I don't agree with proexploit's assertion that we'd be better off without PayPal, but I also wouldn't carry signs and chant slogans in the streets if the US government forced them to be better stewards of their customers' hard-earned money.
The point of my comment was that proexploit makes it sound like the 180 day hold follows from PayPal not being a regulated bank, where the reality is that regulated banks have the same 180 day hold.
I fear I may sound fishy standing up for PayPal considering its unpopularity (despite so many on HN using it without problems), but I don't like to see the perpetuation of untruths. The people that write these complaints must have never read a merchant account agreement. The list of banks that underwrite the Payments Pro accounts are on the PayPal website under the Legal Agreements link. I do read every contract I agree to.
Even if only 1% of PayPal's users were dissatisfied you'd have much more activity than a couple dozen forum posts a month spread across the web and an outdated PayPalSucks site. That'd be over 2 million people with a reason to vehemently complain. The level of chatter you hear makes it much more likely that significantly less than 1% of their user base has serious problems with the service.
No, I'm not using a different product than you. I've been using the plain-jane standard PayPal payment links and subscriptions since 2000. I'm not immune to their risk department either; someone called me just this month to express concern at my account's refund rate after I cancelled some suspicious looking orders.
I'm sure my account has enough notes on it that I'm a single mis-step away from being frozen myself through no fault of my own. But that's nothing less than I'd expect from any of my payment providers. This is business, I understand why their policies are what they are, and I'm prepared for the chance that they may choose to stop doing business with me at some point in time. A little bit of basic knowledge about the financial industry they operate in and you'd run your risk department the same way.
For a good read, get a copy of the book "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days". One of the stories is that of the founding and early growth of PayPal. The only reason they are here today, where their great many competitors during the dot-com boom aren't, is that they figured out how to manage fraud risk. They were hemmorhaging tens of millions of dollars a month to fraud losses, but they held on long enough to build the risk management systems you need to provide payment processing to the masses.