PayPal to support Ethereum and Bitcoin
newsroom.paypal-corp.com
newsroom.paypal-corp.com
Apparently it's legit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45250319
It's decently common for websites to do this-- this is the same reason why Github Pages is hosted at github.io rather than github.com, and why static blobs are at githubusercontent.com. Those have a somewhat different threat model than PayPal's news site (hopefully PayPal isn't letting any random person add news stories...), but the premise is the same: if the thing does not need authentication tokens for the main service, make it so that it's impossible for it to get them.
(You could get some of the same effect by scoping your cookies to a specific subdomain rather than allowing them to apply to all subdomains, but (1) that's not always how you want to structure your site, and (2) it's really easy to mess up and inadvertently scope a cookie too broadly (or for the browser to misbehave and send to subdomains anyways, which was the default behavior of one very prominent browser for a really long time). Using a different domain entirely sidesteps all of this completely.)
From a practical sense, what different does a subdomain and a dedicated domain offer if you're managing your certs correctly?
They serve entirely different audiences and are usually separately managed for the product sites, it’s also common for the latter to be blocked by the companies which are the target audience for the former.
My bank also uses a different hyphenated domain name on emails… another use case could be to check for legit social media profiles cause fakes are popular too and may not be discernible for regular grass touching not-so-online in 2025 individual.
My browser lists 8 .paypal.com cookies and 2 www.paypal.com cookies when I visit www.paypal.com. Those cookies are shared with https://fastlane.paypal.com/ (some random subdomain I found online).
They can separate those cookies out, of course, but they don't need to if they use separate domains and the cheapest work is work that doesn't need doing.
They also seem to own paypal.ai which mcp.paypal.com redirects to the docs of it could also just be a branding thing.
`dig` on DNS also, if it resolves to the same IP as paypal for example, that adds confidence. Though again, nowadays less useful due to a lot of things being behind Cloudflare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Validation_Certificat...
You do need to know what US state PayPal is registered in for them to work, of course, as proven by https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/12/nope-... during the time EV certificates were still considered special.
I don't see why EV wouldn't be viable. ACME can work with any certificate. A certificate authority can just sign new certificates every week at the request of an authenticated ACME client. The biggest issue with this workflow is the CA's billing flow optimised for the "pay once, hand over a file once" workflow.
- Registering lots of domains (launchmyapp.com, trymyapp.com, myapp.info, gomyapp.biz, etc.)
- setting up a limited number of mailboxes per domain
- warming email accounts up for 2 weeks by signing up for a service that sends to and receive messages from your accounts
- setting up a meta inbox to track messages sent and received across all of your accounts
Now pretty much every domain that isn't myapp.com looks like a spammer's domain to me.
You sound surprised. What's the difference between "cold email marketing" and "spamming"?
Spamming is not that.
As for "the real world", there's cash and chip+PIN. Never used paypal IRL. Is that a thing in your country, did you mean that literally? If so, where are you from?
If I really don't trust the seller, I can always still get some sort of insurance thing, but an X% insurance fee needn't be the default for every transaction. (Even if the % is invisible to you, then the seller updates their product's prices. The seller won't choose to eat less just to finance your transaction fees... the only way to not pay those is operate a deficit, which eventually leads to bankruptcy and loss of your warranty, which isn't a desirable situation either)
Yes, I absolutely do think that. When I make a purchase through paypal, I am redirected to an authorization page hosted on paypal's domain. The recipient never sees my card number. I must authorize each charge. Whereas when I give my card number, the recipient can charge whatever they want, whenever they want, however much they want*
* subject to fraud protection.
This matters because sites do get hacked. The paypal horror stories you see are typically not consumer sided.
And of course the main feature of cryptocurrencies is that PayPal can't freeze your account when you try to withdraw money.
Sure, as does Apple & Google pay. I'm not saying PayPal is the only way, but I am frequently faced with either paypal or credit card, and in that situation I will do paypal every single time
this is absolutely the case for me, multiple times I had a great experience getting refunds with PayPal and multiple times I regretted not purchasing something using PayPal because getting a refund was much harder.
I now use PayPal exclusively for any online purchase > $500 precisely for this reason[1].
