whenever people tell me they don't understand the use for crypto, they don't seem to accept the explanation 'you use it to pay for things over the internet', and they'll point to alternatives, like Paypal. I'm glad that Paypal continues to vindicate crypto's necessity.
Crypto needs an out of band method of establishing trust which is the big difference. You can safely buy, well anything, with PayPal G&S and be as sure as one can be that no matter unscrupulous the seller you will be made whole.
The product they’re selling is insurance and peace of mind to buyers and increased sales because of that to sellers.
Anything you invent that does this will become PayPal even if it’s backed by crypto.
> I think the better response here is, demand that the institutions in your free society operate based on the principles of freedom and free expression.
What PayPal is doing is entirely consistent with that. In a free society, suppliers are free to decide whether they want to do business with you, and under what conditions. And you are free to make the same choice.
(Of course, we'd hope that in a free society competition would take care of providing suppliers that offer conditions that customers can agree with. But there's no guarantee of that.)
Institutions only need to protect the freedoms that their users care about.
For example, (many) Germans expect to be free to drink alcohol in public or eat Kinder Surprise. (Many) Americans expect to be free to shoot guns, but can live with bans on public drinking.
Depending on what they're buying, where they are from (PayPal and CC aren't very common outside the West), and the reputation of the seller, plenty people will take the risk.
Don't get me wrong, I like crypto, but it's not perfect either. You make a good point that crypto solves some of these problems that these centralized payment services can't or won't solve.
Crypto is not a better alternative for customers. Crypto is a better alternative for merchants, but primarily because it generally protects merchants against fraud. There are other reasons, but mostly it's a result of credit card companies, banks, and regulations, rather than PayPal itself.
No one wants to actually be responsible for credit card processing, but they want to reap the rewards of it. So PayPal is what you get.
As a consumer though, until crypto offers a compelling reason for me to use, it's nothing but risk for me.
I use crypto as a consumer so that I can self-custody a form of electronically transmissible currency. After seeing the Canadian government, certainly what anyone would call a "free, developed country" extrajudicially freeze citizens' bank accounts because of their political beliefs, I believe it's more important than ever to self-custody one's finances.
Nope. That article glossed over what was going on in favor of quoting the lawyer for the protesting group. TD just didn't want to deal with it and moved to give the funds over to the Supreme Court:
> Speaking to Canada’s CTV News on Friday, a representative for the top 10 North American financial institution revealed that “TD asked the court for the acceptance of the funds. They were raised via crowdfunding and deposited in personal accounts at TD.” Approximately $1 million is the money raised for the Canadian truckers and not refunded by GoFundMe, and the other $0.4 million is made up of direct donations. The bank said it was applying to entrust the funds with the authorities in the hope that “These may be used to distribute them in accordance the donor’s intentions and/or returned to those donors who requested refunds, but whose eligibility cannot be established by TD.”
I have heard this claim before from people about freezing protestors accounts, and it all comes down to either 'someone proposed it but it never happened' or 'some article that mentions something but further digging means it was either a private action or something benign.'
> The freeze is part of a class-action lawsuit filed by residents and business owners in Ottawa against protest organisers and participants, as well as against all those who donated funds after 4 February.
What does this have to do with the government using extra-judicial powers?
The number of people that use PayPal/Stripe/Google other 3rd party instead of acquiring their own merchant account directly with a bank and processing it themselves, or at least own their own merchant account and use a 3rd party to handle the integration.
Sorry, but I see this time and time again, people complaining about PayPal/Stripe/etc.
And yet, when I just went to close my Paypal account, I remembered my final use for it was helping out a friend in need who sometimes needed money to cover their bills.
They barely have a functioning bank in their town, they're definitely not gonna be able to pay their local bill with whatever fad blockchain currency for a while.
So I do all the work to buy and transfer crypto and hope it doesn't lose 20% of its value while I'm doing that because Elon Musk had a bad day and shit-tweeted. They what? Drive a few hours to work out where to get cash from BTC to pay their real world bills?
> And yet, when I just went to close my Paypal account, I remembered my final use for it was helping out a friend in need who sometimes needed money to cover their bills.
I had a friend in that situation once (sudden emergency), and I used snail mail to send one of those pictures of Benjamin Franklin that are printed by the US Treasury. It worked fine, no internet needed, no crypto, no blockchain, and no scam artist coin exchanges were needed to convert the Ben Franklin back into cash, since it was already cash. It beat Bitcoin in almost every regard, as far as I could tell.
