PayPal to allow cryptocurrency buying, selling and shopping on its network
reuters.com
reuters.com
Allowing conversion of soft money to hard money (a btc with 6 onchain confirmations) means every criminal will use you as an on-ramp to convert their hack cc details and bank accounts into immutable hard money.
If I buy a sweater from some company through PayPal, and the company sends me the sweater, they're out the sweater if they get a chargeback. They can fight it, but PayPal is just the middleman.
Cryptocurrency vendors would have to figure out a policy to deal with it, so it might be that nobody would be willing to sell crypto for PayPal, but there's no reason for PayPal to block it.
I mean, it's a big problem in a sense, if vendors don't expect it. But by necessity the bitcoin vendors will have to deal with it as a prime scenario, which means they'll either have to offer a meaningful user identification story (i.e. KYC or similar protocols) or offer a settlement period before the bitcoin is available -- credit the customer's account, but don't let them withdraw for 30 days / 90 days / whatever.
This requires that the vendor take on some risk (because if they make the trade and the price moves but the trade is cancelled due to chargeback the price may have moved) and they have to price this in to the deal; maybe charging a premium for using PayPal, etc. This is all fairly standard and Coinbase, for example, had to deal with a ton of this when they accepted credit card purchases.
But there's no risk to PayPal.
Same thing with Facebook and crypto ads. There were just too many pyramid schemes and get-rich-schemes with a cryptocurrency angle that were being advertised.
Not every PayPal transaction is refundable.
I've bought Bitcoin using PayPal before.
In practice this just means: when a hacker gets into your elderly family member's PayPal account, they need to buy as much crypto as they can since then there's no chargebacks for fraud.
I can appreciate why the pendulum swung hard against ads - it's incredibly hard to differentiate between real and fake ICOs, and we're seeing that again with the defi craze at the moment. It's just made it so much more expensive as an emerging company to try to sell services in this market even when you _aren't_ trying to sell a coin.
Non-native English speaker here but doesn't "by design" refer to something being designed explicitly for that purpose? I agree that lots of ICOs were indeed scams and/or attempts of just taking money for low-quality work, but I don't think fund-raising was initially designed for that. It just happened to be that lots of fund-raising are scams.
But to say that it's by design it's going a bit far, and making your point weaker, not stronger.
The abundance of scams in ICOs (and the cryptocurrency ecosystem in general for that matter) has more to do with the heavily regulated nature of the mainstream financial space, than the design of the cryptocurrency space itself. Because most of the world is regulated, fraudsters are now funneled to cryptocurrency. They come where they are the most free, but there is nothing in the structure of cryptocurrencies that encourages scams over legitimate enterprises. Honesty and hard work is still most rewarding. The absence of barriers to prevent scams other than regular social signals and the user's own vigilance, is the natural state of the world.
This same type of argument is repeatedly employed against free-speech platforms, that keep ending-up hosting the neo-nazis and other undesirable groups that were ousted from Facebook and co.
Shared reputation systems layered over a free platform like Matrix announced[1] a couple days ago should provide relief, but simple increase in adoption will also tilt the ratio back to the average.
So do ponzi schemes. The early investors into them make money, and have a lot to gain by spreading the word to other people.
Investing into a growing ponzi scheme is a rational investment strategy. That's why people do it, and that's one of the reasons for why they are illegal.
As far as I can tell, the majority of interest in ICOs comes from people who are hoping to dump their investment onto a bigger fool. Ironically, the worse the ICO is as a business, the more fools will be interested in it, which makes those ICOs more attractive to invest in.
Either way, it's a step that highlights regulatory progress being made. It may not be the blockchain spirit, but alas that may not be what ultimately prevails.
Were you? Then you must have simply forgotten how Ebay UK (which deals with Paypal) allowed for Bitcoin sales only through the ads, outside of the Paypal-sphere [0]. At the time this was pretty signinficant because this was when several Uk based bitcoin exchanges were being shut down. Bittyliciious being the biggest. And Localbitcoins started to become a target by regulators and gox was on its last legs.
