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Comment by kelnage | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, all the PayPal horror stories I have seen have been from merchants rather than users. PayPal tends to do a good job of protecting users, often to the detriment of merchants’ trust.

Also, PayPal services a niche of users who have bank accounts and/or PayPal credit, but no access to a widely accepted debit or credit card (such as Visa or MasterCard). Those users are often unable to use most other payment providers.

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I'd rather pay with PayPal on a small web shop than input my card details. If anything goes wrong it's super easy to get it fixed through PayPal.

Stripe doesn't cut it because it's on the merchant's site, so I have no way to tell if it's actually stripe or if they're pretending to be stripe.

A lot of small tech-related web shops do take Bitcoin though- so if I think I can trust them (and if Bitcoin is an option) I will use that instead.

that's not praising paypal (or btc:), just picking the lesser of two evils

Can you explain your response to his comment. He was just making a statement of preference, and nothing to do with praising anybody.

It's just better off not to make the type of comments you made, tying to weave your personal preferences into some else's statement of preference by interjecting some form of relativity of "evilness".

> A lot of small tech-related web shops do take Bitcoin though- so if I think I can trust them (and if Bitcoin is an option) I will use that instead.

So you will replace a payment method that has a method for recourse when you get fucked with one that is completely irreversible? That doesn't make any sense at all.

Even if Paypal or your CC isn't perfect, at least you have some form of recourse. With bitcoin, when you get fucked over, you are completely shit out of luck.

The reason I use PayPal is when I use my credit card on small websites I get fraudulent charges and have to get the card replaced. This had happened at least 10-15 times since I've been buying stuff online and it's a huge hassle. Small website security is absolutely pathetic.

I’ve used my American Express card almost exclusively online (a lot) since the late ‘90s and have never had to replace it. On the other hand, I only use my Visa for offline charges and have to replace it every six months or so.

1. Use privacy.com.

2. Tie it to whatever payment method you like.

3. Generate one-time use or vendor-locked virtual credit cards, each with their own restrictions for how much can be charged, cancelled at any time, etc....

4. Sleep easy.

Paypal represents 21% of e-commerce transactions in the UK and 40% in Austria, similarly popular in many other European countries where debit/credit is widely accessible. I wouldn't call that niche.

[0]https://ecommercenews.eu/ecommerce-per-country/ecommerce-the... [1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/434121/online-shops-popu...

Sorry, I wasn’t trying to say that the only people who use PayPal fall into those categories - in fact, I don’t, but use PayPal semi-regularly for some purchases - just that there are some PayPal users who can’t use common alternatives.

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