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Comment by andegre | Hacker News Reader

so, what are some PayPal alternatives?

Depends on the functionality you need. For payment processing, try Stripe. To send money between individuals, try your bank's "send money to anyone" mechanism if they have one; I don't know of good alternatives there.

Venmo is evidently popular for interpersonal transfers. I haven't used it, but then again I'm right on the "Venmo line:" http://qz.com/277509/read-what-happens-when-a-bunch-of-over-...

(TL:DR; effectively everyone at QZ under the age of 30 is using Venmo regularly, and those over 30 are kind of baffled.)

Venmo is owned (indirectly) by PayPal. Braintree bought Venmo, and PayPal bought Braintree.

Transferwise. I have used it internationally to great effect. It is incredibly easy and fast. Another option here for easy and fast is Popmoney.

Square Cash. Ridiculously good. https://cash.me/ Payments show up magically in your bank account.

Downside: transfer limit is like $2k.

Google Wallet lets you send money to individuals, even as an attachment in GMail, but not CC backed; you need to back it with a debit card IIRC.

Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on Wallet.

For small personal transactions, I like Square Cash [1] because I can pay by sending a simple email. Deposits also seem to be pretty fast.

[1] https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5372-square-cash-wit...

Surprised that no one has mentioned Google Wallet (https://www.google.com/wallet/send-money/). You may have issues sending money outside of the US, and a Google account is required. No fees and I've never had a problem with it.

> You may have issues sending money outside of the US

So basically the only reason why people use PayPal is because of international transfers, and as an option to that you propose something which only works in one country.

Sounds great.

> So basically the only reason why people use PayPal is because of international transfers

Huh?

Does that make me the only one who uses PayPal solely because a bunch of people selling things online use PayPal and it's somewhat more convenient than having to fork over my credit card info every time I want to buy something?

> Does that make me the only one who uses PayPal solely because a bunch of people selling things online

Selling things online, on the internet, where there are no country borders.... Sounds like international transfers and payment to me.

Am I missing something?

The vast majority of my PayPal transactions are domestic.

Sure. Yours are. Are at least so you think. If they weren't, you wouldn't know.

Now try to repeat that trick with a nationalized bank-service.

My point was that my use of PayPal - and presumably that of many others - is not explicitly because of the ability to do international transfers, but because of the convenience of not having to send my credit card information to dozens or even hundreds of different merchants. Whether or not international transfers are allowed has little bearing on the reason PayPal exists in the first place; it's just a nice feature on top of the core feature of not having to manage so much risk on one's own.

> basically the only reason why people use PayPal is because of international transfers

[citation needed]

Surprised no one has mentioned it!!

Many banks have free billpay services, you can send a check to someone for free, they can use their bank's mobile deposit to save the trip to the bank. Not ideal, but it also doesn't robocall you.

For instant, worldwide, international transfers in the 21st century... You suggest cheques and snail mail.

For real?

This blew me away upon moving from the UK to the USA. In the UK, my (old school, household name, bricks and mortar) bank's online service lets me wire money to any other British account completely free, up to multiple thousands of pounds. They all do. It's instant to many banks, up to 3 days for others. It has digital signatures for payments using a little pinpad device. It is how moderate sums of money moves around between friends and family and invoicers.

In the USA, the same facility causes the bank to mail a paper cheque. I was flabbergasted when I discovered that. In 2015, cheques (checks) are still absolutely everywhere. My debit & credit cards don't have chips. It's like the country is 15 years behind Europe.

Things are moving in the right direction though: many stores no longer take checks, and a new account I opened with a major institution lets me wire money to (and draw from, which is terrifying) nominated accounts with other institutions online for free, and their card has a chip on it.

In addition to the other recommendations, there's also Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies), which (for the time being) is the only option that's mostly immune to PayPal-style dickery (depending on how you manage your wallet and what methods you use to turn USD into Bitcoin and vice-versa; most formal American exchanges, for example, do have to collect quite a bit of information per relevant laws).

Unfortunately, cryptocurrencies have their own convenience issues.

For interpersonal transfers, I had good luck with Dwolla for a while before switching back to Paypal for faster transfers. If they go through with this, though, I guess I'm back to Dwolla if they haven't yet gone evil. Was pretty happy with them other than for the speed.

Amazon payments?

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