[1] unless it's a vendor that I know has a good return policy, such as JB HiFi.
I wouldn't store any money in it though.
And today I mostly see Adyen, Stripe, Klarna, Apple/Google Pay... in Europe PayPal is comically expensive.
Paypal is still probably the most popular "easy" checkout option in the UK, more popular than Stripe, Google pay and Amazon pay.
Maybe not more popular than Klarna, but I don't have a debt problem so I don't want to use that. Never heard of Adyen and I can't recall ever seeing Apple pay.
My wife placed a large clothing order some months back, but the package got ripped in transit and we only received about a quarter of it. The seller company refused a refund because the tracking data said "delivered", even though I was able to get confirmation from USPS that the package weight in transit lost most of it's weight between two shipping centers. The fact that we placed the order through paypal ended up saving us, we were able to bring them in as a mediator and they got us a refund.
Chargebacks, at least where I live, are much harder if you paid with a debit card. Paypal refunds are just the same no matter if you used debit or credit.
Enough people to steal 20 billion USD a year according to https://stripe.com/en-fr/resources/more/chargeback-fraud-101
Some advantages for me:
1. I don't touch your credit card or personal info. I don't want to know those things. I don't want to be responsible for keeping them secure.
2. Integration with the post office for generating shipping labels is seamless.
3. I think people are more confident to buy something from a little known business if they feel that PP is protecting them. The increase in sales probably covers the PP fee.
4. I can run my business from a passive web page. All of the other services require me to manage some kind of server, running code, that I become responsible for maintaining. I love coding, but don't want it to be part of this business.
From reading articles and forum posts two main sources of horror stories seem to be:
1. People who just seem to be "accident prone" in terms of getting into disputes with others.
2. Selling non-physical goods, which I can only imagine has its own pitfalls that I don't know about.
Works perfectly well for us, we don't handle any PI or CC details and clubs can connect their PP account to our platform for their registration / event management needs.
So, I'll use PayPal these days to pay someone with my credit card, but I'd be extremely cautious about receiving more than a small amount of money through them.
A few months ago, I checked an infrequently-used email address and noticed some unusual notifications about a "new user added to your PayPal account." I hadn't even remembered this was the email associated with my PayPal account - so after managing to reset my password and log back in, I managed to figure out that someone must have skimmed or brute-forced my PayPal password, set up a second account, attached their bank account to that new account, and begun draining my own bank account. By this point they'd gotten around $5,000 out of it.
Some features I noticed on the PayPal side that seemed obviously bad: PayPal sends no indication via email of these literal bank transfers, and there is a "feature" on the PayPal site where you can hide (but not, thankfully, wholesale delete) previously concluded transactions. The criminals had just hidden every one of the transfers. They also consistently used something like $499.99 as the transfer value, presumably because that amount prevents some automated level of scrutiny from kicking in.
Additional bad points: the interface for registering a complaint is in a highly counterintuitive workflow through the PayPal site, and seems almost entirely set up for people to register "normal" complaints, not fraudulent transactions.
The good side, however, was that I managed to find the right place, opened a case, and got the thing resolved and the money refunded to my bank account within 24 hours. So, excellent job, fraud resolution team at PayPal!
To tie back to the theme of this thread: my assumption is this fraud will become vastly easier after PayPal breaks (further?) with FDIC-insured fiat currency and people can just turn hacked bank accounts into BTC.
That's just one of the headaches they deal with. Also one of the reasons for using cryptocurrencies. PayPal may be creating the worst of both worlds by combining the complexity of cryptocurrency transactions with the need to abide by byzantine regulations.
Next to nobody's budged. It's all Paypal. I'm taking a class and I paid the teacher via Venmo, which is a fucking Paypal company. It's so damn entrenched. When the fuck can I take payments for furry porn via FedNow instead of giving money to these jerkwads.
Crypto was supposed to be an alternative to all this but, well, look how that worked out.
Crypto was supposed to be an alternative to all this but, well, look how that worked out.
It gave up a decade ago. I wouldn't call that "working out".
have to chose
Maybe you live somewhere that your landlord takes bitcoin, that's nice for you, my landlord wants USD. If you would like to fund me finding out if my landlord will actually take bitcoin if I ask nicely enough then please feel free to send a couple bitcoins to 3CzUW828J2u5wCB2xD4iE9kH8dPTokjxow.
