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Comment by liquidify | Hacker News Reader

They couldn't do that. If they didn't actually have any crypto, in the event of a large scale increase in price combined with a large scale cash out, Paypal would have to eat the difference from buy to sell price. They would lose their shirt. At minimum, Paypal is buying some percentage of the crypto sales in actual crypto to act as a hedge. However, it is more likely they are closer to 1 to 1 backing since they probably believe that there will be large upward movements in the future and they believe they can make money on both the spreads and the actual bitcoin (assuming they ever care to sell it).

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They could just as well hedge the "PayPal-Bitcoin" they hand out to their customers with unbacked Bitcoin futures. They don't necessarily have to buy the underlying as long as they can find some other party who's willing to engage in a bet about the future of the Bitcoin price.

Though I must admit that it's doubtful for them to find enough cash to take the other side of this bet, so most likely they have to resort to actual Bitcoin bought from liquid exchanges or OTC.

Bitcoin futures are running at about 25% per annum carry.

They absolutely can find counterparties to take that trade, but it would be much more efficient to trade in the spot markets. The real question is if they have custody operations setup to handle the coin.

I expect they outsource these backend operations to the likes of Coinbase, Gemini, or Fidelity. They probably won't allow customers to transfer their Bitcoin out until they move custody in house, which is no easy task.

You're giving Paypal and Robinhood too much credit. It wouldn't surprise anyone if they both consider themselves "too big to fail" and do not have sufficient crypto to cover themselves. It's easy to imagine the meetings where someone "important" says "That will never happen, end of discussion." and then it turns out they they're wrong and they get bailed out (or not).

These meetings don't exist. Occasionally fraud and negligence happens, but not this casually. People running PayPal-sized companies are neither completely stupid not completely evil. A bit yes, but not this much.

"Too big to fail" - and that's how you increase the supply of BTC without actually doing so I think.

As long as an entity (such as the government) prints money and takes the hit on the spread people will see contracts of BTC as equivalent as BTC w.r.t value. Its basically banking, but since fiat is still the prime currency of legal settlement (not BTC) no one will think its possible to "run the bank" as that entity in the event of a run will pay the difference. BTC is not actually required to settle anything by most countries laws, so actually delivery of BTC isn't guaranteed. This does undermine actual BTC especially if actual BTC is harder to spend - the pseduo-BTC would then have more utility.

In other words BTC could be the same as fiat potentially in the longer term. It will be more transparent of course since it it easier to take delivery of than say gold (or cash but less so), but as long as they don't give you that option in your product that's fine. Even cash is like this with withdrawal limits, and other laws. If fiat was only valued by the actual cash in the economy it would be worth a lot more than it is now btw.

> Paypal would have to eat the difference from buy to sell price.

Why? If they never offer withdrawals then they don't need to worry about that.

If I buy a BTC for $30,000, then later decide to sell it for $47,000, Paypal will lose $17,000 if they didn't actually have a BTC somewhere in their vault.

This is the same idea as bucket shop operations that "trade" stocks with their clients without actually processing trades on any exchange.

When prices are rising, with new buyers available, then a bucket shop can do just fine for themselves. As soon as they have more sellers than buyers, at a price higher than they came in, the shop is the one that has to cover the difference.

If no one can transfer bitcoin out of the PayPal system then the only way for you to sell it for $47,000 is to find someone else on PayPal willing to buy it for that amount (or actually a bit more because of the spread). So PayPal don't lose anything.

Admittedly this doesn't sound right to me, but it's what the parent commenters seem to be saying.

It doesn't work like this. If paypal's customers decide to cash out as a whole, then that means there is a net sell. There won't be enough buyers in paypal to cover the sells. They would need to expose themselves to another market by buying / selling actual bitcoin to be able to float like you describe.

In most financial systems, there has to be a "banker" to make the market, i.e. they have to close the deals when the aggregate buy/sell deals end in surplus or deficits. So Paypal has to close the ending position -- at least that is my understanding.

I assume that they don’t hold the bitcoin but contract out the holding of the coins (or keys) to some 3rd party who specializes. They still make money on the spread and the buy/sell price gouge may be even larger to cover fees of whoever actually holds the crypto. Holdings may not be 1:1 still but it should be some safe amount.

Or maybe even buy more Bitcoin than they need? It seems to have worked out well for Tesla so far.

As Matt Levine pointed out yesterday, a mainstream company can make money by buying Bitcoin and then making an announcement that sounds like they're going to use it. (It doesn't matter whether that plan works out or not, as long as the price of Bitcoin goes up.)

For Paypal, getting their own customers to buy Bitcoin (that they already own) would be a way of hedging, if they're long Bitcoin to begin with.

IMO Tesla tries to get around China currency controls and lets people in China buy Teslas with bitcoin. I guess that is part of the reason why Tesla was hauled in front of the Chinese government recently. It is a good idea if it works out.

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