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Comment by joahnn_s | Hacker News Reader

The whole purpose of crypto is to exchange money online like we exchange cash in person, so who wants PayPal as a middleman on a tech designed not to have a middleman? Who will use that

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PayPal 20 years ago made it easy to engage in internet commerce across various world currencies. And now users of PayPal have an easy way to commerce with two more world currencies using a familiar trusted interface. Another way PayPal as the middle man helps: "Unclaimed links expire after 10 days", which sounds like it avoids the problem of accidentally sending bitcoin into the void.

I completely understand why I would want paypal as an intermediary in the unlikely case I wanted to send bitcoin to somebody. I think what makes less sense to me is why people who actually like crypto would want paypal.

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.

>why people who actually like crypto would want paypal

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)

Is your legislation answerable to democracy? Citizens having some power in that case from outside the system could be very useful.

Easy answer: most people dont arent crypto people but may be open to accepting crypto from crypto people. Aka sending btc to friend/merchant who doesnt have any or vice versa. Crypto people are the small minority

> I think what makes less sense to me is why people who actually like crypto would want paypal.

To pump their stock.

Wait until democratic legislation in the USA starts freezing liberals' accounts.

That's the purpose of crypto, yes. As it turns out people like having trusted authority in their money movements, and so now we're watching the crypto world just re-invent the financial industry basically as a digital twin.

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.

Corporations and businesses aren't the only middlemen in traditional finance. The federal reserve, treasury, and/or whatever settlement system (swift), clearinghouses, and networks (visa etc) exist.

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.

> Tether, the darling of the stablecoin world

...huh?

For people who won't setup any wallet this can be useful. Self custody wallets are scary for some users.

What's the intersection of people who are afraid to set up their own wallet, want to use Ethereum and Bitcoin, and are happy to have PayPal as the one performing their transactions for them? Any of those might be reasonable independently, but it's hard to imagine someone fitting all three.

Quite a lot, because you're forgetting one key group - existing Paypal users who are interested in crypto but not interested enough to proactively pursue it.

"Trust PayPal with your not-wallet" oh sure.

The duality of crypto.

"Paypal is horrible. With bitcoin, you won't need Paypal anymore!"

"Paypal supports bitcoin. This is good for bitcoin."

I think the opportunity here is getting money from a bank account to an ETH or BTC wallet using "normal" means and not setting up a new account on a crypto exchange. Unless you're getting a paycheck in crypto, someone has to be a middleman.

Absolutely. Cryptocurrency should make payment middlemen obsolete. PayPal should get laughed out of the building here. It's incredible that this has any legs at all. This thread should be full of the names of Ethereum wallets.

MetaMask, Trezor, MEW, Status

You might still want an mediator, sure I can pay you directly on chain but what if you don't even ship my goods? I'm not going to court over an 5$ item but I don't mind engaging PayPal support.

I imagine that most people who use cryptocurrency for payment at all will still need to convert it to something else sometimes. Attempting to use it for everything would be pretty hardcore.

>so who wants PayPal as a middleman

The governments that are threatened by private citizens transacting outside their purview obviously.

Decentralized Finance!

> The whole purpose of crypto is to exchange money online like we exchange cash in person

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".

Scammers, who will need to exit the scheme at some point, while laundering gains in the process. Good thing techbros at PayPal will help with that minor nuisance :)

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