Stripe would occasionally charge me an obscene amount of money to pay for the bank "charge back" fees
I never had this issue with PayPal; i usually get dispute cases, but they always get positively closed
My only issue with PayPal is their devise conversion fees, i'd argue their behavior there constitutes fraud.. and their UX, their web interface is painfully slow
I want a regulated middleman answerable to democratic legislation. Crypto people (largely) don't.
I guess this is mostly a play that crypto people won't actually care if there's a middleman if it creates some liquidity. That just seems like giving up to me.
this snippet is everything: "to PayPal, Venmo, as well a rapidly growing number of digital wallets across the world that support crypto and stablecoins"
this is effectively PayPal taking its "closed-loop" payment network, and opening it up to any wallet capable of receiving crypto/stablecoins - which is still a big deal.
your counterparty no longer has to have a PayPal account for you to pay them via PayPal - they can have any crypto wallet and get paid by you - which is in line with much of the crypto vision around global interoperability/payment acceptance/etc. you could compare to Visa/card acceptance as another global payment rail - but the difference here is closer to the difference between global card payments (easy) and global bank transfers (hard)
To pump their stock.
"Paypal is horrible. With bitcoin, you won't need Paypal anymore!"
"Paypal supports bitcoin. This is good for bitcoin."
The governments that are threatened by private citizens transacting outside their purview obviously.
Just look at Tether, the darling of the stablecoin world, which is minted by a handful of institutional clients. If you squint hard enough, you can see the banks.
As a naive consumer you might not see all the gears but the layers of complexity in traditional finance are vast compared to the bitcoin whitepaper.
I'm still amazed at how deeply this forum of supposed compsci gurus is hoodwinked by groupthink and a few "scam" headlines from info brokers.
...huh?
MetaMask, Trezor, MEW, Status
No, the whole purpose of crypto is to provide an unregulated financial playground for speculation and scams. As they say, "the purpose of a system is what it does".
Yes, they are somewhat of a necessary evil if you do any online peer-to-peer buying/selling, since they are the only money transfer service that provides some level of "buyer protection", but you want to do the bare minimum with PayPal to avoid unnecessary risk.
Link one bank account (not your primary) to PayPal to receive money, and transfer received money immediately. Link one credit card for purchases. Nothing else. Do not link debit cards, do not sign up for their "balance account" where money is held in PayPal (no matter how hard they push it with UI dark patterns in their app), do not sign up for their crypto account.
Has this been your experience with PayPal?
That's not even close to the worst stories I've heard... like running Rippa through the ringer.
More specifically, their support cannot actually do anything to resolve problems. They read off what their computer screen is telling them. They can't take any actions to fix things.
Edit: The above means that deposits on your PayPal account aren’t insured, different from regular bank accounts in the EU. This is a frequently emphasized caveat regarding the use of PayPal as a bank account in the EU.
My point is that one doesn’t get all the protections normally taken for granted for EU bank accounts.
What bank allows that on a consumer account?
They are not called Ing Diba anymore.
For anyone curious, the fee is $240/yr.
I used Mercury when I had an LLC and had a great experience. It feels like they're the only bank that's not 10 years behind in technology. I've never tried their personal banking, but the ACH denial power makes me a lot more curious.
And, when the only medium of exchange available to consumers and merchants is through one of these tokenized marketplaces, getting locked out of marketplaces means getting locked out of doing business entirely with no recourse or alternative.
Mediums of exchange should be neutral, and self-sovereign exchange has to be an option in order for marketplaces to offer competitive marketplace services, else they just abuse their monopoly on medium of exchange.
It's pretty nice, e.g. that when I buy a leash, it doesn't also have to walk the dog. Maybe for some, it's ideal to have someone else walk the dog, and the dog walker can even insist on bringing their own leash, but having the option of buying my own leash, putting it on my dog, and walking it myself means I don't need anyone's permission to own a dog, (not a big deal in the case of dog-walkers since there are so many) and substantially lowers the premium that dog-walkers can command in the marketplace for their services.