Also worth noting how you could bypass this with the sale of Bitcoin 'software' on their platform:
> Ebay previously allowed users to sell software for bitcoin mining and transactions.
0: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ebay-uk-allow-users-buy-sell-bitco...
> until Google can shill their centralized cloud solutions as a scalability option and whatever other evil shit they have in the pipeline
How does this relate to search ads?
There doesn't have to be just one reason, however.
This bit me with Coinbase 7-8 years ago when I was trying to buy $10k of bitcoin -- they'd only allow bank transfers, and only $100 at a time until you were "established". I gave up (and lost a lot of profit because of it).
The quasi-anonymous nature of crypto means that fraud is rampant. For better or worse payment processors and banks have decided they'll make more money banning crypto unless the whole transaction is within their ecosystem. It's not great but I get it.
It's for people who leave a bunch of money sitting idle in their Paypal accounts for several months and don't want it to lose buying power.
Paypal can achieve this by holding onto Bitcoin reserves to back their customers' funds. What this means is that Bitcoin is going to become the new gold standard. This will allow Paypal to take the place of traditional banks and help society to transition away from fractional reserve banking backed by fiat currency.
It is very clever and brave of Paypal to do this.
The leading candidate for Satoshi is international murdering drug- and arms-dealing, racist, real-life Bond-villain Paul "Solotshi" Calder Le Roux. He of course created E4M and Truecrypt. [1,2] And he likely did so to avoid money laundering rules.
And hey he just told a judge he was looking to get into the Bitcoin business!
“The scope and severity of Mr. Le Roux’s criminal conduct is nothing short of breathtaking. I have before me a man who has engaged in conduct in keeping with the villain in a James Bond movie,” Judge Abrahms said.
"I plan to start a business selling and hosting bitcoin miners." [3]
You love to see it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-inte...
[3] https://news.bitcoin.com/satoshi-nakamoto-paul-le-roux-start...
Trying to get to the customer support is yet another saga, and I will spare your time, but the net result is nil. Nobody in the support knows why the ban happened (there was no real reason to ban a paypal customer with over 8+ years, buying some random stuff on ebay), nobody can revert it, nobody really cares and there are no appeals.
Receiving a note from paypal today regarding crypto looked like a bad, really dumb joke to me and an insult for my spouse. You gotta be completely clueless or insane to trust this shitty company with your crypto. One of the key points for crypto is the lack of "deplatforming", which the sinister paypal does left and right, at the same time not even being able to explain its actions, nor comprehend consequences.
Paypal - never!
• PayPal account holder for 14 years.
• Occasionally sell on eBay, and send/receive payments for freelancing work (maybe $10k a year)
• Semi-regularly buy and sell bitcoin for PayPal (about $1-2k a month)
• Never had eBay buyers claim DOA or anything suspicious, including high value sales (think GPUs, etc).
• As of a year ago, added to the “Funds Now” program which means my money will never be placed on hold, even during a dispute.
• The program worked as intended, as I was able to access my funds even during a dispute.
• For disputes I’ve had to make, they’ve always been resolved in my favour.
• Back when they had phone support pre-COVID, I always got local reps who knew what they’re doing.
On the other hand, last month my bank banned me and closed my accounts for depositing money into a local, regulated bitcoin exchange; with a letter giving me one day to sort out alternate banking agreements.
Go figure.
The subject of the discussion is paypal's surprise wedding with crypto. As stated in the above comment, my argument is: from customer perspective it is a bad, crazy proposition.
Hey, paypal has a loooong history of random, inexplicable deplatforming of customers, and mixing that corporate attribute with crypto makes sense only on executive powerpoint slides.
