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Comment by sarcasmatwork | Hacker News Reader

I'm more amazed people still use Paypal in today's society.

Venmo, owned by paypal, is very popular in the US. People use to split expenses among friends.

It's so odd, because Venmo is both newer than PayPal, yet limited in the same stupid ways PayPal is (multi-stage xfers), which Square Cash avoids entirely.

It's perplexing to me that Venmo ever caught on.

Network effects. Square Cash is vastly superior but Venmo is the incumbent so it's hard to tell your friends "no, I have this other cash app you should install instead"

Hence the slogan "we're not using the other apps anymore" https://www.reddit.com/r/FriendsofthePod/comments/8pgbpq/wha... https://twitter.com/square/status/968602892646023169?lang=en

What do you mean by multi-stage xfers?

It transfers to your Venmo balance and not directly to your bank account.

Venmo caught on likely because of Facebook integration

Also the whole publishing all of your transactions on the public internet by default was a really good feature.

Importantly however, Venmo doesn't make money on peer to peer transactions that use bank accounts, which I'd imagine is what most people do as that's free.

Consequently, Venmo is not profitable.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/24/venmo-has-40-million-users-p....

Venmo transactions' data and the social network inferences you can make from them are probably pretty valuable on their own.

I don’t see how that data is all that valuable. There’s the inherent network effect of needing to install it to send/receive money from a friend who did.

But a surprising number of people will pay for instant transfer(almost all of that 300m probably comes from this), and the debit cards they get to take in a portion of the merchant transaction fees. They’ll probably be profitable off that, with p2p as a loss leader to drive installs

But Venmo/PayPal don't have any ads?

Furthermore, just because you can link people together, it doesn't mean that knowledge is actually valuable. The only social network you can link to Venmo currently is Facebook. The only other way to "discover" contacts/friends is by uploading your contact book to Venmo's servers.

Its marginally better for online shopping than Visa and Mastercard. No address and zipcode and depending on authentication settings significantly less friction to purchase. Its surprising PayPal isn't everywhere.

Small data point but personally maybe 5 or 6 of last 20 online purchases have been PayPal.

YRMV

I'd much rather use PayPal for a smaller retailer than give them my credit card number directly. If they get compromised, it's a lot less grief for me.

Paypal effectively has a monopoly.

It's often the only choice.

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