So while you may want a self-sovereign exchange, your counterparty doesn't give a shit about your preferences, or is actively happy with using PayPal (Because their dispute resolution is better biased towards their side of the transaction, or because they just never gave it a second thought.)
As a counterpoint to the rhetorical impossibility of a challenger overcoming an incumbent (in almost all subjects this is true, despite challengers in the world regularly overcoming incumbents), exchange rates indicate markets are positive about the network effect threshold being overcome, since if it is impossible to overcome, the value of all cryptocurrencies combined is approximately 0.
"Those are functions of a marketplace"
Then it seems you should have said "If only there was a technology and a marketplace which fixes this..."
And no, it doesn't exist because handling disputes is a hard problem. It's the actual moat of PayPal (and credit card companies) and the reason why they can get away with their crappy behaviour.
> No clue what I did, no recourse, now locked out of a fuckton of global marketplaces and peer to peer transactions that uniquely only work on a platform like PayPal.
I am not saying there is a single technology that is completely at parity without paypal without the problems, I'm saying that there is a technology which can give you access to global marketplaces and peer-to-peer transacting if you are locked out of the paypal/CC system.
And the payment processors don't have a moat in their sophistication in dispute resolution. This is a hard problem, but a solvable one if you have lots of liquidity: e.g Amazon, AliExpress. Their moat is having lots of liquidity, regulatory capture, and network effects.
Places like swapd that operate on crypto escrow every transaction to lessen these crypto problems.
One thing I did - in response to them saying I could no longer do business, I told them that they also could no longer do business with me, requested a copy of all of the user data they had on me under CCPA, and told them to then delete all of my personal information. They did not actually comply and I didn't pursue. I probably should, though.
s/demonic/pernicious
I switched to a hardly used checking account for paypal after they held $20 hostage for a couple months after selling an old video card on ebay. I'd heard some one say their bank account had become frozen by paypal during a dispute and that event reminded me of it enough to get some separation.
Costs 1.5%. Or wait a few days.[1] Plus a fee for receiving cryptocurrency. There are additional fees for buying cryptocurrencies, other than PayPal's own. And none of this is FDIC insured.
[1] https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/paypal/pp-balance-tnc?loc...
Mine does supposedly but does not let me, the account holder, use FedNow. Instead I'm stuck using Zelle which I can hit the limits of just by paying a mortgage payment.
Now instant payments using SEPA are mandatory and rolled out everywhere.
The thing that gets me is the 40% cash back on Walmart purchases up to 500$. It's such an incredible incentive it has to be shady af. Are the Rand oligarchs trying to buy out the poor? We'll never know because poor people don't have PayPal accounts.
"A something-or-another big enough to give you everything you want is a something-or-another big enough to take from you everything you have." -Voltaire
All very true, but banks are doing exactly the same thing, all while following banking regulation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38150606
"In 2008, PayPal Europe was granted a Luxembourg banking license, which, under European Union (EU) law, allows it to conduct banking business throughout the EU.[173] It is therefore regulated as a bank by Luxembourg's banking supervisory authority" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Regulation
You're not wrong that they don't act like an honest bank, or abides by any sort of ethics about whose money it really is that they're holding onto... but know that they are regulated in case that ever helps you!
In the US, this is true with some important caveats.
"If you have opened a PayPal Debit Card Mastercard® account, enrolled in Direct Deposit, or bought or received cryptocurrency with your personal PayPal Balance account, we will place your U.S. dollar PayPal Balance funds at one or more Program Banks. Any other balance funds and all cryptocurrencies are not held in FDIC insured bank deposits. Cryptocurrencies may lose value." [1]
[1]: https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/paypal/program-banks-tnc
You don't need Paypal to use Bitcoin, but there's nothing in the spec that prohibits it.
In practice, the word "decentralized" just speaks to whether anyone can join in the protocol if they want. But it doesn't mean the protocol is easy to implement.
The benefit comes from having the option to go elsewhere. A business that cannot lock you in is more likely to try to retain your custom by offering a good service.
The reality is, we will have a mix of custodian - through third-party - and self-sovereign usage; depending on the context and user's skill
> Under capitalism necessities become luxuries, while luxuries become false necessities. Umair Haque
I used to work at a few big banks, and because of the "friendly" nature of digital currencies. The traditional banking entities are trying to get in on the grift while they can.