Call me when paypal sells gold, in physical form that you get to keep in your property. Make no mistake that paypal will ban any crypto that cant' be 100% subject to the whims of governments. These centralized "mainstream" cryptocurrencies are going to kill the anarchic ecosystem and consequently outlaw it. The playbook "save the children/our enemies" is such a popular routine nowadays that i wonder why there's not a startup for it.
Internet -> Centralizing
AI -> Centralizing
Blockchain -> Centralizing
Is Technology cursed to give us 1984?
In that sense, we're doomed to give ourselves 1984 unless we consciously and continuously fight everyday to not slip into a dystopia.
And given the short time-frame needed to bring a software product to market, how possible is it really for a small player to compete with any of the software giants? Even if you come up with something really innovative, how likely is it that your product can't be replicated by an organization with infinite resources?
First position the goal posts where the revolution or disruption is oriented towards freedom. Next, use the disruption to centralize power where you want it.
The strategy is centuries old at a minimum.
It's also why nation states exist. More centralized organizations can subjugate and absorb, or just out-compete less-centralized ones.
I'd say this is more tied to people not being taught to question power, and less to do with technology.
It's about having the __option__ to go without the middle-man if and when required.
With more centralized institutions adopting these decentralized tech, it gives the entire network more credibility in the short-term (adoption phase).
Bitcoin now accepted by mainstream institutions - “Wow what a joke! They subverted the point of bitcoin! What a stupid thing!”
Can’t bitcoin be accepted by everyone, decentralized or centralized mainstream players?
Thank you fluffy pony.
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180111/12215438987/fbi-s...
It's all PR work that the compliant media laps up. Most of us live in a world where guilt needs to be proven, not implied.
'Most' of those things that we do to manage it, particularly around fraud, insurance, reporting are to maintain the real integrity of the currency and system.
If you are concerned about the integrity of a currency due to 'money printing' then simply don't hold it as a store of value - just use it as a currency (as it was intended!).
Crypto currencies, without the systems in place to back the fidelity are toys - neither stores of value, nor currency.
Other than perhaps some of the ugly, bureaucratic cobwebs of financial regulations which have not caught up with the times ... there's no point at all to cryptocurrency, it's just a novelty.
https://www.wweek.com/news/business/2018/02/21/bitcoin-miner...
However, the unwanted side effect is also the growth of centralized currencies used as "cash you can track" by governments. And we can be certain PayPal will know exactly where to steer their users...
When you look at the aftermath of exchange hacks (e.g. the recent kucoin hack), and see how quickly funds are frozen by various other exchanges, you can see the direction of travel, especially when combined with the uptick of regulatory interest (e.g. BitMex)
Edit: As this is attracting some downvotes, how about some citations.
On Kucoin From(https://www.coindesk.com/kucoin-crypto-hack-laundering) "The hackers have largely failed to sell those tokens on closely guarded centralized exchanges which quickly flag and often block hacked funds."
On BitMex from(https://www.coindesk.com/bitmex-accelerates-identity-verific...) "BitMEX Accelerates Mandatory ID Verification After Charges of Lax Anti-Money Laundering Controls"
Crypto is one of the few topics on HN that has an extremely aggressive following. The followers may not be that numerous, but they'll downvote (and fast, too) on an emotional basis, rather than a rational one, and will thus even downvote simple facts when they displease them.
(not referring to my own posts on crypto, which are at least somewhat opiniated.)
>> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. ...
>> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Yeah I'm expecting downvotes for this one also...
And that a private company who is hacked (and was previously the custodian of a customer's tokens) makes it more difficult to retrieve same through its machinery?
Per your link, "Still, by Monday, Elliptic said that hackers had already flipped millions of stolen tokens for $7.5 million in ethereum (ETH) on decentralized exchanges (DEX) Kyber Network and Uniswap."
So the "problem" is that companies are making decisions for themselves (admittedly, approaching the way Google and Apple can make decisions "for themselves"), and that people who were given control of assets are controlling them.
Decentralization seems fine from a protocol perspective, these are just effects of human behavior.
