Comment by joahnn_s
Comment by joahnn_s 11 hours ago
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
Comment by joahnn_s 11 hours ago
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
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)
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.
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.
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.