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Comment by chiph | Hacker News Reader

Doubtful. I expect this is a tactical marketing play to associate themselves with the current hipness of Bitcoin.

PayPal seems to have justly earned their reputation for frustrating many developers. Having said that, this is a new President and he has done nothing but say the right things since coming in. They've also realized major improvements to their API's/Docs etc. I'm not saying it's kumbaya time just yet. But I do think some reciprocal open mindedness from the developer community is appropriate to encourage further advancements in PayPal's approach to the web dev world. At least until we see that the leopards spots are no different.

Realized major improvements is a bit of an over-statement. They've made some new APIs available to US developers while completing sabotaging their existing developer toolset and sandbox environments to the point that they're almost unusable.

I could forgive this if their support seemed even remotely cognizant of these changes, but every time I get in touch with them it's like they're hearing about it for the first time.

I disagree: If they had no interest in integrating with bitcoin, the smart move for paypal would be to just spread FUD about bitcoins at every opportunity.

It's in their best interest to ramble about any of the current hipness and simply wait out to see about the viability of integrating it into their business. If it takes off in a non-niche way, they can claim that they were "first" thinking about it today, if BTC collapses for mainstream adoption, they can adopt the next and forget about their nonexistent "plans".

I disagree: If they did spread FUD they would be widely considered to be out of touch by the IT crowd. The same crowd they need to be incorporating the Paypal APIs into their apps.

PayPal already is considered out of touch by the IT crowd (and many other crowds that are actually involved in the selling or payment gateway integration end of things beyond "put this HTML on your page and use the Buy Now button").

It's still widely used because everyone knows about them and they're well-established. It's often hard to talk clients out of using PayPal because the barrier to entry for setting up an account is so low, despite the arbitrary terms and the relatively high fees and limits.

This could potentially be a bid to impress the IT crowd, which would be a good move for them if they actually follow through (it certainly won't affect my view of them, but that hardly means anything).

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