Yea that's correct. They track the coins as they flow from one address to another. It can be increasingly difficult once the funds are divided, but entirely possible with automation. It's worth noting that this is not possible with some privacy focused cryptocurrencies like Monero.
Absolutely plausible scenario. If one stole $1m from a bank, the value of those bill are no longer $1m. But if that someone can use mules, distribute the money across the city (assuming a big city), ask the mules to spend this on the same day, in various locations, then the value of that $1m will drop to $500k. The reason: mules need a cut, mediators need a cut, value of items purchased, etc.
In that sense, I expect that those "decentralized exchanges" should have large fees, large spreads, etc, practically mimicking the cost of running a 'mules' network.
Also to be successful for the general public, they'll need fiat on and off ramps (at least in the short-->medium term). At the moment most of those go via the centralized exchanges...
As long as this is a community decision, I don't see a problem. Centralization would need a central authority to decide which coins to freeze.
Uhm, the blockchain is a ledger of all transactions. It's "cash you can track", and pseudoanonymous at best.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-financial-watchdog-fines-e...
For large amounts, use cold wallets. Not your keys, not your coin.
I don't follow cryptocurrency evolution on a regular basis -- in fact it's grown far beyond what I understood when I was BTC mining for fun a decade ago! I did some googling and see literally hundreds of them now. Is the goal CC enthusiasts to see a world with one main CC or a fragmented world of many, all exchanging at different rates?
https://newsroom.paypal-corp.com/2020-10-21-PayPal-Launches-...
> PayPal Launches New Service Enabling Users to Buy, Hold and Sell CryptocurrencyPayPal CryptocurrencyPayPal Cryptocurrency 2PayPal Cryptocurrency 3
By enumerating all the things you are tricked into assuming you might also transfer out the coins. But no, looks like a lawyer wrote that title and they provide what they say right there.
I wonder what is Strope's stance towards blockchain? Will they now also move into blockchain like PayPal, but properly?
I'm not saying Bitcoin is necessarily on that path, but there's also no reason it couldn't be, and whether it is or isn't isn't related to any intrinsic value it might or might not have. And lots of things that do have intrinsic value, like grain, are terrible investments because they're easy to make more of and because they don't store indefinitely. "Intrinsic value" is just an orthogonal concern.
But you are right to realize Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. That makes it very similar to something like a dollar bill.
That said, intrinsic value isn’t really what makes currency valuable. It’s a nice feature... if the bottom drops out of the market and your currency is cigarettes... at least you can smoke them! And trade them for some other currency at the price of smokes.
But that’s a very special circumstance. Intrinsic value only matters under one very special circumstance: Total market collapse. Under normal circumstances, what matters is use value.
And Bitcoin has some very unique use value. For example, it is a thing that can be exchanged for gold that can be stored in your head. That’s a very unique use. I think those kinds of uses, if you can add up their utility, are the best way to calculate Bitcoin’s long term value.
Value is just the measure of the willingness of people to give you something in exchange for something else. It's not in the objects themselves, but in the head of the people.
This is beginning to change. In the DeFi space, the token often provides voting rights and a share in generated revenues.
Ownership into a cryptocurrency. Its not like you can borrow a PC from Bill cause you have shares in MS. The company and the cryptocurrency both perform a function that gives them value to people, the stock/coins reflect that value.
I've just started writing about this. Here's an interesting chart:
https://bitcoinflippening.gold/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/bi...
Unless your exchange gets hacked, you lose your keys or similar
I've been writing about this topic; specifically, gold vs bitcoin.
You might find it interesting:
(To say nothing of the climate impact!)
I think there may be a future where energy is no longer the deciding factor in profitability vs the hardware itself and operational costs (land, employees etc). Which could mean less power consumption despite climbing hashrate.
[1] https://stripe.com/blog/stellar
EDIT: well, hamstercat's link is a great follow up :)
I think people often forget that PayPal has a $250B market cap and is one of the largest companies by valuation in the world...
