mercury's personal banking product allows you to reject ACH transactions before they clear. They also allow you to generate virtual account numbers, so you can easily cut off an entity without having to change your main account number. Unfortunately Mercury charges a monthly fee.
That's pretty cool! I didn't know about that.
For anyone curious, the fee is $240/yr.
I used Mercury when I had an LLC and had a great experience. It feels like they're the only bank that's not 10 years behind in technology. I've never tried their personal banking, but the ACH denial power makes me a lot more curious.
SEPA Direct Debit (the standard way to debit accounts within the SEPA, i.e. roughly "Europe/Eurozone") gives you 8 weeks to revert a debit that you disagree with. Whether a bank exposes this in the UI or not depends on the bank.
https://monzo.com/help/payments-getting-started/cancel-direc...
Every bank in Germany allows you to dispute transactions done with Debits.
And they make it as difficult and hidden as possible. At the same time they advertise to "support sepa now" as if it's something new while by law they have to process such transactions within two hours for over 10 years now.
At ING it's just a button click. It's directly next to the transaction on their app.
ING is Dutch, not German.
There's also ING in Germany. They are super famous.
They are not called Ing Diba anymore.
I use mbank.pl (Poland, EU regulations apply). What do consumers do if they have accounts in banks which don't have this feature in case they want to revoke DD consent?
Even if that's the case, why even put yourself in that position in the first place?
Plus they have a history of freezing people’s money for months on end for flimsy reasons.
Staring at a “you can no longer do business with PayPal” email myself. No clue what I did, no recourse, now locked out of a fuckton of global marketplaces and peer to peer transactions that uniquely only work on a platform like PayPal.
I had one of these. My account ended up eventually being reinstated. No reason was given for the initial account freeze or reinstating.
One thing I did - in response to them saying I could no longer do business, I told them that they also could no longer do business with me, requested a copy of all of the user data they had on me under CCPA, and told them to then delete all of my personal information. They did not actually comply and I didn't pursue. I probably should, though.
you should get a lawyer and try to sue in small claims court, it is the fastest path vs. anything they will surface to you. even by saying this I put myself at risk but they are truly a demonic organization
s/demonic/pernicious
As others have pointed out, legal is fastest approach with them.
If only there was a technology which fixes this...
It would have to handle chargebacks and resolve disputes.
Those are functions of a marketplace, a low-cost pseudo-legal system so that you hopefully avoid using a state's costly and slow legal system. But if marketplaces also own the medium of exchange, e.g. marketplaces that issue tokens and only allow transacting in tokens (Paypal behind the scenes), their economic incentive is not to resolve disputes, but to create as many barriers as possible to converting tokens back into value as they can get away with, since this becomes the profit center of the business.
And, when the only medium of exchange available to consumers and merchants is through one of these tokenized marketplaces, getting locked out of marketplaces means getting locked out of doing business entirely with no recourse or alternative.
Mediums of exchange should be neutral, and self-sovereign exchange has to be an option in order for marketplaces to offer competitive marketplace services, else they just abuse their monopoly on medium of exchange.
It's pretty nice, e.g. that when I buy a leash, it doesn't also have to walk the dog. Maybe for some, it's ideal to have someone else walk the dog, and the dog walker can even insist on bringing their own leash, but having the option of buying my own leash, putting it on my dog, and walking it myself means I don't need anyone's permission to own a dog, (not a big deal in the case of dog-walkers since there are so many) and substantially lowers the premium that dog-walkers can command in the marketplace for their services.
The problem is that there are two parties in any transaction, and power users/casual users swayed by marketing will be the ones that will choose the medium on which the transaction will take place.
So while you may want a self-sovereign exchange, your counterparty doesn't give a shit about your preferences, or is actively happy with using PayPal (Because their dispute resolution is better biased towards their side of the transaction, or because they just never gave it a second thought.)
One can argue about the difficulty of overcoming network effects to make mediums of exchange viable until the cows come home but that's orthogonal to the issue GP raised and ultimately impossible to predict.
As a counterpoint to the rhetorical impossibility of a challenger overcoming an incumbent (in almost all subjects this is true, despite challengers in the world regularly overcoming incumbents), exchange rates indicate markets are positive about the network effect threshold being overcome, since if it is impossible to overcome, the value of all cryptocurrencies combined is approximately 0.
"If only there was a technology which fixes this..."
"Those are functions of a marketplace"
Then it seems you should have said "If only there was a technology and a marketplace which fixes this..."
And no, it doesn't exist because handling disputes is a hard problem. It's the actual moat of PayPal (and credit card companies) and the reason why they can get away with their crappy behaviour.
The comment I responded to said:
> No clue what I did, no recourse, now locked out of a fuckton of global marketplaces and peer to peer transactions that uniquely only work on a platform like PayPal.
I am not saying there is a single technology that is completely at parity without paypal without the problems, I'm saying that there is a technology which can give you access to global marketplaces and peer-to-peer transacting if you are locked out of the paypal/CC system.
And the payment processors don't have a moat in their sophistication in dispute resolution. This is a hard problem, but a solvable one if you have lots of liquidity: e.g Amazon, AliExpress. Their moat is having lots of liquidity, regulatory capture, and network effects.
That's what escrow is for?
Places like swapd that operate on crypto escrow every transaction to lessen these crypto problems.
If this happens to you, I imagine it is grounds for legal action?
In europe, Paypal Sarl is a bank subject to bank regulations
Good point. I should have clarified that I'm referring specifically to PayPal in the US, which themselves state that "PayPal is not a bank, does not take deposits and is not FDIC insured".
https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/paypal/program-banks-tnc
But they don’t offer deposit guarantee. Banks usually have to in the EU
It isn’t subject to the EU statutory deposit insurance, however.
Edit: The above means that deposits on your PayPal account aren’t insured, different from regular bank accounts in the EU. This is a frequently emphasized caveat regarding the use of PayPal as a bank account in the EU.
Is that an issue if you don't plan to "store" money in PayPal but only use it for payments?
You'd be surprised. A lot of sellers don't "cash out" from paypal all that often, letting tens of thousands pile up. (And inevitably, some of them get hit with arbitrary account closures and have that money seized)
In that case it isn’t, but this thread is specifically about holding money in PayPal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45250598
My point is that one doesn’t get all the protections normally taken for granted for EU bank accounts.
The question is if a EU bank has to provide deposit insurance but PayPal does not how can PayPal be a bank.
PayPal might be a bank but maybe PayPal accounts aren't bank accounts
I haven’t researched the details, but it doesn’t work that way, because they aren’t providing regular bank accounts.
> They are not a bank, they do not abide by banking regulations.
"In 2008, PayPal Europe was granted a Luxembourg banking license, which, under European Union (EU) law, allows it to conduct banking business throughout the EU.[173] It is therefore regulated as a bank by Luxembourg's banking supervisory authority" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Regulation
You're not wrong that they don't act like an honest bank, or abides by any sort of ethics about whose money it really is that they're holding onto... but know that they are regulated in case that ever helps you!
