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Comment by wink | Hacker News Reader

That's so much not a fitting comparison.

The most money I have ever had on my PayPal account was 100 bucks from a reversed transaction (like, double booking of a hotel room or wrong item sent), otherwise it's just a gateway. It would be annoying if my PayPal account was locked, because I use it a lot to order pizza online and a few small purchases. I could just use my credit card or something else but it's more clicks. And I know a lot of people who do it like this. The only thing lost is convenience. No past purchases, no digital identities.

Maybe you meant the merchants who really amass thousands but I suppose they are a small minority of active users.

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There are a good number of freelancers of various sorts that get paid via PayPal and only occasionally pull that money to their bank accounts to avoid the fixed fee, or even prefer to spend much of it straight from PayPal to avoid the percent fee. People also use it to send money between family members in different countries because it's often cheaper than an international wire.

It's quite easy to build up a few hundred or thousand USD worth. It feels just enough like a bank account that you think you're safe. Then...well, the internet is full of PayPal horror stories, I won't bore you with my own.

> and only occasionally pull that money to their bank accounts to avoid the fixed fee

You have a fee for transferring from PayPal to your bank account?

It’s always been free for me, as long as I don’t opt for the instant transfer option.

Last time I had to deal with that was 8-ish years ago and there was definitely a fee. Can't check now because they blocked my account due to a failed Spotify payment and I don't care enough to deal with their phone support again to get it unblocked

I've done probably hundreds of PayPal transfers to my bank account over a couple decades.

Never once encountered a fee.

Might be related to your country's local laws?

That you don't keep a PayPal balance and i don't buy Apple gift cards is irrelevant to the people that do keep a PayPal balance and do use Apple gift cards

I wish there are more comments like this on HN - well done :)

the number of people commenting like “well I don’t do/use/…” is mind-boggling

Maybe they're one of today's lucky 10000, learning that other people are different.

I think the point was that PayPal and Apple are different since PayPal is easy to mitigate, and Apple not so much.

I would go even further and say for most PayPal users there never was anything to mitigate because they didn't keep a significant balance there in the first place. Which is a perfectly valid reply to someone not understanding why so many people would keep using PayPal.

"It hurts whenever I hit myself"

"But you don't have to hit yourself"

"tHaT yOu DoN't hIt YoUrSeLF iS IrReLeVaNt To ThE pEoPlE tHaT dO"

For every purchase you make as a gateway there's a vendor account on the other end receiving that money and required to do accounting with it (like issuing refunds) which requires keeping a balance. These are the people having big problems when their account gets locked and their funds are no longer available. The blow back does potentially effect you if you return an item and then the vendor can't issue the refund because the account is locked.

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