Let’s hope stripe does it right (crypto from the buyer and crypto to the seller)
Same goes for buying in EUR and the merchant receiving USD. Buyers get to use their preferred currency (now inc. crypto) and merchants receive theirs.
It's so strange to me that people don't see how that is antithetical to the concept of cryptocurrencies.
The right way to do cryptocurrencies is to just let people use cryptocurrencies. But that means watching your business get eaten up by it. Which is why they are trying to insert themselves so that they don't get disrupted out of existence.
Why would you need a middleman for that? Every crypto is already peer to peer.
Companies want a simple solution that lets them accept the various common ways people want to pay whether that's Paypal balance, any of the credit/debit cards, or any of the other services out there.
Also all the people at Tether can plan to print themselves some new coins --> BTC and then go on a shopping spree :P (for the humour impaired, this bit is a joke)
There is plenty of circumstantial evidence that the tether supply is strongly correlated to BTC (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066), and at this point you have to take it as a point of faith that all the tether in circulation truly comes from fiat deposits. On the regulatory side, crypto currencies are very much like going back to the days of Wild West finance, random hold-ups included.
By the way, Tether supply should be correlated to BTC, whether or not they are doing a fractional reserve.
Would you say there's a minimum amount? Thought it was quite clear in the courts that it was at least 90% fiat backing with anything else being hard too account for which I'm guessing is doublespeak for "it's ours and you can't touch it".
Virtually all of the people who actually hold tether are exchanges, mostly in the US. Everyday people are rarely exposing themselves to risk here.
Just for comparison, the reserve ratio required by US banks is now effectively 0%.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm
On the KYC front, actors like Paypal (and Square, Braintree and so on) are in a very good position, as they are already payment processors and fully compliant with those regulations. That is something smaller upstarts struggle with, not the established ones. It can even benefit them as a moat.
That means they will need to hedge the risk of a change in exchange rate between buying and settlement (for example paypal offers to settle payment 14 days after payment as a service). Now they can do that, but it'll take some effort.
On KYC I'd agree they're in a better position, but it seems like they'll still need to beef up their processes, as regulators are quite interested in proving where cryptocurrencies came from. They'll not want to be caught with a load of coins that came from the latest ransomware incident.
Perhaps PayPal will only allow people to pay with cryptocurrency they have bought from PayPal in the first instance. So there wouldn't be any incoming our outgoing movements of cryptocurrency at all.
I use bittorrent to download and distribute Linux distributions. Every bit and byte on my harddrive, from the OS to the applications to the data, is either open source, written by me, or paid for. I don't need people who should know better to draw parallels between my completely legal and moral use of bittorret and copyright infringement. And people who have perfectly legitimate and legal use of cryptocurrencies, of which there are many and some might argue more than the use of cash, do not need people who should know better to draw parallels between their usage of technology and anything illegal or immoral.
The only concerning part is "shopping" with crypto, and that's likely going to be restricted to merchants that already have a business agreement with PayPal. Under the hood it need not involve cryptocurrency at all except for displaying prices and debiting balances - instead of showing $XXXX, it shows YYYY_BTC and PayPal has to do figure out the currency conversion price for debiting the customer balance in BTC and crediting the merchant in USD.
Crypto is a magnet for fraud
Banks were just recently outed for laundering 800x more cash for drug cartels than Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency system has ever done.
Is it really even a punishment if you made more than the fine imposed?
Pretty much all of the actual uses for cryptocurrency involve some sort of crime (drugs/warez/fraud/child porn).
We've had Bitcoin for 11 years now, and nothing meaningful has changed. It wasn't revolutionary - all it did was introduce the anonymity of cash to the Internet.
I think you missed the point? That's it. That's the revolutionary part!
You're let down because a currency is acting like a currency?
I did not plan on doing this, I didn't even know how to use these BTC ATMs before this. But the ability to have access to cash in any country you are without international transfer hassle is one huge benefit.
