There are some things that cause PayPal to just freeze an account, and it's next to impossible to speak to a human or to otherwise get the situation resolved.
Pretty much the only threat to Stripe's eventual world domination would be PayPal getting its act together.
Paypal is risk averse, which means you shouldn't use them for cases where you're taking a large amount of money up front and not delivering in the near future (i.e events, crowd-funding), or alternatively get pre-approval from Paypal.
I've no idea what the current fraud level against Stripe is, but as they become more mainstream they're going to need to employ more anti-fraud and anti-risk measures as their exposure increases.
I'm one of Stripe's cofounders. For what it's worth -- we already process billions of dollars a year. (More than PayPal when it was acquired.) There'll always be more we can do on the fraud/risk side, but we're already operating at a scale that requires a decent amount of sophistication.
The problem is that fraud/risk (like tech security) is it often involves black swan events. Everything seems fine right until the point where it's not and you're on the hook for millions of dollars (Stripe is probably in the position where you can afford to take a few black swan type events and survive; a lot of Paypal competitors weren't).
Given that Stripe don't do the "wallet" approach of Paypal and is primarily focused on API customers I'm guessing your risks in general are lower, but I'd recommend you be careful about becoming over-complacent.
Absolutely. Indeed, I'd characterize us as actively paranoid. My point was merely that we're already operating at a scale that needs pretty good fraud systems.
(I think we're mostly in strong agreement.)
Everyone keeps saying that fraud will be a serious problem for Stripe, but they move a huge amount of money now which is probably comparable to the period when PayPal nearly got destroyed by fraud - which was around the year 2000 when the web was a lot smaller.
Payments are final and instant and, best of all, don't require a middle man.
Only for extremely specific and useless definitions of "no fraud."
If I send my bitcoins to someone to buy something, I have no protection if they decide not to deliver.
At which point the Bitcoin enthusiasts will say "but you can use a third party escrow service," which is true, and puts us right back into the same situation we are with PayPal.
Online it's the same thing. I'd pick credit card or Paypal over bitcoin just like I pick credit cards IRL over cash. It has nothing to do with obscurity.
With Credit Card companies and their proxies, Stripe, PayPal, etc. there is no option of choosing a buyer protection service provider which meets your needs (unless you consider strict to extremely strict a choice).
Buyer protection isn't always a good thing. Often it is a hindrance to progress. Merchants should be able to chose the level of buyer protection they want to offer.
Bitcoin escrow doesn't work that way. Escrow cannot decide by itself to freeze your money. There are three parties in the transaction and you'd need the consensus of at least two of them to move the money. It's either the buyer and seller (in ideal transaction), or the escrow and seller or the escrow and buyer in a situation where transaction is disputed. The bitcoin escrow cannot behave like paypal do in this case.
To be more precise, you have no protection from the money transmission service. This is no different from cash.