This is all true, but are they actually any worse than any other crypto exchange? I just take it as a given that a crypto exchange can lock me out and steal my money at any time with no legal consequence, and so I try to keep as little money in them as possible. And at least PayPal is older and likely to have more senior engineers and fewer vibe coders, and thus be less likely to lose everything because of an elementary security error.
No startup can compete with PayPal's decades long track record of suspending accounts and freezing funds.
Only Stripe apparently based on the Tell HN posts I've seen
> Link one bank account (not your primary) to PayPal to receive money, and transfer received money immediately.
Costs 1.5%. Or wait a few days.[1] Plus a fee for receiving cryptocurrency. There are additional fees for buying cryptocurrencies, other than PayPal's own. And none of this is FDIC insured.
[1] https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/paypal/pp-balance-tnc?loc...
Their fees for cryptocurrency are small (between 1.5% - 2.5% depending on amounts, higher amounts have a lower fee), but they take it on both the buying and selling end. So if the amounts you're moving require a 1.8% fee, then for both buying and selling you end up with 3.6% in fees. Coinbase and most other CEXes charge this and they claim part of the fee is due to instability in the price, so this fee acts as a spread they can use to not lose money.
I think they meant, initiate the transfer immediately. There's no need to pay for the "fast" transfer vs standard ACH.
Does PayPal support FedNow? Bank-to-bank transfers in under 10 seconds, for $0.045 each? Nah.
How many banks do? Not just theoretically, but practically.
Mine does supposedly but does not let me, the account holder, use FedNow. Instead I'm stuck using Zelle which I can hit the limits of just by paying a mortgage payment.
With PayPal in the UK you can do an instant transfer for free or pay extra for a two-day transfer. I don't know why the option is still there or why anyone would choose it.
I assume you can't use Crypto instead of the bank account link, you probably require both. Otherwise this might have some use as another blast radius reducer for Paypal's antics.
I switched to a hardly used checking account for paypal after they held $20 hostage for a couple months after selling an old video card on ebay. I'd heard some one say their bank account had become frozen by paypal during a dispute and that event reminded me of it enough to get some separation.
Just treat it as your checking account; for anything substantial, move it to the self-custody
> They are not a bank, they do not abide by banking regulations.
In the US, this is true with some important caveats.
"If you have opened a PayPal Debit Card Mastercard® account, enrolled in Direct Deposit, or bought or received cryptocurrency with your personal PayPal Balance account, we will place your U.S. dollar PayPal Balance funds at one or more Program Banks. Any other balance funds and all cryptocurrencies are not held in FDIC insured bank deposits. Cryptocurrencies may lose value." [1]
[1]: https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/paypal/program-banks-tnc
> They can lock you out of your account and your money at any time and leave you going in circles
All very true, but banks are doing exactly the same thing, all while following banking regulation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38150606
What’s odd is that Germans LOVE using PayPal. The pseudo banking system that PayPal offers is apparently light years ahead of traditional banking in Deutscheland.
The banking system is fine. It’s just that credit card use is not very widespread in Germany. PayPal (linked to bank accounts) is then fairly convenient online.
It was faster until a few days ago.
Now instant payments using SEPA are mandatory and rolled out everywhere.
seriously. given how sellers and creators have had their accounts locked and sometimes not gotten their crap back. it would be unwise. if your going to buy crypto on paypal make sure they let you forward it to your own wallet.
What's the problem with debit cards?
Debit cards generally have less recourse for fraudulent transactions compared to credit.
I always keep a few bucks on the PayPal card to forget about until the next time I don't have my card and I'm like, "oh shit I have enough for a beer on this bastard" and it's like a mini-Christmas.
The thing that gets me is the 40% cash back on Walmart purchases up to 500$. It's such an incredible incentive it has to be shady af. Are the Rand oligarchs trying to buy out the poor? We'll never know because poor people don't have PayPal accounts.
"A something-or-another big enough to give you everything you want is a something-or-another big enough to take from you everything you have." -Voltaire
Why does their support being "offshore" matter at all? If they wanted to provide good, user-friendly customer support, they would, regardless of where the reps are?
> If they wanted to provide good, user-friendly customer support, they would
Has this been your experience with PayPal?
They marked my account as hacked (it wasn't), and the first two submissions of a photo of my driver's license from my phone were rejected... not until the third time after calling the third operator was like.. yep, that's a driver's license with your name on it.
That's not even close to the worst stories I've heard... like running Rippa through the ringer.
Offshore support is unloved and powerless. They can't and won't fix any issue. They exist to fulfill the obligation to provide support in the cheapest form possible.
Fair enough, maybe "outsourced" would be a better way to put it. Basically they want support to cost them as little as possible and do not particularly care whether it actually offers any useful help to customers.
More specifically, their support cannot actually do anything to resolve problems. They read off what their computer screen is telling them. They can't take any actions to fix things.
Because it's offshore so it would be cheap, which already provides a metric that is being optimized.
I thought the whole point of a decentralised ledger was not needing companies like PayPal…
This point is conveniently missing. There's simply more money to be made! Now get out of here with your nonsense ideas of decentralizing money. It's bad for business.
The point of cash is that it represents transferrable value that doesn't require an intermediary between you and the person you're transacting with. And yet, banks and credit card companies exist and deal with cash. This does not mean that cash is a useless concept.
Okay and the key difference between crypto and cash/credit/whatever is supposedly that it is decentralized. Or have we abandoned that false premise now?
Cash has centralized distribution, but it's very decentralized in use. That's what makes it useful. However, sometimes people might choose to use a centralized service provider (like a bank, or a credit card company) because it's useful. They still have the option of using cash. What's important isn't that every single transaction happens in a fully-decentralized way: it's that decentralized transactions remain an option. That means that banks and credit card companies have to compete with cash, and that they can never have full control of your financial life.
The same is true of cryptocurrency. It's not a problem that centralized service providers exist. If they stop providing useful services, people can just take their cryptocurrency and go home.
That credit cards exist didn't mean cash stopped existing. Likewise, just because CEXes and L2s exist doesn't mean L1 cryptocurrency doesn't exist. You can still grab a non-custodial wallet and still manage your own crypto. Today Coinbase has a debit card that can sell crypto at FMV, apply their spread (1.88% I think?), and immediately use that to pay off USD denominated bills. So if your crypto is in your wallet you can just send your Coinbase wallet the funds for the purchase and then swipe your debit card to pay.
Coinbase's spread isn't the worst thing to pay for the service of having a debit card and auto-selling, but if you also buy crypto using Coinbase, they double-dip on the fee.
That is the point! You don't need companies like Paypal... Companies often offer services that are "not needed" because people like convenience, ease of use, etc.
You don't need Paypal to use Bitcoin, but there's nothing in the spec that prohibits it.