Store your wealth digitally in an asset with a fixed supply that is not controlled by a government entity without the use of a third-party intermediary.
Obviously this applies to only to Bitcoin and not inflationary cryptocurrencies.
did you ever hear the phrase “money laundering”? most fraud is done using “real” money. we should get rid of money to prevent fraud. /s
Have you ever been denied an application for a checking account? What about a credit card?
Potentially good news for HODLers
Potentially bad news for decentralization
Look at the covid crash in March, coins like BTC also dipped and peformed worse than indexes like Nasdaq while traditional currency hedge gold rose in value when both of them were crashing.
1 Yr Holders ETH +120% BTC +51% SP500 +12%
2 Yr Holders ETH +87.5% BTC +92% SP500 +24%
It's probably not fair to go back 5 years as ETH is up over 62,000% which make the other 2 look like a straight line & it would be past the date of your argument.
Here's a Yahoo URL that should allow you to compare different items though.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BTC-USD/chart?p=BTC-USD#eyJp...
I picked BTC as by volume and market cap, as that's the biggest out of those, about 5-6x of the second biggest in market cap. In the same URL you shared I compared Nasdaq with BTC and both seem to be correlated in the last 1 year. In the last 2 years, Nasdaq seems to have the lead for a while but the end returns seem to be the same.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BTC-USD/chart?p=BTC-USD#eyJp...
The stock 2 flow model predicts btc to reach $1 mill in 2025. I'm curious if this becomes true.
TSLA is up 470%
ZM up 400%
NVDA up 200%
S&P 500 (SPY) up 58%
Nasdaq (QQQ) up 70%
SHOP up 230 %
If Paypal verifies both transactions (Bitcoin and fiat), this problem goes away, and all KYC laws are followed.
PayPal doesn't want to get left in the dust. Square offers crypto, so even if the chance crypto really takes off for payments is small, they have a strategic disadvantage/weakness, which has now been rectified.
The basic concept of cryptocurrency is that you don't need PayPal or any company to be involved in digital money exchange.
By deciding that they are going to "support" crypto what they are doing is saying "you don't need to go use real crypto. Just buy it from us and we will handle it for you.". Which means instead of the transaction going through on the real blockchain, it goes through PayPal still. Paypal stays in the loop and gets their transaction fee. People don't own cryptocurrencies.
What we want is for Ethereum 2 and or Polkadot or whatever that is now starting to get better scaling ability to really take off and start clearing a ton of transactions per second.
It's amazing to me that people cannot see that PayPal and other banks or transaction middlemen have a fundamental conflict of interest with cryptocurrencies which aim to make them obsolete.
(i.e. if bitcoin is 21M max, what about these other two? I'm pretty sure they don't have a cap, but what's the inflation schedule/regime?)
Personally I view the supply cap as the killer feature for bitcoin, which is why I'm asking.
Don't really know anything about Polkadot.
Personally I think the idea that a fixed supply solves everything is an oversimplification. I mean if you want digital gold then sure. But if you want lots of everyday transactions I am not sure it can work.
Every country is still gonna have their currencies, and the most stable country is going to be used as the peg currency. Right now that's USD.
So basically Bitcoin is a digital gold, but the underlying trust mechanism is inefficient. Thus it gets centralized at big nodes, like banks or exchanges.
Thus it becomes basically a digital gold. You might as well have banks offer "Digital Gold, $1000 an ounce!"
I offer the perspective: you hold a set of deeply held assumptions that are being actively questioned and poked at by this technology. The level of your reasoning is not up to the task of understanding what happens, even long after the disruption has happened. I recommend investing in education on this topic.
A recent podcast episode worth listening to: https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/what-is-bitcoin
The cost of a Bitcoin speculator's "freedom" is paid by others. Real currency and banking systems actively try to prevent fraud and crime. Bitcoin is...whatever the exact opposite of that is. It exists only to be itself -- provably so.