Coinbase's spread isn't the worst thing to pay for the service of having a debit card and auto-selling, but if you also buy crypto using Coinbase, they double-dip on the fee.
The same is true of cryptocurrency. It's not a problem that centralized service providers exist. If they stop providing useful services, people can just take their cryptocurrency and go home.
Most large company entries into the crypto space seem to fizzle out and disappear due to lack of use, and how annoying it is to deal with currencies which fluctuate in value between the time you've spent them and the time the transaction is approved (I understand there are lightning networks), and then there's the issue with maintaining wallets.
It really just adds nothing but extra complexity to the existing electronic payment methods. And takes away tons of things like regulators, regulations, consumer protections, strong case law.
There's plenty of alternatives these days so now I just use the direct credit card option on most sites.
Although, they're pretty late to the game. Company must not be integrated super tightly since Venmo's had some crypto support for years now.
Stablecoin payments really are just better: - Instant settlement - Extremely cheap - Extremely reliable - Highly programmable - Built on open protocols - International
There are no traditional banking systems that offer all of these properties!
If anyone is tempted to reply with "okay but that could have been done with a database" I would really encourage that person to try to think hard about why that didn't happen.
An immutable ledger to put information is the best invention since sliced bread, and that can only be achieved by an underlying economic system to maintain such a ledger.
That being said, probably all crypto (except one) will go to zero very soon. Crypto is a bubble, but it doesn't mean that the underlying technology is useless.
I also use it myself as a backup abroad when my regular bank foreign account doesn't work for any reason.
I got the card in the middle of the night in 10 minutes.
I think all that is simply awesome.
Also, you can have complete separation if your accounts are at Bank A, and the dependents are at Bank B.
I'm not trying to convince you, but moreso keep others from making parenting harder than it already is.
I got this in 10 minutes and have 0 maintenance, and you want me to have account at bank A and B which can take days, if not weeks, along with the constant management. I have a life, you know.
Nah, I am gonna keep using a crypto card while my neighbor still waits for a card of the local bank 3 months later, after a tone of back&forth.
I can buy anything anywhere. If it supports regular cards, it supports crypto card.
My first test was to buy candy btw in the local corner shop in the middle of nowhere.
It is really funny how people on HN can be so stubborn.
You are welcome.
What are the fees associated with using the Bybit Card?
Here's a breakdown of the fees:
– Foreign Exchange Fee: 1% (on top of Mastercard's exchange rate)
– Crypto Conversion Fee: 0.9% (on top of Spot trading fees)
– Annual Fee: None
– Dormancy/Inactivity Fee: None
– Card Cancellation Fee: None
– Card Issuance/Replacement Fee: None for Bybit Virtual Card; 5 USD/USDT for Bybit Physical Card
– ATM Withdrawal Fee: 2% (applies after reaching the monthly free ATM withdrawal limit of 100 USD)https://wirexapp.com/help/article/wirex-fees-1379
https://wirexapp.com/card, or affiliate link: https://ale.sh/r/wirex
Not sure what you mean. Nobody buys anything with cache anymore. I keep some cache in my car for bazaar and similar stuff, but all but few stores accept cards everywhere in EU I go. The convenience of having all your cards on a phone is unparalleled.
This differs greatly according to global region. Germany from what I've observed is an outlying for noticing the distinction (mostly because they suffered from very high credit card surcharges for decades vs the rest of the world).
https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/stripe-bridge-acquisiti... has some examples
So that does not answer the question what legit stuff businesses do.
However, AFAIK eight of Russia's biggest banks are still cut off from SWIFT: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWIFT_ban_against_Russian_ba...
I feel like this is the wrong question to ask. Instead try "why would someone purchase with crypto over fiat?". I prefer to use crypto for international online purchases because the transaction and conversion fees from my native currency are way too high. With crypto it's a one off deposit fee and then gas is trivial these days.
But enabling everyone to skirt around it completely is not a good outcome IMO.
Enabling everyone to skirt around it completely would be in effect a return to the state of affairs that prevailed throughout the entire 20th century, and that would probably be a good tradeoff.
