The product they’re selling is insurance and peace of mind to buyers and increased sales because of that to sellers.
Anything you invent that does this will become PayPal even if it’s backed by crypto.
Not, no biggie, we’ve got an interesting in theory, largely impractical in practice alternative, crypto!
What PayPal is doing is entirely consistent with that. In a free society, suppliers are free to decide whether they want to do business with you, and under what conditions. And you are free to make the same choice.
(Of course, we'd hope that in a free society competition would take care of providing suppliers that offer conditions that customers can agree with. But there's no guarantee of that.)
Institutions need to protect the freedom of their users. You're talking about a completely different kind of freedom.
Competition is one solution to the problem, by avoiding incumbent institutions, but it often fails and it's not the only solution.
For example, (many) Germans expect to be free to drink alcohol in public or eat Kinder Surprise. (Many) Americans expect to be free to shoot guns, but can live with bans on public drinking.
No one wants to actually be responsible for credit card processing, but they want to reap the rewards of it. So PayPal is what you get.
As a consumer though, until crypto offers a compelling reason for me to use, it's nothing but risk for me.
When did this happen?
> Speaking to Canada’s CTV News on Friday, a representative for the top 10 North American financial institution revealed that “TD asked the court for the acceptance of the funds. They were raised via crowdfunding and deposited in personal accounts at TD.” Approximately $1 million is the money raised for the Canadian truckers and not refunded by GoFundMe, and the other $0.4 million is made up of direct donations. The bank said it was applying to entrust the funds with the authorities in the hope that “These may be used to distribute them in accordance the donor’s intentions and/or returned to those donors who requested refunds, but whose eligibility cannot be established by TD.”
I have heard this claim before from people about freezing protestors accounts, and it all comes down to either 'someone proposed it but it never happened' or 'some article that mentions something but further digging means it was either a private action or something benign.'
What does this have to do with the government using extra-judicial powers?
How did you come to this conclusion?
Sorry, but I see this time and time again, people complaining about PayPal/Stripe/etc.
They barely have a functioning bank in their town, they're definitely not gonna be able to pay their local bill with whatever fad blockchain currency for a while.
So I do all the work to buy and transfer crypto and hope it doesn't lose 20% of its value while I'm doing that because Elon Musk had a bad day and shit-tweeted. They what? Drive a few hours to work out where to get cash from BTC to pay their real world bills?
I had a friend in that situation once (sudden emergency), and I used snail mail to send one of those pictures of Benjamin Franklin that are printed by the US Treasury. It worked fine, no internet needed, no crypto, no blockchain, and no scam artist coin exchanges were needed to convert the Ben Franklin back into cash, since it was already cash. It beat Bitcoin in almost every regard, as far as I could tell.
I guess all of these too could theoretically be replaced with crypto depending on your need and situation. With something like a wire you are placing the transfer in the trust of your bank, which is secure but can take multiple days and can cost more than an ETH transaction.
Most mail arrives fine but mail theft is still a massive problem and rising, it is one reason you are advised not to regularly send cash in the mail.
Domestic wire transfers are almost instant, while international ones can take overnight.
Doing anonymous and untracked payments of significant amounts at scale is sure to tick off regulators. If your ETH transactions are non-anonymous and tracked, it's hard to see any superiority over ACH or wires. It's a solution looking for a problem.
I don't regularly send cash in the mail but I've done it a number of times, with no losses that I know of. A typical reason is that I don't feel like going to the hassle of getting a money order. I feel like sending a personal check is riskier than sending cash, since a stolen check reveals my account number, leading to possibly unbounded loss. I generally do use money orders if I might need proof of payment afterwards, or if the amount is high enough to worry about. I've sent $100 cash on a couple of occasions but more typically it's $10 or $20. Even that is an occasional rather than a frequent thing.
Domestic wires are slow in many countries, in the order of days, and costly[1]. My ETH transactions are done in 30sec, fees are usually less than a dollar, and they are pseudonymous - primarily only known to my CEX and government. The transaction is traceable while in transit and proof of payment easily found.
To me, it sounds like you are writing off ETH transfers without having actually used them.
[1] https://smartasset.com/checking-account/how-long-does-a-wire...
Fwiw, I live in an apartment, and any letters are delivered to my mailbox, which has a lock. There is not much likelihood of letters getting stolen after delivery. Packages that don't fit in the mailboxes are left on top of the mailbox, and those are much more exposed to getting stolen.
Yeah I'm not speaking for other countries, not all of which have functioning payment systems. ETH (current version) does sound more efficient than BTC.
Use DAI or any other stable coin.
It is a good point about integration. In all fairness, the merchent in said city could be convinced to accept block chain currencies -- but that's another discussion.
It really appears that a lot of people have strong opinions on something they know doorknob about?
USDC. DAI.
It seems like there is a lot of misunderstanding between what constitutes "a cryptocurrency mature enough to currently use on a regular basis" and "the speculative shitcoins/memecoins being propagated to the masses".
Technical merits aside, volatility is considered a negative feature of a currency. At least until that gets sorted out the "Not Paypal" options are what I will stick to.