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> Not to mention that turning gift cards into essentially bank accounts is going to create even more issues. Remember how we have to remind people how paypal isn't a bank?

I would have thought the intention with such regulation as proposed by the original commenter would be that apps specifically stop offering such functionality?

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Then why not just ban gift cards outright?

Because they’re useful and well liked by consumers?

Who actually likes gift cards, as in, would still use them despite better alternatives existing?

If giving/receiving cash wasn't already illegal or socially unacceptable, gift card issuers would have started lobbying for that yesterday.

Other than that original use case, many people use them as a form of poorly functional digital cash (since it's not fungible across issuers) that really ought to exist natively in a currency these days.

I regularly got dunkin donuts, starbucks and the like gift cards for less the face value (sometimes half of face) and therefore strongly preferred using them when I shopped at those stores (at least when I had a balance).

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