PayPal on Android lets you bump phones to send money | Hacker News Reader

PayPal on Android lets you bump phones to send money

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28 pointscoderdude22 comments

Wow, it took them a decade and billions of dollars in revenues to realize their original, petty goal.

I hope I don't become a famous billionaire astronaut Fields medalist, before I realize my vanity goal of getting a six-pack. That would suck.

Yeah, that would suck.

Congratulations Bump, for helping Max Levchin's original vision for PayPal, as described in Founders at Work, come to fruition.

Congratulations. Now quit screwing your customers and I might decide to give that company money again.

You haven't cried until Amazon owed you money :-|

I have never felt so helpless in my life. Had about 4k with them, and their excuse for not giving me my money was "you're selling way too many books too fast". To get my money, I had to take a mugshot, holding up tens of USPS receipts with a pile of books behind me (as if it wasn't enough I was selling my most precious collections, if not friends.)

That doesn't sound so bad really. A photo is just a photo, they made 'proof' pretty painless and it's easy to see why they would do a double take if a non-company nobody is selling $4,000 in books.

10 weeks went between photo and payment.

For the record, so does FaceCash (http://www.facecash.com) on Android, and we don't charge fees for person-to-person transfers!

It would be sweet if this service (or any service, for that matter) was more widespread. A bit of a chicken and the egg problem here, though.

It's great to hear you say so. We're working hard to get more merchants (not just ones in Palo Alto) signed up. The more people you tell about it, the easier it is for us.

I haven't used paypal via phone, but paypay via the web is free for person-to-person transfers as long as you mark the transfer as such. There is only a charge when transferring to a merchant.

Not sure about that. My landlord can't accept rent via PayPal without paying a huge fee, and that's when I've funded my transfer via ACH. He doesn't have a merchant account, just an individual account.

IMO paying rent wouldn't count as a P2P transaction. I've used Paypal for years to pay friends, and there have never been any fees.

I think it was because of the transaction volume. Once you get past $3,000.00USD it looks like you automatically become a merchant with PayPal, even if you're not.

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_fees-rate-abou...

Can you bump a Droid with an iPhone yet?

Yes, with our software you can. I'm guessing it works with PayPal too since it's the same library.

He was probably asking specifically for the Paypal app. Not that this isn't a good thread to talk about your startup, but the question seemed pretty direct and your response didn't answer it past "I'm guessing"

...and your answer, which provides no additional information, begins with "probably." I was trying to (and did) answer the question: it's the same library, so the fact that it works with one application tells you something about the rest.

That headline is a bit ambiguous when Bump isn't capitalized.

For a moment, I thought that it was a bug where if you bumped the wrong button on the phone accidentally, you could send money accidentally and wondered if we had a new Antennagate type of problem.

I'm sure this is a fine product, but as a consumer I would need a little education on this product, because the very first thing that came to my mind was "accident waiting to happen."

Why didn't they just roll their own Bump technology? Can't be that hard to do, and now they're dependent on Bump.

The Bump technology is probably more complicated than it looks, especially when it comes to insuring that a transaction is unique, valid and can't be intercepted (the way a Paypal transaction needs to be).

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