I think their point is that in the end, most people want convenience. That convenience requires centralization, which eliminates a lot of the supposed benefits that something like cryptocurrencies were promoted with. We've already seen it play out very poorly several times in crypto already.
This adds convenience because I can instantly send ETH from Robinhood to PayPal to Coinbase to my Ledger, without dealing with banking rails or creating a taxable event.
I don't think convenience requires centralization. Centralization makes some things easier and other things impossible, and things in both of those categories can be useful for convenience. BitTorrent, the WWW, and VisiCalc on the Apple ][ are three examples of distributed or decentralized systems that were much more convenient to use than their centralized predecessors.
The power of not needing companies like PayPal does not preclude them from offering services that ease its use.
The benefit comes from having the option to go elsewhere. A business that cannot lock you in is more likely to try to retain your custom by offering a good service.
I thought the point was more that you can't be required to use companies like PayPal in order to use the underlying technology.
PayPal has been slowly circling the drain for years, grasping at highly questionable Hail Mary's like crypto coins.
They earned $1.2 billion last quarter. That drain must be in a very nice part of town.
It's the same drain that Meta's been circling, the one that exists in HN commenters' minds.
The Internet is decentralized but most of us use ISPs to connect to it. Most of can't access the Internet without these companies.
In practice, the word "decentralized" just speaks to whether anyone can join in the protocol if they want. But it doesn't mean the protocol is easy to implement.
Or Coinbase, or Cash App, or Venmo, or any of the other random places you can buy cryptocurrency. If it's not on the blockchain, it's not cryptocurrency; it's just an IOU until you withdraw to a private wallet.
Which can still be useful. Just like banks used to issue "IOUs" in exchange for depositing your gold coins, so that it was easier and safer to transfer small amounts.
It's not that simple, there's a niuance there - tradeoffs are to to be made if we want to have a decentralized system; it will not scale to the whole planet, if running a node is accessible; and it must be so, otherwise it's not decentralized.
The reality is, we will have a mix of custodian - through third-party - and self-sovereign usage; depending on the context and user's skill
There is a beautiful quote about this that captures an essential process within our economic system.
> Under capitalism necessities become luxuries, while luxuries become false necessities. Umair Haque
better call up the Bitcoin CEO and Vitalik to voice your complaints that a third party you don't have to use at all is using your favorite network
It’s a grift, that’s why. Pedophile protector administration has silently dropped all of the regulatory lawsuits related to digital currency. There is minimal or no oversight right now. The pedophile in chief and family himself have also rug pulled their own tokens and not many people are caring.
I used to work at a few big banks, and because of the "friendly" nature of digital currencies. The traditional banking entities are trying to get in on the grift while they can.
Yeah, but Bitcoins ledger is shit.
I would recommend the best recovery team available to anyone who has been a victim of scam like i was a few weeks ago. I was able to recover my fund that i got scammed of, $112k in total. All thanks to Darek Recovery Service, you can contact them via email;( recoverydarek @ gmail. com ) They are very reliable and trust worthy.
real question because i don't know, what do people actually buy with crypto other than other money or illegal stuff? i presume paypal won't be happy with you buying/selling drugs with it
There are legit uses that enterprise companies are using today, but they are few and far between in comparison to day trading/speculation/etc. For example, moving money from different currencies usually requires foreign exchange fees which can be hefty - whereas if you buy some stablecoin in a local currency and then sell that stablecoin in the currency you want to have in your bank account, you pay tiny transaction costs and thats it. This is a real problem for companies who have operations in tons of countries, and have to manage bank accounts and local entities in all of those countries. Imagine reducing your profit by 1-2% just because you want your profits in ireland instead of mexico. Stablecoins make that into <0.5%, which is many millions.
https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/stripe-bridge-acquisiti... has some examples
To answer your question, I hardly buy anything with crypto because there's barely support... Hopefully this is a catalyst for change.
I feel like this is the wrong question to ask. Instead try "why would someone purchase with crypto over fiat?". I prefer to use crypto for international online purchases because the transaction and conversion fees from my native currency are way too high. With crypto it's a one off deposit fee and then gas is trivial these days.
It’s strange because I buy everything with Bitcoin already. Literally. Even my kids Robux!
I have a virtual crypto card and gave it to my daughter and she added it to the Google wallet on her android. She uses it anywhere to buy anything. My bank didn't want to open bank account to minor. Everything was set up in 10 minutes. I transfer to her some random coins and it just works.
I also use it myself as a backup abroad when my regular bank foreign account doesn't work for any reason.
I got the card in the middle of the night in 10 minutes.
I think all that is simply awesome.
Used everywhere to buy everything? Some serious evidence is required to support this claim. I bet she can't even buy candy at your neighbourhood convenience store.
Dude...
I can buy anything anywhere. If it supports regular cards, it supports crypto card.
My first test was to buy candy btw in the local corner shop in the middle of nowhere.
It is really funny how people on HN can be so stubborn.
Fwiw you won't find a supermarket in this country that accepts buying things on credit, much less a local candy store. If that worked for you, it's very specific to wherever you live
I used it in Serbia, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Montenegro, Austria... not sure what kind of country you're talking about :)
Huh, okay, I didn't know buying things constantly on credit was common in Europe. Certainly not around Netherlands/Germany (so Austria seems odd, they generally share a culture). The only one of these countries I've been to is Italy but I was young enough that it was probably all cash then
It's a debit card.
Not sure what you mean. Nobody buys anything with cache anymore. I keep some cache in my car for bazaar and similar stuff, but all but few stores accept cards everywhere in EU I go. The convenience of having all your cards on a phone is unparalleled.
Ooh! Somehow I thought you meant credit card. No, indeed, normal cards are normal cards. Misunderstanding is entirely on my side
I think there's some confusion here, you can use a credit card and have it processed on the back-end as a debit transaction, for a consumer the distinction is almost unnoticed.
This differs greatly according to global region. Germany from what I've observed is an outlying for noticing the distinction (mostly because they suffered from very high credit card surcharges for decades vs the rest of the world).
Side note, but you can say you have a debit card, then pay with a credit card and usually it will go through. Or vise versa. No idea why they make the distinction, maybe the fees are different but the cashier usually can’t tell.
Is it a Visa or Mastercard then?
Venmo and Coinbase also offer debit cards (Venmo -> Mastercard, Coinbase -> Visa) that work for this purpose. Like OP says it's trivial to get (just open the app, enable the Debit Card feature, read the disclosures (pretty standard stuff but do read them), then add to Google Wallet.)
https://www.bybit.com/en/cards
You are welcome.
So it is indeed a Mastercard, plus some extra fees:
The fees are more than acceptable for the service.
Wirex is quite nice, though the FX fees are also a bit steep. But at least you get $200/mo ATM withdrawals for free!
https://wirexapp.com/help/article/wirex-fees-1379
https://wirexapp.com/card, or affiliate link: https://ale.sh/r/wirex
Your bank does not offer custodial or joint accounts?
