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Comment by tedmiston | Hacker News Reader

A major difference is that customers can pay through PayPal from a PayPal balance whether they have a credit card or not.

People use PayPal from person to person for B/S/T forums. The PayPal user base is bigger in this community because anyone can accept payments without being a merchant, yet unlike dealing over Venmo there are still protections for the buyer.

Also, accepting payments worldwide is much more feasible. Stripe is in 25 countries [1]; PayPal is in 200 [2].

[1]: https://stripe.com/global

[2]: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/country-worldwide

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>A major difference is that customers can pay through PayPal from a PayPal balance whether they have a credit card or not.

Customers can pay through Visa whether they have a credit card or not:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Electron

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Debit

As far as I can tell it might be only USA banks that don't issue these kinds of cards as standard, in place of a bank card.

You're right — to clarify, I was trying to make the point that one can pay via PayPal with their PayPal account balance, as opposed to via any type of card (credit, debit, ATM, prepaid Visa gift card, etc). So, one can use PayPal without a credit or debit card. Stripe does not offer anything analogous to that.

I'm not sure about other countries but in the US, it is possible to open a bank account without a debit card attached to it.

And you can get cash into paypal without a bank account at all.

For instance, https://www.paypal-cash.com/index.html

In Austria you can't really get these debit cards, and my understanding is that it's pretty difficult to get them in Germany as well.

People here get useless Maestro debit cards. You can only get Visa/Mastercard credit cards. And very few people do, usually only people who travel to the US bother.

Those cards are pretty standard in America too. If you open a checking account, you'll almost certainly get a Visa or Mastercard credit/debit card.

At least in Sweden, the youth cards are usually completely blocked from online transactions.

Stripe can accept payments from anywhere. The merchant has to be located in one of those countries (or have a bank account there).

Not having a credit card is the main reason I see for people requesting PayPal (they may also prefer it if they already have an account, but that's not a deal breaker).

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