Investment accounts on the other hand take a while for sales to settle before your funds are available as cash.
That said, I think Australia might be uniquely blessed by Livingroomofsatoshi. It basically bridges crypto to all our other payment streams.
Oh and grey market stuff all the time. Drugs that arent like, go to jail illegal but ship internationally direct from india. That sort of stuff.
I was so angry when Vision Direct lost the ability to ship prescripting contact lenses to US customers — my prescription hasn't changed in two decades! The only crime being committed here is the cost of my annual examination.
video games with https://www.kinguin.net/
there's lots of places to spend crypto if you look, and I don't feel like needing to associate my identity just to purchase digital goods. Crypto facilitates that. People forget it's even an option.
I could create an account, buy a domain name with a gift card, and put your username in the WHOIS.
So I’ll continue to avoid them in the next 6 years as well.
Well, they're not above the law. They're effectively a bank and must follow the laws in the countries in which they operate.
Paypal was granted a banking license seventeen years ago. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Text: PayPal users in the U.S. can begin [..] today, with international expansion [..] starting later this month.
So immediately out of the box it is exactly NOT for "anyone" and NOT "anywhere".
This is contagious: a couple of years ago Gnosis tried to launch their Gnosis Card[1] on Berlin DappCon with the exact same slogan: "Anyone, anywhere" while only accepting applications from a select group of people living in select EU countries.
I have had discussion with their CEO right there regarding this marketingspeak but he did not seem to grasp what's the problem at all here.
You can't make this shit up.
"Look how global we are… as long as you have a U.S. address, the correct passport, a bank account in a supported country, a smartphone with the correct OS."
pass.
Of course it will be as far from "anyone" or "anywhere" as possible, because they will start the crypto expansion in a much more restrictive fashion than TradFi.
People who love crypto will hate anything that has anything to do with legacy censorship-prone fraudulent financial institutions like PayPal.
Who is this for?
For a general background, searching for 'paypal' reveals a thing or two: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=paypal
> - Thinking of Selling on eBay using Paypal? Think Again
> - “We found PayPal vulnerabilities and PayPal punished us for it”
> - We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business
> - PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub
> - More Paypal nonsense
That's five of the top eight results. The last one pretty much sums up the sentiment of the whole page
Paypals reputation in the FinTech space is that of creating a service that restricts as much as possible what can be done with your own money. All in the name of "security." Even though they seem to offer the worst security of any platform, coupled with the now infamous risk of having your funds "frozen" for any arbitrary reason. In short: I literally cannot think of a company I would trust less with digital currencies than Paypal. And seeing them support any of them just makes me think "wow, you fucking phonies."
A lot of activity moved to L2s, making L1 gas cheaper, and so simple ETH and token sends are cheaper. L2s will continue to get cheaper, with the next hard fork around November and L1 gas should be even cheaper with the hard fork after the next.
There are sites that still support Visa / Mastercard but removed their Paypal support. SubscribeStar, for example.
To look at it another way - why one would spend $100 from their brokerage account if they know a year later they can spend $110?
It's rational to buy stuff when it's cheap and sell stuff when it's expensive. Not the other way around. In other words, if the money gets suddenly more valuable, people would go on a shopping spree, which would cause inflation and the value would return back to normal. They wouldn't wait for it to be even more valuable. The situation would be different if there was a guarantee of deflation, but there isn't.
Economic demand is driven by human needs and wants. Lot of everyday consumption, like food, is bought when it's needed, and can't be bought 5 years later, because you'd be dead already. Other things, like a computer or a car you can buy later, but then you'll have to make a calculation whether the thing is more valuable today or after 5 years if you'll get it 30% cheaper. There's no situation where you sit on a pile of bitcoins and just die there waiting.
It took nearly six months to fully close down the account and many, many phone calls, which were equally difficult because it's nearly impossible to speak to a real person, and when you do finally get connected to a real person they just hang up on you when they realize they can't solve your issue in under five minutes. Paypal is one of the worst companies I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with, and money or crypto is the last thing I would trust them with.
Never again.