I don't want custodial or joint accounts. Then my kids call me to ask about stuff on their accounts. I want them to have their own thing. I want total separation of my own accounts from anything else in the world, including my family.
These of accounts do have read access so you can send all your childrens' phone calls straight to voicemail. :)
Also, you can have complete separation if your accounts are at Bank A, and the dependents are at Bank B.
I'm not trying to convince you, but moreso keep others from making parenting harder than it already is.
You are making it waaay harder than it is :)
I got this in 10 minutes and have 0 maintenance, and you want me to have account at bank A and B which can take days, if not weeks, along with the constant management. I have a life, you know.
Nah, I am gonna keep using a crypto card while my neighbor still waits for a card of the local bank 3 months later, after a tone of back&forth.
None of what you said is true in the US.
How do you get a virtual crypto card?
Cross border money transfer is one reason. People in 3rd world countries don't want to hold their money in the country. Many want to get paid by stablecoins.
I agree the AML laws of old are out of date for the current state of things. More and more workers in developing countries are doing remote work, and AML is unfortunately unfairly affecting this demographic (I used to be part of that demographic).
But enabling everyone to skirt around it completely is not a good outcome IMO.
They aren't old. They were passed this century—because, in democratic countries, they were politically radioactive until the 9/11 attacks allowed the Intelligence Community to get its wishlist passed into law.
Enabling everyone to skirt around it completely would be in effect a return to the state of affairs that prevailed throughout the entire 20th century, and that would probably be a good tradeoff.
Increased privacy and independence from a government will always benefit both good and bad actors unfortunately.
Back when I carried it I would pay all my bills in it. Paid for most of my wedding tbh.
That said, I think Australia might be uniquely blessed by Livingroomofsatoshi. It basically bridges crypto to all our other payment streams.
Oh and grey market stuff all the time. Drugs that arent like, go to jail illegal but ship internationally direct from india. That sort of stuff.
>Drugs that arent like, go to jail illegal but ship internationally direct
I was so angry when Vision Direct lost the ability to ship prescripting contact lenses to US customers — my prescription hasn't changed in two decades! The only crime being committed here is the cost of my annual examination.
A long time ago someone bought a pizza.
Most large company entries into the crypto space seem to fizzle out and disappear due to lack of use, and how annoying it is to deal with currencies which fluctuate in value between the time you've spent them and the time the transaction is approved (I understand there are lightning networks), and then there's the issue with maintaining wallets.
It really just adds nothing but extra complexity to the existing electronic payment methods. And takes away tons of things like regulators, regulations, consumer protections, strong case law.
Given that I basically never use PayPal anymore I'm thinking this might be a desperate attempt to find any new market to grow in.
There's plenty of alternatives these days so now I just use the direct credit card option on most sites.
Yea Paypal seems to have the _most_ friction in my experience. That being said, they bought Venmo in 2013 so I'm still using 'em.
Although, they're pretty late to the game. Company must not be integrated super tightly since Venmo's had some crypto support for years now.
https://www.bitrefill.com/
video games with https://www.kinguin.net/
there's lots of places to spend crypto if you look, and I don't feel like needing to associate my identity just to purchase digital goods. Crypto facilitates that. People forget it's even an option.
The only use-case I've heard for cryptocurrencies that doesn't just sound like a get-rich-quick-speculative-betting-scam is providing financial services to the un-banked.
Russians abroad use crypto to work around sanctions.
I know quite some Russian companies using bitcoins t to trade with western companies. For example large ad networks and bookies that operate there and pay in bitcoins. Malta, Switzerland are quite popular for these constructions.
Isn’t that illegal, I mean what those Western companies are doing?
So that does not answer the question what legit stuff businesses do.
Probably not. Most Russian companies are not subject to sanctions even in the US, but many of their banks are. And most Western companies are not in the US and consequently aren't bound by US sanctions.
However, AFAIK eight of Russia's biggest banks are still cut off from SWIFT: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWIFT_ban_against_Russian_ba...
Coinbase and Venmo offer debit cards that you can fund with crypto. Coinbase offers to auto-sell crypto assets you choose to fund it. That means you can hold money in crypto and sell it off when you want to buy something. Be cognizant of taxes, but if you're willing to hold your crypto for a year then LTCG kicks in and you're getting taxed at pretty reasonable rates.
Investment accounts on the other hand take a while for sales to settle before your funds are available as cash.
Stablecoin payments are currently a hugely growing business, mainly for B2B payments as I understand it. I think its really hard for people who have absorbed 10 years of anti-crypto groupthink from HN to digest the fact that crypto is here to stay and is finding legitimate use cases.
Stablecoin payments really are just better: - Instant settlement - Extremely cheap - Extremely reliable - Highly programmable - Built on open protocols - International
There are no traditional banking systems that offer all of these properties!
If anyone is tempted to reply with "okay but that could have been done with a database" I would really encourage that person to try to think hard about why that didn't happen.
Yeah, its amazing how much anti-crypto HN is. I decided to invest entire year in learning technology and I couldn't be happier on that decision. The entire ecosystem of mainstream coins is mind-blowing and too big to fail at this point.
I once had to go through a SWIFT certification and it was a nightmare… They make you jump through so many rings… They make you buy hardware from them (for their certification runs), their documentation is awful. Their test environment is awful (no logs, no clear error messages, etc). Sadest time of my life.
Funny thing is, most Coinbase or Kraken or Binance transactions of BTC and Ethereum are simple SQL transactions in a normal database.
An immutable ledger to put information is the best invention since sliced bread, and that can only be achieved by an underlying economic system to maintain such a ledger.
That being said, probably all crypto (except one) will go to zero very soon. Crypto is a bubble, but it doesn't mean that the underlying technology is useless.
I bought a Go board and some stones from GoGameGuru back in the day. A bitcoin was only 200-ish Euros back then. Funny to think how much that's gone up.
Those stones cost you a couple hundred thousand or something
My golf instructor accepts bitcoin and provides a 50% discount for doing so!
Are they overseas or something? Why are they willing to offer such a large discount?
Nope, in person in my city. Afraid I don't actually know why he does, but it was pretty easy for me to buy a years worth of lessons for 50% off.
Gray market stuff.
Tax evasion mostly. Tokens are used to obscure movement of assets from both governments, but then you need to safely exit into real money in the recipient country, and preferably make them all clean and legal. Now you need to use some P2P exchanges, rely on some less reputable intermediaries, while PayPal will streamline the process.
Is this a legit PayPal domain?Sounds like a fake domain.
Once upon a time, their corporate and developer sites were x.com even, before they moved to a more professional domain and later sold that one back to Elon.
PayPal, teaching users to become phishing victims since 2019
https://www.attejuvonen.fi/paypal-sends-phishing-emails/
https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/crypto
Bitcoin trading on PayPal has been available for the past five years.