The hate is getting less hatey each year. I think networks like lightning might centralization some, but as long users remain able to pay uncensorably Bitcoin still checks the ecash box.
Bitcoin can be censored. Do to it's transparent nature, miners can refuse to add transactions to blocks based on specific criteria such as sender, receiver, and transaction amount.
So if you had the world transacting on the blockchain ledger, it would take a crazy amount of computing power just to validate?
The real energy consumption comes from miners who use a crazy amount of computer power to secure the network. Bitcoin's transaction history is immutable because changing it would require an even crazier amount of computing power - too much for any malicious actor who tries to attack the network.
The amount of energy used is a feature, not a bug. There are no alternative designs known that could replace proof-of-work while keeping its security assurances, permissionless participation, fair distribution of coins, unforgeability, etc.
They are registered money transfer business. When they give out loans they use Synchrony bank for that.
This is worse than any of the existing exchanges. It's the robin hood of holding cryptocurrency.
Being in cryptocurrencies has made me cynical.
I think it's mainly due to purchases from institutions that believe that Bitcoin is a safe haven asset during the lockdowns. The spiel is: it's protection from currency debasement due to Central Banks everywhere printing out at low interest rates for the pandemic.
- Square spread 50MUSD worth buys @ 10K USD early October [1]
- Microstrategy spread 425M buys from 9-10K USD around August - September [2]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/08/square-buys-50-million-in-bi...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherbrookins/2020/08/14/...
does that mean a 'centralized' entity will try to facilitate payment based on 'decentralized' currency
wow
>Cryptocurrency payments on PayPal will be settled using fiat currencies, such as the U.S. dollar, meaning merchants will not receive payments in virtual coins, the company said
Will users be able to take coins out of PayPal and send them to merchants, or will this be another walled garden?
If PayPal's policies and fees weren't so difficult, many merchants wouldn't be into cryptocurrencies in the first place.
There was a time when if you said people would wear tracking chips you'd be labeled a kook. Today people willingly carry smart phones connected to social networks.
The disruption is similar in both cases. The result is predictable. The goals have already been stated at Davos.
Also, wen stablecoins?
On the operations side of things, I assume your site acts as an intermediary, drop-shipping the item?
- you don't own the keys and therefore don't actually own the crypto, just a vague IOU from payapl
- paypal can therefore credit you for as much crypto as you'd like (in exchange for your fiat) without actually owning/controlling *any* crypto at all, since there is no way for a user to ask for a crypto-hard proof that the coins they own actually exist.
Does this mean they will amass a large amount of coin to speculate with in the market as they see fit?
>Can I transfer crypto into and out of PayPal? Currently you can only hold the cryptocurrencies that you buy on PayPal in your account. Additionally, the crypto in your account cannot be transfered to other accounts on or off PayPal
https://twitter.com/Cz4182925/status/1318912301488025602/pho...
It's a shame. The concept of digital cash is such a cool concept, it would be nice to discuss it without every convo mired in the same boring non sequiturs.
I also wonder how the China factor will play into the future of it: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/pools/#:~:text=Po...
The difference is that the Bitcoin network is completely transparent and auditable, and we can accurately estimate the total energy used to secure it; whereas the banking network is opaque and we can only guesstimate how much energy they really consume
In all seriousness this kind of thing should be decided upon with public debate and discourse, where pseudo banks and payment processors are compelled to accept crypto currencies if the law and the people deem them as legal tender.
Isn't that exactly how it works right now? The "public" don't get to decide directly because that's what governments are for, but if a currency becomes lagal tender, people do have to accept it.
> A private company gets to decide how and when we can spend our money.
No more so than before. Now you can also spend crypto when buying through PayPal. You can still spend crypto elsewhere and you can spend fiat with PayPal and elsewhere.
That's .. not going to happen, unless one of the "central bank cryptocurrencies" goes live.