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Comment by khet | Hacker News Reader

If Bitcoin does succeed, I don't see a regular person wanting to manage his own wallet and security let alone understand all the complexity that is bitcoin.

I see Bitcoin becoming the underlying infrastructure on which companies like Paypal, Square, Banks and other financial institutions trade.

If Paypal does invest in adding Bitcoin, it would be right step ahead for Bitcoin and for Paypal.

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The real win is that if it becomes the underlying infrastructure, it is still possible for the common man to have a "manual wallet".

You won't end up in walled garden situations where a single vendor controls with massive fees and restrictions, but you have no choice but to use them, because hey, that's all everybody accepts and uses.

If an online wallet service/paypal/visa is gonna keep your business, they have to make what they offer be worth their fees.

What if you have large vendors like PayPal only offering transfer to other institutionally-controlled wallets?

for example: "Since your funds are transferred only between other PayPal users, PayPal can always reverse a fraudulent transaction."

Then you would have a veritable roach motel of bitcoins.

you could easily send BTC out of paypal to any bitcoin address, they could nto sue it and disable those coins from accessing the blockchain. However they could say that if you do a BTC transfer from paypal account to paypal account they could offer protection then by freezing the funds or having a 5 day period before the user could withdraw them. Once they are withdrawn there is nothing paypal could do, of course this removes the immediacy of payment aspect of bitcoin so merchants may not want it.

Really because bitcoinoffers low fees this sort of service would be of benefit to the buyer only.

Alternatively PayPal could use bitcoin as their backend for transferring money internationally. If i want to pay someone in USD but only have EUR then they could exchange EUR for BTC then BTC for USD and pay the USD to whoever I was paying.

They could place any restrictions on it they want if they keep both keys secret. They could also just keep all the bitcoins in the same wallet, and keep track of how much each account owns.

There's the value: a trusted* escrow service.

(* Well, within the known limits of how far Paypal can be trusted. )

Wallets are never going to be mainstream the way they work right now, so for most people, online wallets are the way to go - at least until hardware wallets are a common thing, like say in the form of a ring. If that ever catches up, I think it will be the way to go for people who want to have personal wallets.

Why not have it on a card in a wallet? I still expect to carry some dead tree money in this scenario.

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