Yes, the newsroom is linked to at the bottom of paypal.com.
Someone mentioned this kind of thing in the npm breeches last week. You get desensitized to non-standard “official” urls and it makes it easier for phishers.
Aha, thanks!
https://who.is/whois/paypal-corp.com
Anyone can put anything in their WHOIS.
I could create an account, buy a domain name with a gift card, and put your username in the WHOIS.
And supply real credentials & host bestiality and CP on it.
I assume this is a trolling effort on your part?
I agree. Strange URL, bare page, and the fonts are rendering oddly for me.
OP asked if PayPal was a real company, before they edited the comment.
This post is about Paypal links. Unclear what this has to do with ETH or BTC given Paypal has had support for those for years.
I’ve happily avoided Paypal in the last .. 6 years or so. Ever since Revolut came up with disposable cards I’m much less hesitant to give my card details to someone, also PP never stopped being shady and user-hostile in the meantime.
So I’ll continue to avoid them in the next 6 years as well.
One of the reasons I don't think crypto can succeed is because people will only use it if it's convenient, which very likely means corporate involvement, which of course ultimately defeats the whole argument of being decentralized.
Corporate involvement isn't that bad as long as the user can exit to fully decentralized operation in case of abuse.
This is true!
Without convenience it will not be successful as a common currency. It does not need convenience to succeed in other ways. For example, as a store of value.
Sorry, I should have been more specific. "Succeed as a common currency" is more-so what I meant, I think the store of value argument stands.
Literally any scarce and durable good can be a store of value. A pound of Osmium is about a million bucks. So building massive server farms to store something equivalent to an inert rock is kind of uninteresting.
This is more about regulatory compliance than technical capability. PayPal already had the infrastructure - they've been waiting for clearer guidance from regulators. The interesting part will be how they handle the AML requirements. Traditional payment processors have decades of experience with compliance, but crypto transactions create new challenges for transaction monitoring.
Just to echo other sentiments. Don't use PayPal to hold your crypto. Yes it will open the gateway to existing PayPal users and enable them to transact in these currencies. But the reality is that these centralised entities do not operate under an ethical code the way you would expect them to. They make unilateral decisions about what happens to your account and funds without asking you a single question. Be very careful. I was not a banking skeptic before. I have quite happily used my bank account, credit cards, PayPal and everything else. But now. I am not so sure. The level of control they have over your finances and ability to transact is unnerving. What they do with your money you can't control. When they decide you are no longer a favourable actor you can't control. Minimise exposure to these entities please.
> you can't control
Well, they're not above the law. They're effectively a bank and must follow the laws in the countries in which they operate.
Paypal is very specifically not a bank and does not have to follow banking regulations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Regulation
Paypal was granted a banking license seventeen years ago. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
[dead]
As they say not your keys not your money
I find it hard to trust and believe any corporation incapable of rendering a responsive website on mobile
Title: PayPal [..] Reimagining How Money Moves to Anyone, Anywhere.
Text: PayPal users in the U.S. can begin [..] today, with international expansion [..] starting later this month.
So immediately out of the box it is exactly NOT for "anyone" and NOT "anywhere".
This is contagious: a couple of years ago Gnosis tried to launch their Gnosis Card[1] on Berlin DappCon with the exact same slogan: "Anyone, anywhere" while only accepting applications from a select group of people living in select EU countries.
I have had discussion with their CEO right there regarding this marketingspeak but he did not seem to grasp what's the problem at all here.
You can't make this shit up.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4_6aOUagY4
Yeah, it’s textbook USdefaultism.
"Look how global we are… as long as you have a U.S. address, the correct passport, a bank account in a supported country, a smartphone with the correct OS."
Well in fairness they really have reimagined how money moves to anyone anywhere, they just haven't changed it yet. Plus they used a verb tense suggesting the process is ongoing. If they said "we changed how money moves to anyone anywhere" then that would be inaccurate, but that's not what they said.
It is almost like there were two departments in play. One that did reimagine how the global crypto money works, and the other who cannot image transacting without a recent utility bill. And they met in the press release.
So hold on, does this mean I can pay with crypto anywhere that accepts Paypal? Because if so that's kind of a big deal, but not at all clear to me if that is the case...
I’m so confused I remember this headline from like 8 years ago
You can be sure that the “anyone, anywhere” claimed is a lie.
Oh absolutely. They even explain it right in the press-release: "users in the U.S. can [...] with international expansion [...] starting later this month".
Of course it will be as far from "anyone" or "anywhere" as possible, because they will start the crypto expansion in a much more restrictive fashion than TradFi.
Is this using x402 under the covers?
Excellent question.
Hey is this the same PayPal that freezes accounts and locks you from those funds?
pass.
With the expensive and slow transactions of BTC and Ether, is there any crypto currency that is actually practical to spend on something like Paypal?
You probably need to update your sources. It’s super cheap to send ETH
https://www.gasfees.io/
Huh, I was basing this on NFT gas prices since that's the part of blockchain I've always been most curious about, I didn't realize that simple ETH transfers required far less gas than things like minting and selling NFTs.
Minting and selling NFTs in general require more computation, but many smart contracts with NFTs have been gas optimized compared to 2021, sometimes requiring less approvals and transactions.
A lot of activity moved to L2s, making L1 gas cheaper, and so simple ETH and token sends are cheaper. L2s will continue to get cheaper, with the next hard fork around November and L1 gas should be even cheaper with the hard fork after the next.
So they've finally found a way to make a wrapper around a blockchain with a database, nice.
I don’t understand all the immediate negativity surrounding this. Can someone in the know explain what the ramifications are?
People who hate crypto will hate anything that has anything to do with crypto.
People who love crypto will hate anything that has anything to do with legacy censorship-prone fraudulent financial institutions like PayPal.
Who is this for?
the people that neither hate nor love crypto?
The people who embrace both! I love having options.
People that like convenience and pretending that they love crypto. Which is much larger than these partisan takes.
I hate paypal, because they froze my money for 6 months and destroyed my mental health for weeks. Compared to other people my situation was not even bad.
What's not to understand? If you have a specific question about the 'immediate negativity', perhaps comment on one of the puzzling comments to ask for clarification
For a general background, searching for 'paypal' reveals a thing or two: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=paypal
> - Thinking of Selling on eBay using Paypal? Think Again
> - “We found PayPal vulnerabilities and PayPal punished us for it”
> - We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business
> - PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub
> - More Paypal nonsense
That's five of the top eight results. The last one pretty much sums up the sentiment of the whole page
Cool. Wake me up when Paypal isn't trying to police what kind of porn people can watch online.
They are probably not the one that care, it's most likely Visa / MasterCard that have an issue with that.
Nope. If there is someone more eager to police content than Visa, it's Paypal.
There are sites that still support Visa / Mastercard but removed their Paypal support. SubscribeStar, for example.