The main issue at the time seemed to be that it couldn't really work as a medium of exchange. Eg; $100 paid on the Monday might be $80 or $150 by the time it actually cleared. Maybe I was really inept but I got sick of the complexity and bailed, even though I liked the idea of having these options.
I wouldn't try Paypal's offering as they don't have any kind of quality support for merchants.
you wallet is self custodial there
do they think countries' populations will "opt in" into dolarizing that country econony (a la argentina in the 80s) bypassing their central bank opinions?
or is this much simpler and is just "ebay now works as crypto escrow for your bids"?
congrats if you buy a stablecoin - you've effectively financed the US gvt at 0%.
now the US gvt can inflate away that debt at 0 cost to them, and pass on the cost to you.
that's why a bunch of these stablecoin companies are pushing it as a way to save for people in distressed economies.
what a way to steal from the poor.
that's why the crypto act was called GENIUS act.
Just Devil's Advocate, but isn't that a reason not to use stablecoins? I mean, I can participate in the fleecing of the poor without changing anything at all apparently.
By swapping the volatility from crypto to lower USD volatility, they effectively create a funnel from riskier currencies into dollars.
Which is the same state that previously existed... except now facilitated by the crypto industry's global accessibility/UX and with less international regulation.
Blessing USD stablecoins at the US federal level was a smart move (from the US-perspective) as it creates a much bigger demand for dollars, and if the US didn't do it then China or OPEC would have eventually gotten around to it as an end-run around dollar hegemony.
Winners:
- Crypto industry (more volume to skim)
- US Treasury (more demand for debt)
- Countries with less-stable currencies (lose further control of monetary policy)
- China / OPEC (miss opportunity to push dedollarization further)
- Money laundering (once volume grows, KYC and traceability will follow)sure, it couldn't happen without the local warlords, but still...
I don't know what the effect is called, but suddenly some unrest in some country or inflation in another calls for creating a whole new money system. It seems unreasonable and I'm a bit suspicious of where it comes from.
IIRC in hindsight at the beginning of 2024 the best was to exchange all your saved dollars to pesos, invest them in bonds or the bank, and exchange them for dollars at the end of the year. Probably you can get a 20% yoy increase. But there was a risk or many unexpected problems that would let you with a lot of monopoly money that is worth only a 50% of the initial value... So the safe option was to keep your savings in dollars.
Euros are another safe option. Pounds are very difficult to exchange. The money of nearby countries is sometimes better, but they may have unexpected surprises too.
> I don't know what the effect is called, but suddenly some unrest in some country or inflation in another calls for creating a whole new money system. It seems unreasonable and I'm a bit suspicious of where it comes from.
I agree.
These typically pay interest. (Or have retail servicing costs attached.)
[1] https://www.chase.com/personal/savings/interest-savings/inte...
[2] https://www.bankofamerica.com/deposits/savings/savings-accou...
A bunch of zero marginal cost capital funding purchases of U.S. debt would absolutely push down rates, possibly lower than inflation, because if you’re a stablecoin issuer you’re not constrained by yield.
This is a dumb-money venture. And if there is this much money that is this dumb, Treasuries aren’t the worst place for it to go.
If you think trillions of dollars in de novo price-insensitive demand doesn’t move a market, even one as deep as the Treasury market, I’ve got a stablecoin to sell you.
There is a floor to short term treasury rates because the Fed also runs overnight repo operations linked to the Fed funds rate
USDC on Coinbase yields interest. The USDC people make a little spread on it, but you aren't financing the US government at 0%, you're financing them at market rates. There is counterparty risk just like with a bank. Unlike a bank, there are liquid markets onchain for other fungibles.
Russia's take on the system is correct and we're seeing ASIANs and BRICS run away as fast as possible from $.
Ways out include total protectionism/mercantilism or war.
Gold is parabolic now. 10k by March is completely doable.
> The GENIUS Act requires permitted payment stablecoin issuers to maintain reserves backing outstanding payment stablecoins on at least a one-to-one basis, and provides that reserves may only consist of certain specified assets, including US dollars, federal reserve notes, funds held at certain insured or regulated depository institutions, certain short-term Treasuries and Treasury-backed reverse repurchase agreements, and money market funds.