That would be my fallback, yes, but that's also a pretty large risk of theft or loss if you get unlucky. Not to mention the added time involved in sending it thousands of miles by mail.
It takes a couple days to cross the country, and snail mail is pretty safe. 1% loss rate on a Ben Franklin picture would equal a George Washington picture. The transaction fees for the 3 bitcoin transactions (cash to btc, btc transfer, and btc to cash) are probably way more than that. And you can always use money orders, registered mail, overnight express, or whatever.
This is a pretty poor way of transferring value. High likelihood of theft or loss, long transfer time, low maximum legal limits. It may beat Bitcoin as a one-off workaround with no need to scale, but unlikely to beat L2 ERC20 crypto payments over the long term.
The likelihood of theft is reasonably low, certainly less than 1%. I don't know what L2 ERC20 is but normally for larger amounts within the regulated system, you would send a check or money order, or ACH if you were doing this at volume. At higher amounts you'd send a wire transfer. I don't see a role for crypto here.
You’ve described a few mechanisms that are different than sending cash in an envelope: check, money order, ACH, wire transfer.
I guess all of these too could theoretically be replaced with crypto depending on your need and situation. With something like a wire you are placing the transfer in the trust of your bank, which is secure but can take multiple days and can cost more than an ETH transaction.
Most mail arrives fine but mail theft is still a massive problem and rising, it is one reason you are advised not to regularly send cash in the mail.
That link is almost entirely about package theft, not ordinary letters. Even if I accept the figure of 3%, that's equivalent to a $3 insurance premium on sending $100 cash, not too bad. I'd put it at way under 1%. Lots of us still pay our rent and bills every month by mailing checks, same with annual tax returns etc., and losses in the mail are rare even though those sorts of mailings are identifiable as being likely to contain payments. A hand addressed envelope to a random person is less likely a priori.
Domestic wire transfers are almost instant, while international ones can take overnight.
Doing anonymous and untracked payments of significant amounts at scale is sure to tick off regulators. If your ETH transactions are non-anonymous and tracked, it's hard to see any superiority over ACH or wires. It's a solution looking for a problem.
I don't regularly send cash in the mail but I've done it a number of times, with no losses that I know of. A typical reason is that I don't feel like going to the hassle of getting a money order. I feel like sending a personal check is riskier than sending cash, since a stolen check reveals my account number, leading to possibly unbounded loss. I generally do use money orders if I might need proof of payment afterwards, or if the amount is high enough to worry about. I've sent $100 cash on a couple of occasions but more typically it's $10 or $20. Even that is an occasional rather than a frequent thing.
If you are sending cash numerous times in the mail I would say this is a problem and technical solutions that aim to improve on this are beneficial. That said, you and the receiving party may be living in more fortunate conditions. Many people in the world live in apartments, with mail rooms that are not well secured and are frequent targets of package theft.
Domestic wires are slow in many countries, in the order of days, and costly[1]. My ETH transactions are done in 30sec, fees are usually less than a dollar, and they are pseudonymous - primarily only known to my CEX and government. The transaction is traceable while in transit and proof of payment easily found.
To me, it sounds like you are writing off ETH transfers without having actually used them.
Why do you want a CEX and the government to have their hands in your transactipn? Does the recipient also have to deal with a CEX? If yes, that is another hurdle. And why do you keep referring to package theft when the cash is sent in an envelope and not in a package? Packages get stolen because they have stuff inside. Envelopes that look like random personal correspondence is much less attractive. If you have any stats about mail theft that is about envelopes, I'd like to see them, but stats about packages are something different imho.
Fwiw, I live in an apartment, and any letters are delivered to my mailbox, which has a lock. There is not much likelihood of letters getting stolen after delivery. Packages that don't fit in the mailboxes are left on top of the mailbox, and those are much more exposed to getting stolen.
Yeah I'm not speaking for other countries, not all of which have functioning payment systems. ETH (current version) does sound more efficient than BTC.
It is a good point about integration. In all fairness, the merchent in said city could be convinced to accept block chain currencies -- but that's another discussion.
It really appears that a lot of people have strong opinions on something they know doorknob about?
> and hope it doesn't lose 20% of its value while I'm doing that
USDC. DAI.
It seems like there is a lot of misunderstanding between what constitutes "a cryptocurrency mature enough to currently use on a regular basis" and "the speculative shitcoins/memecoins being propagated to the masses".
I would still prefer "something like PayPal, just not paypal" over Crypto.
Technical merits aside, volatility is considered a negative feature of a currency. At least until that gets sorted out the "Not Paypal" options are what I will stick to.