When Bitcoin first hit public consciousness the knock from economists was that it had a built-in deflationary spiral and that seems to be true. The price keeps going up and up with a few noted bumps. Rising value is great for speculators but it's a death knell for an actual spending currency. You'd be nuts to spend it if you expect it to appreciate. That's why central banks aim for low but positive inflation.
This is a fallacy.
It's rational to buy stuff when it's cheap and sell stuff when it's expensive. Not the other way around. In other words, if the money gets suddenly more valuable, people would go on a shopping spree, which would cause inflation and the value would return back to normal. They wouldn't wait for it to be even more valuable. The situation would be different if there was a guarantee of deflation, but there isn't.
Economic demand is driven by human needs and wants. Lot of everyday consumption, like food, is bought when it's needed, and can't be bought 5 years later, because you'd be dead already. Other things, like a computer or a car you can buy later, but then you'll have to make a calculation whether the thing is more valuable today or after 5 years if you'll get it 30% cheaper. There's no situation where you sit on a pile of bitcoins and just die there waiting.
You're trying to rewrite decades of economic theory in a single comment. You can just Google "deflation great depression" and "elasticity of demand". Think about the opposite side of the coin. You have car that is ok but want a better one. The better one costs $35k. In a few months, it will be $30k and a few more $25k. When will you buy it? Deflation is kryptonite to consumer spending.
I'm not rewriting anything, this is called time preference, a well-known concept. High-% deflation happens to consumer electronics all the time. You get the same product much cheaper or a better product with the same price if you wait. Still people buy these products, because they want / need them now. Sure, the rate of inflation / deflation will shift the average time preference, but it's not that drastic and doesn't cause a spiral.
I think the difference here is that Bitcoin is predictable deflationary vs fiat being unpredictable. If you can know in advance the rate, it becomes sorta like an investment vehicle, where instead of dividends you get appreciation of the assets.
To look at it another way - why one would spend $100 from their brokerage account if they know a year later they can spend $110?
Bitcoin is not remotely predictable. The value has swung wildly over the past 5 years. Dropping more than 50% then gaining 200%. By comparison, USD has been rock solid even with the recent run of inflation. An actually circulating currency causes a panic at an 8% drop in value and yet there was zero macroeconomic impact from BTC dropping 50%. BTC is less stable than Turkish Lira.
I am taking specifically about deflationary nature of Bitcoin issuance
The same can be said for stocks, and they are considered a good investment if you are in the knows. As an example, Tesla lost a third of its value this year.
Stocks convey equity, pay dividends, must do quarterly disclosures, must disclose insider trading activity and, most importantly, are never used for payments. The topic is payments, not investments.
Yeah, right, on paper. Let's pretend that insider trading activity is disclosed and that Nancy is just born talented
Trades made by actual insiders are disclosed. That's a narrower definition than what qualifies at illegal insider trading (or an insider sharing inside information with an outsider). That's also not likely to be what is happening with members on Congress who may be trading on nonpublic information that isn't legally insider information.
Aside from tax implications, there's no difference between spending $1000 from your salary, and spending $1000 in Bitcoin and rebuying that amount from your salary.
In the early days of Bitcoin (like 2013 and earlier) there were soo many entrepreneurs that tried to use Paypal for their fiat on-ramps. There even used to be a service that let you buy Bitcoins with credit cards and used Paypal to process payments. They did their own KYC and everything, with very low fraud rates despite the double-spend risk. Even with an interesting result: Paypal caused them nothing but misery. Every single merchant, trading system, wallet, or platform that tried to rely on Paypal came to regret it.
Paypals reputation in the FinTech space is that of creating a service that restricts as much as possible what can be done with your own money. All in the name of "security." Even though they seem to offer the worst security of any platform, coupled with the now infamous risk of having your funds "frozen" for any arbitrary reason. In short: I literally cannot think of a company I would trust less with digital currencies than Paypal. And seeing them support any of them just makes me think "wow, you fucking phonies."
Great. I can't wait to attach recent utility bills with every stablecoin transaction.
PayPal locks people out of their money. Screw them, never using this shit again.
I tried some Woo-Commerce? plugin to accept Bitcoin on my sites a few years ago and Paypal baulked at it or made it incredibly complicated to the point that I gave up. Stripe said to wait until their cryptocurrency was released.
The main issue at the time seemed to be that it couldn't really work as a medium of exchange. Eg; $100 paid on the Monday might be $80 or $150 by the time it actually cleared. Maybe I was really inept but I got sick of the complexity and bailed, even though I liked the idea of having these options.
I wouldn't try Paypal's offering as they don't have any kind of quality support for merchants.
being able to spend stablecoins via paypal wallet seems convenient but i assume there is some ethereum sized fees that makes the whole thing redundant
I will never trust Paypal with anything again after they completely botched up the closing of my deceased parent's account. It was a dystopian nightmare to try and get them to understand the situation, and every support person who replied to the ticket started from scratch to give a wholly new, and yet equally unhelpful, take on the situation.
It took nearly six months to fully close down the account and many, many phone calls, which were equally difficult because it's nearly impossible to speak to a real person, and when you do finally get connected to a real person they just hang up on you when they realize they can't solve your issue in under five minutes. Paypal is one of the worst companies I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with, and money or crypto is the last thing I would trust them with.
Like with most things, if you put a serious amount of money through your account they will assign you a personal account manager who will bend over backwards for you. Otherwise they couldn't care less :( source: experience
Paypal has supported Ethereum and Bitcoin for years, in the US, most of the comments on this thread are irrelevant and unrelated to the current press release
zero reason to use this instead of something like sling.money
you wallet is self custodial there
PayPal deleted my account in 2017 for having a relationship with Bitcoin-associated banks. Fuck you, that was war.
Yeah bro Im not sending crypto through paypal so I get charged like 5%+ on too of withdrawal fee by my bank of like 10% extra...
I've bought bitcoin a few times using paypal, and while it says you can transfer it to any address, it would never actually let me complete the process. Support was utterly useless. Presumably it's some fraud risk sort of issue, but ultimately just cost me a few dollars in losses and fees to get my cash back.
Never again.
You mean, they wouldn't let you withdraw the Bitcoin you had nominally bought from them?
Cash is king for me.
Yes, I switched my bank account to a Cash Management account (Fidelity) and get ATM fees and international fees reimbursed, this has renewed my cash usage and eliminated my card usage. I love it!
I can't tell if you are joking, but cache is probably the worst type of asset one can have.
how did you manage to still misspell it when directly replying to the comment?
*in the USA
Seems like they all come crawling back.
You talking about Paypal or the crypto nerds who would claim they'd never use it?
Stripe, PayPal, etc.
