I wonder why Douglas Crockford, a brilliant man, still works there (other than obviously well compensated time).
They're equivalent to big banks, and big banks never die. Even governments bail them out when they screw up.
Bottom line, the bankers always wins. That's how the world is setup today.
I'm not a financial expert so this is just my naive view of all the crap that goes on in the financial world. Hope I'm wrong...
Big banks screw up impressively, but not consistently. They can go broke and survive, they can commit massive fraud and survive, but they can't be utterly useless at the very act of banking and survive.
Paypal is rapidly approaching that point. It's name is almost synonymous with "we'll ban you without warning, and freeze your funds when we do". It's literally the first thing I expect when I see 'Paypal' in a headline.
Big banks survive partly due to FDIC insurance and similar - they're fairly unlikely to simply strip all the cash from depositors. Paypal, by contrast, has ruined everyone from Amazon sellers, to Kickstarter campaigns, to startups. At this point, I can't imagine starting a business that relied on Paypal without having another, more reliable way of handling payments.
Put it this way: I would trust Chase to handle my paychecks, even if they do make bad investments. If they started randomly freezing 2% of deposits, I would sure as hell not continue trusting them.
They've already screwed up and screwed people over publicly dozens of times. Paypal does have to go, but I don't think paypal will die until someone offers an equivalent service.
I can't imagine a consumer revolt, but at a certain point "makes your users feel secure" is outweighed by "makes you terrified you'll lose your money". I suspect that something like Stripe or Square will eventually sell companies on a "we won't screw you over" narrative and start to compete directly.
Dozens of times means absolutely nothing considering the billion that uses them.
Do you many how many thousands of times banks and insurance companies actually screw people -- and yet nobody bats an eye?
Besides the big assumption is that this is due to PayPals incompetence or malice, and not due to BS regulations (that anybody else will have to follow too).
I don't want to victim blame, but if you work in tech, and still involve PayPal in your business in any way you shouldn't be surprised about the outcome. Use Stripe, use GoCardless. Paypal Has To Go®.
I wouldn't ever use Paypal as a primary or exclusive channel for a startup, and I'm not alone. It may not become publicly hated, but if companies end up too scared to give it traffic, it will still die.
If that's the standard, there likely isn't a single major corporation that'd meet it.