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Comment by tobylane | Hacker News Reader

Without Visa, Mastercard or Paypal on the other side how can it survive? Cryptocurrencies as the current niche are hanging on, I suspect for as long as VMP permit them (ie buying bitcoin with a credit card). Everyone else, even Apple, go through them.

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Separate economies don't necessarily have to be equal in capability. One may be the dominant while the other operates closer to being a black market, while not necessarily being an actual black market.

Maybe it would be based on cryptocurrency, or a more traditional form of currency that is centralized but isn't USD, for instance. Or someone with a lot of money decides that having dominance over a new economy takes the opportunity and forms their own "competitor" to Visa, but it operates within the economy that Visa decides it doesn't want to be a part of. Then again, maybe Visa one day leaks enough customers that it decides it's not worth being as moralistic.

> Without Visa, Mastercard or Paypal on the other side how can it survive?

Bank transfer?

It's really more of a bootstrapping issue than anything. You need to accept credit cards because that's what your customers expect to pay using.

If your customers start to expect to pay using some cryptocurrency, what do you need credit cards for?

First you have to reach a critical mass for the alternative payment system, but the more legitimate businesses that PayPal boots to the other side of the wall, the more mass there is on the other side of the wall.

Genuinely curious: if it’s a growth thing, how did PayPal get where they are today? I know eBay was involved, but not much more than that.

First to market advantage, more or less.

Also, it's even not so much PayPal as Visa and MasterCard, and how they got the way they are involves both politics and backroom dealings.

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