In Soviet America Pay pals you!
what's the end goal of stablecoins, besides the immediate grift?
do they think countries' populations will "opt in" into dolarizing that country econony (a la argentina in the 80s) bypassing their central bank opinions?
or is this much simpler and is just "ebay now works as crypto escrow for your bids"?
one thing with these stablecoins is they're pushing to buying of 'us-debt'.
congrats if you buy a stablecoin - you've effectively financed the US gvt at 0%.
now the US gvt can inflate away that debt at 0 cost to them, and pass on the cost to you.
that's why a bunch of these stablecoin companies are pushing it as a way to save for people in distressed economies.
what a way to steal from the poor.
that's why the crypto act was called GENIUS act.
That's not how any of this works. You may not receive any interest on your stablecoin balance, but the issuer certainly does. Why would they offer to lend money to the US government at zero when they can get the market rate and pocket it? What's more, these are mostly short-term instruments This means any increase in inflation will be reflected in their yield.
> You may not receive any interest on your stablecoin balance, but the issuer certainly does
A bunch of zero marginal cost capital funding purchases of U.S. debt would absolutely push down rates, possibly lower than inflation, because if you’re a stablecoin issuer you’re not constrained by yield.
This is a dumb-money venture. And if there is this much money that is this dumb, Treasuries aren’t the worst place for it to go.
Even if every dollar of market cap for every crypto currency in the world was invested into us treasuries, it would still be a drop in the bucket and wouldn't drastically change rates.
All those trilions and trilions of dollars of stablecoins sure are bringing down the us' cost to borrow.
> those trilions and trilions of dollars of stablecoins sure are bringing down the us' cost to borrow
If you think trillions of dollars in de novo price-insensitive demand doesn’t move a market, even one as deep as the Treasury market, I’ve got a stablecoin to sell you.
Yes, trillions of dollars of new price-insensitive demand would move the treasury market. That's why I named that number! But, there just isn't that much value in stablecoins.
>A bunch of zero marginal cost capital funding purchases of U.S. debt would absolutely push down rates
There is a floor to short term treasury rates because the Fed also runs overnight repo operations linked to the Fed funds rate
It’s actually more of a win-win situation if you look closely.
Stablecoin issuers earn yield from holding U.S. Treasuries, which sustains their business model. Meanwhile, people in distressed economies get practical access to a digital dollar, often cheaper and faster than navigating restrictive exchange rules or paying steep conversion fees at money-changers. That’s meaningful when local currencies are unstable or losing value.
Of course, not all stablecoin issuers are trustworthy, and some governments under economic distress may ban or limit these instruments. But when the setup works, both sides benefit.
The foreign individual is likely better off in game theory terms, but their country is collectively likely worse off due to a reduction in their central bank's independence and ability to perform seigniorage/print money. Difficult to ban for the foreign nation, and probably results in a greater need for dollars for their government also.
Probably not. You would be right if we were talking about honest, competent central bankers. But most people live in poor countries. Why are those countries poor?
Every country is different, but poor countries are mostly poor because they are governed by kleptocrats, generally including their central bankers, and hyperinflation in particular is a constant menace. When the central bankers aren't directly kleptocratic themselves, they are very often incompetent but loyal, similar to most of Trump's nominees. In this situation, generally speaking, things that put power over individuals' lives back in the hands of those individuals, instead of the kleptocrats' hands, will improve the situation not just of the individuals but of their whole country.
I agree that kleptocracy and incompetence are a important factor, but I'm not sure it's the only one. There's a correlation between corruption indices and low GDP but I'm not sure it's causal. For example the US scores only moderately in corruption index terms, but does quite well in GDP terms. Arguably GDP growth rates are a better measure, in which case there's possibly a inverse correlation.
For example China, India and Malaysia have grown quite substantially are not particularly transparent, but they are alike in their resistance to dollarization. On the other hand Ecuador and El Salvador are examples of countries that have fully embraced dollarization with less than great outcomes. There are examples in the middle as well, but there is not a clear trend that it's necessarily a change for the better of the country and it's citizens.
To me it seems like a continuation of the IMF's dollarization as described by Joseph Stiglitz in 'Globalization and its discontents', in terms of mechanisms and effects on recipient countries. From this perspective it's less like transferring power from kleptocrats to the people, and more like choosing kleptocrats that are offering a better deal.
I don't think corruption indices do a great job of measuring kleptocracy. The PRC's national government, for example, has clearly prioritized enriching the general population through economic development and reducing poverty over lining their own pockets, despite not being transparent or accountable. The indices do provide some information; extremely kleptocratic countries like Venezuela, Eritrea, Yemen, and Nicaragua reliably come out on the bottom of the CPI. But the most damaging effects of kleptocracy are very subtle.
I do agree that dollarization hasn't been resoundingly successful, and that does undermine my thesis somewhat. I agree that cryptocurrencies are like super-dollarization: not only do they remove domestic government control of monetary policy, they remove or weaken domestic government control of and visibility into capital flows, banking services such as savings and lending, and payments. If that would be great, you'd expect dollarization to at least be good. And it isn't clear that it has been. It hasn't been obviously disastrous either—you can make credible arguments that Ecuador or El Salvador would be either better off or worse off without it—but it hasn't been obviously beneficial.
I think "choosing kleptocrats that are offering a better deal" is a good description of dollarization and, for example, Tether, USDC, or CBDCs. But, as a description of Bitcoin and Ethereal, it's comprehensively incorrect; there haven't ever been any credible allegations of corruption in their blockchains, unless you count Ethereal's DAO rollback. They've so far been completely immune to the kind of politically-motivated currency manipulation that is the actual official job of central banks behind fiat currencies like the dollar.
> congrats if you buy a stablecoin - you've effectively financed the US gvt at 0%.
USDC on Coinbase yields interest. The USDC people make a little spread on it, but you aren't financing the US government at 0%, you're financing them at market rates. There is counterparty risk just like with a bank. Unlike a bank, there are liquid markets onchain for other fungibles.
It doesn't cost a stablecoin anything but a bit of electricity to manufacture a "coin". The coin is valued at whatever the peg is, but it doesn't move the m2 needle or any other measure of circulation, until they purchase a treasury (or whatever they claim is backing). How much did it cost mr stablecoin to do all that? And you better believe the US Gov NEEDS this to happen.
Russia's take on the system is correct and we're seeing ASIANs and BRICS run away as fast as possible from $.
Ways out include total protectionism/mercantilism or war.
Gold is parabolic now. 10k by March is completely doable.
US govt is financed at whatever rate the stable-coin issuer finances at, which is likely a mixture of T-bills, fed overnight interest rates (via bank accounts), and other assets.
didn't you just explain the USD game? (fleecing the poor worldwide through inflation...) stablecoins don't change much in this.
Having access to USD is still a lot better than whatever local currency most of these countries have. All those without any real central bank independence (though FED independence has become more questionable in the US as well).
...fleecing the poor worldwide...stablecoins don't change much in this
Just Devil's Advocate, but isn't that a reason not to use stablecoins? I mean, I can participate in the fleecing of the poor without changing anything at all apparently.
It's a reason not to use dollars in any form if you are outside of US (and probably inside as well).