> In addition, the GENIUS Act requires stablecoin issuers to provide monthly public reporting as to the composition of their reserve portfolios on their website, and requires larger issuers (with more than $50 billion in consolidated total outstanding issuance) to publish annual audited financial statements. These monthly reports must be examined by a registered public accounting firm, and the CEO and CFO of a permitted payment stablecoin issuer must certify the accuracy of these reports to the primary federal payment stablecoin regulator or state payment stablecoin regulator, as applicable.
https://www.lw.com/en/insights/the-genius-act-of-2025-stable...
If another goal is to enrich the Trump family, then the SEC could forgo enforcement on the World Liberty Financial stablecoin. But they could still enforce the act for everyone else.
Increasing demand for treasuries, thus keeping interest rates down, also directly benefits Trump because he's bought at least $100 million in bonds since becoming president.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-buys-more-100-mill...
Stablecoin issuers earn yield from holding U.S. Treasuries, which sustains their business model. Meanwhile, people in distressed economies get practical access to a digital dollar, often cheaper and faster than navigating restrictive exchange rules or paying steep conversion fees at money-changers. That’s meaningful when local currencies are unstable or losing value.
Of course, not all stablecoin issuers are trustworthy, and some governments under economic distress may ban or limit these instruments. But when the setup works, both sides benefit.
Every country is different, but poor countries are mostly poor because they are governed by kleptocrats, generally including their central bankers, and hyperinflation in particular is a constant menace. When the central bankers aren't directly kleptocratic themselves, they are very often incompetent but loyal, similar to most of Trump's nominees. In this situation, generally speaking, things that put power over individuals' lives back in the hands of those individuals, instead of the kleptocrats' hands, will improve the situation not just of the individuals but of their whole country.
For example China, India and Malaysia have grown quite substantially are not particularly transparent, but they are alike in their resistance to dollarization. On the other hand Ecuador and El Salvador are examples of countries that have fully embraced dollarization with less than great outcomes. There are examples in the middle as well, but there is not a clear trend that it's necessarily a change for the better of the country and it's citizens.
To me it seems like a continuation of the IMF's dollarization as described by Joseph Stiglitz in 'Globalization and its discontents', in terms of mechanisms and effects on recipient countries. From this perspective it's less like transferring power from kleptocrats to the people, and more like choosing kleptocrats that are offering a better deal.
I do agree that dollarization hasn't been resoundingly successful, and that does undermine my thesis somewhat. I agree that cryptocurrencies are like super-dollarization: not only do they remove domestic government control of monetary policy, they remove or weaken domestic government control of and visibility into capital flows, banking services such as savings and lending, and payments. If that would be great, you'd expect dollarization to at least be good. And it isn't clear that it has been. It hasn't been obviously disastrous either—you can make credible arguments that Ecuador or El Salvador would be either better off or worse off without it—but it hasn't been obviously beneficial.
I think "choosing kleptocrats that are offering a better deal" is a good description of dollarization and, for example, Tether, USDC, or CBDCs. But, as a description of Bitcoin and Ethereal, it's comprehensively incorrect; there haven't ever been any credible allegations of corruption in their blockchains, unless you count Ethereal's DAO rollback. They've so far been completely immune to the kind of politically-motivated currency manipulation that is the actual official job of central banks behind fiat currencies like the dollar.
Further, stable coins / crypto are almost certainly being used to slop up as much liquidity as possible and has essentially so far pulled 4 trillion out of circulation. If not for that sleight of hand trick, hyperinflation, at least in the USA, would have already happened. Probably still will as there's only so much can kicking that can occur. I know of 30 year olds that literally live in mom's basement and dump nearly all of their just above minimum wage checks straight into Robinhood to blindly purchase crypto. Will forever beat inflation is the mentality.
Sure looks like there's going to be lots of pain for poor and middle class people in the next 5 years.
As MMT teaches us, a government that issues its own currency does not need to borrow to finance itself, as it can create the money it needs, though it may still issue debt for other reasons.
It's grift time baby!
Doubly so when the feature being discussed is crypto related.
I agree that it is confusing.
Ideally, companies would have a page "all the domains we use" as part of their footer links.
So many companies that should know better are helping to enable phishing by using random domains.
(also thought that it's phishing or scam domain).