Usually the local money is even worst. (Hi from Argentina! Not so bad this year so far...)
Is it really "usually?" I think that people often think of the worse cases (Argentina, etc). Looking at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG?most_rec..., the US is at 103, there are 102 countries with worse inflation, and 215 with better. From https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/wld/wor..., the Global Average Inflation rate for 2023 was 5.7%, more than the US but not out of control.
I don't know what the effect is called, but suddenly some unrest in some country or inflation in another calls for creating a whole new money system. It seems unreasonable and I'm a bit suspicious of where it comes from.
"Usually" in the countries that need it. The problem with the 102 countries with less inflation is that some years it may be less, but other much more.
IIRC in hindsight at the beginning of 2024 the best was to exchange all your saved dollars to pesos, invest them in bonds or the bank, and exchange them for dollars at the end of the year. Probably you can get a 20% yoy increase. But there was a risk or many unexpected problems that would let you with a lot of monopoly money that is worth only a 50% of the initial value... So the safe option was to keep your savings in dollars.
Euros are another safe option. Pounds are very difficult to exchange. The money of nearby countries is sometimes better, but they may have unexpected surprises too.
> I don't know what the effect is called, but suddenly some unrest in some country or inflation in another calls for creating a whole new money system. It seems unreasonable and I'm a bit suspicious of where it comes from.
I agree.
This is the worry of globally-available USD stablecoins.
By swapping the volatility from crypto to lower USD volatility, they effectively create a funnel from riskier currencies into dollars.
Which is the same state that previously existed... except now facilitated by the crypto industry's global accessibility/UX and with less international regulation.
Blessing USD stablecoins at the US federal level was a smart move (from the US-perspective) as it creates a much bigger demand for dollars, and if the US didn't do it then China or OPEC would have eventually gotten around to it as an end-run around dollar hegemony.
Winners:
Losers: TBD:sure, but there's something twisted in ripping off e.g. poor africans from the other side of the world...
sure, it couldn't happen without the local warlords, but still...
Aren't they sort of printing new dollars privately accelerating the fleecing? Or am I wrong?
Not anymore than a USD deposit account. Just with extra steps.
> Not anymore than a USD deposit account
These typically pay interest. (Or have retail servicing costs attached.)
Oh yeah, if you get a USD savings account from major nationwide banks you'll be getting exciting interest rates of up to 0.02% [1], assuming you have a 'relationship bonus'. BofA gets up to 0.04% [2], with the right tiers.
[1] https://www.chase.com/personal/savings/interest-savings/inte...
[2] https://www.bankofamerica.com/deposits/savings/savings-accou...
not anymore, this is not guaranteed in the "app age". and the interest was always negligible.
> congrats if you buy a stablecoin - you've effectively financed the US gvt at 0%.
As MMT teaches us, a government that issues its own currency does not need to borrow to finance itself, as it can create the money it needs, though it may still issue debt for other reasons.
I mean if the US gov moderately lowers the amount of debt it issues (and starts printing more to cover the difference), inflation will go way up, which seems pretty bad.
The total stablecoin marketcap is not that high relative to US debt, and open question whether they're actually buying all the treasuries they claim. Tether has never been audited.
Times are changing:
> The GENIUS Act requires permitted payment stablecoin issuers to maintain reserves backing outstanding payment stablecoins on at least a one-to-one basis, and provides that reserves may only consist of certain specified assets, including US dollars, federal reserve notes, funds held at certain insured or regulated depository institutions, certain short-term Treasuries and Treasury-backed reverse repurchase agreements, and money market funds.
> In addition, the GENIUS Act requires stablecoin issuers to provide monthly public reporting as to the composition of their reserve portfolios on their website, and requires larger issuers (with more than $50 billion in consolidated total outstanding issuance) to publish annual audited financial statements. These monthly reports must be examined by a registered public accounting firm, and the CEO and CFO of a permitted payment stablecoin issuer must certify the accuracy of these reports to the primary federal payment stablecoin regulator or state payment stablecoin regulator, as applicable.
https://www.lw.com/en/insights/the-genius-act-of-2025-stable...
With regard to Tether none of this is applicable as they aren't compliant with the GENIUS Act. They are in fact attempting to launch a totally separate stablecoin to try to get some of that market: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Right, and who is looking at it anyways? Let's not kid ourselves, noone at the SEC will be enforcing "genius" act. Does anyone realistically think otherwise?
If it really is the goal to increase treasuries demand by means of stablecoins, then I would expect them to enforce this. If the stablecoins aren't really buying the assets then they do nothing for demand.
If another goal is to enrich the Trump family, then the SEC could forgo enforcement on the World Liberty Financial stablecoin. But they could still enforce the act for everyone else.
Increasing demand for treasuries, thus keeping interest rates down, also directly benefits Trump because he's bought at least $100 million in bonds since becoming president.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-buys-more-100-mill...
Stable coins can print anytime they want, there's no one at the SEC that will regulate it in this admin. As a matter of fact it's pretty well accepted in some circles, especially on subreddits, that Tether did exactly that, printed usdt, purchased btc at effectively 0 cost basis, inflating bitcoin prices by decreasing supply and then turned around and purchased treasuries. Cantor Fitzgerald ran that for them.
Further, stable coins / crypto are almost certainly being used to slop up as much liquidity as possible and has essentially so far pulled 4 trillion out of circulation. If not for that sleight of hand trick, hyperinflation, at least in the USA, would have already happened. Probably still will as there's only so much can kicking that can occur. I know of 30 year olds that literally live in mom's basement and dump nearly all of their just above minimum wage checks straight into Robinhood to blindly purchase crypto. Will forever beat inflation is the mentality.
Sure looks like there's going to be lots of pain for poor and middle class people in the next 5 years.
Wake me when eBay accepts BTC in exchange for silver dollars or even collector coins. They're still afraid to do the very hard thing and challenge the status quo on an even playing field.
Fascinating. Now do it for Monero.
The current administration is fully embracing crypto - the Trump family is reaping significant benefits. Hence, all the banks are getting into all the action as well.
It's grift time baby!
What is this paypal-corp.com website? I immediately suspected phishing when I saw that.
Doubly so when the feature being discussed is crypto related.
Add the end of https://www.paypal.com/us/home there is a Hewsroom link to https://newsroom.paypal-corp.com/ . They use https://about.pypl.com/about-us/default.aspx as well. At one point, employee email accounts used paypal-inc.com. It might not even be a SEO thing, it could just reflect their corporate structure and the different IT teams.
I agree that it is confusing.
It's a little annoying, but as long as the main domain has a paste that links to the dodgy-looking domain then it's bearable.
Ideally, companies would have a page "all the domains we use" as part of their footer links.
So many companies that should know better are helping to enable phishing by using random domains.
Fraudulent by design.
(also thought that it's phishing or scam domain).
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What a weird timeline we live in. Absolutely bonkers.