Holding money (or crypto) in PayPal is a terrible idea. They are not a bank, they do not abide by banking regulations. They can lock you out of your account and your money at any time and leave you going in circles with their offshore support.
Yes, they are somewhat of a necessary evil if you do any online peer-to-peer buying/selling, since they are the only money transfer service that provides some level of "buyer protection", but you want to do the bare minimum with PayPal to avoid unnecessary risk.
Link one bank account (not your primary) to PayPal to receive money, and transfer received money immediately. Link one credit card for purchases. Nothing else. Do not link debit cards, do not sign up for their "balance account" where money is held in PayPal (no matter how hard they push it with UI dark patterns in their app), do not sign up for their crypto account.
> Link one bank account (not your primary) to PayPal to receive money, and transfer received money immediately.
Costs 1.5%. Or wait a few days.[1] Plus a fee for receiving cryptocurrency.
There are additional fees for buying cryptocurrencies, other than PayPal's own.
And none of this is FDIC insured.
If you link your bank, and approve direct debit (it’s just a popup with yes/later - very risky move), they will eventually withdraw from it when there are any issues. And most likely you’ll lose more disputes when your bank is linked - but no proof of this so take it with a grain of salt.
Staring at a “you can no longer do business with PayPal” email myself. No clue what I did, no recourse, now locked out of a fuckton of global marketplaces and peer to peer transactions that uniquely only work on a platform like PayPal.
I had one of these. My account ended up eventually being reinstated. No reason was given for the initial account freeze or reinstating.
One thing I did - in response to them saying I could no longer do business, I told them that they also could no longer do business with me, requested a copy of all of the user data they had on me under CCPA, and told them to then delete all of my personal information.
They did not actually comply and I didn't pursue. I probably should, though.
you should get a lawyer and try to sue in small claims court, it is the fastest path vs. anything they will surface to you. even by saying this I put myself at risk but they are truly a demonic organization
Those are functions of a marketplace, a low-cost pseudo-legal system so that you hopefully avoid using a state's costly and slow legal system. But if marketplaces also own the medium of exchange, e.g. marketplaces that issue tokens and only allow transacting in tokens (Paypal behind the scenes), their economic incentive is not to resolve disputes, but to create as many barriers as possible to converting tokens back into value as they can get away with, since this becomes the profit center of the business.
And, when the only medium of exchange available to consumers and merchants is through one of these tokenized marketplaces, getting locked out of marketplaces means getting locked out of doing business entirely with no recourse or alternative.
Mediums of exchange should be neutral, and self-sovereign exchange has to be an option in order for marketplaces to offer competitive marketplace services, else they just abuse their monopoly on medium of exchange.
It's pretty nice, e.g. that when I buy a leash, it doesn't also have to walk the dog. Maybe for some, it's ideal to have someone else walk the dog, and the dog walker can even insist on bringing their own leash, but having the option of buying my own leash, putting it on my dog, and walking it myself means I don't need anyone's permission to own a dog, (not a big deal in the case of dog-walkers since there are so many) and substantially lowers the premium that dog-walkers can command in the marketplace for their services.
Good point. I should have clarified that I'm referring specifically to PayPal in the US, which themselves state that "PayPal is not a bank, does not take deposits and is not FDIC insured".
It isn’t subject to the EU statutory deposit insurance, however.
Edit: The above means that deposits on your PayPal account aren’t insured, different from regular bank accounts in the EU. This is a frequently emphasized caveat regarding the use of PayPal as a bank account in the EU.
You'd be surprised. A lot of sellers don't "cash out" from paypal all that often, letting tens of thousands pile up. (And inevitably, some of them get hit with arbitrary account closures and have that money seized)
I assume you can't use Crypto instead of the bank account link, you probably require both. Otherwise this might have some use as another blast radius reducer for Paypal's antics.
I switched to a hardly used checking account for paypal after they held $20 hostage for a couple months after selling an old video card on ebay. I'd heard some one say their bank account had become frozen by paypal during a dispute and that event reminded me of it enough to get some separation.
This is all true, but are they actually any worse than any other crypto exchange? I just take it as a given that a crypto exchange can lock me out and steal my money at any time with no legal consequence, and so I try to keep as little money in them as possible. And at least PayPal is older and likely to have more senior engineers and fewer vibe coders, and thus be less likely to lose everything because of an elementary security error.
Why does their support being "offshore" matter at all? If they wanted to provide good, user-friendly customer support, they would, regardless of where the reps are?
They marked my account as hacked (it wasn't), and the first two submissions of a photo of my driver's license from my phone were rejected... not until the third time after calling the third operator was like.. yep, that's a driver's license with your name on it.
That's not even close to the worst stories I've heard... like running Rippa through the ringer.
Fair enough, maybe "outsourced" would be a better way to put it. Basically they want support to cost them as little as possible and do not particularly care whether it actually offers any useful help to customers.
More specifically, their support cannot actually do anything to resolve problems. They read off what their computer screen is telling them. They can't take any actions to fix things.
Offshore support is unloved and powerless. They can't and won't fix any issue. They exist to fulfill the obligation to provide support in the cheapest form possible.
It’s actually more of a win-win situation if you look closely.
Stablecoin issuers earn yield from holding U.S. Treasuries, which sustains their business model. Meanwhile, people in distressed economies get practical access to a digital dollar, often cheaper and faster than navigating restrictive exchange rules or paying steep conversion fees at money-changers. That’s meaningful when local currencies are unstable or losing value.
Of course, not all stablecoin issuers are trustworthy, and some governments under economic distress may ban or limit these instruments. But when the setup works, both sides benefit.
That's not how any of this works. You may not receive any interest on your stablecoin balance, but the issuer certainly does. Why would they offer to lend money to the US government at zero when they can get the market rate and pocket it? What's more, these are mostly short-term instruments This means any increase in inflation will be reflected in their yield.
> You may not receive any interest on your stablecoin balance, but the issuer certainly does
A bunch of zero marginal cost capital funding purchases of U.S. debt would absolutely push down rates, possibly lower than inflation, because if you’re a stablecoin issuer you’re not constrained by yield.
This is a dumb-money venture. And if there is this much money that is this dumb, Treasuries aren’t the worst place for it to go.
Even if every dollar of market cap for every crypto currency in the world was invested into us treasuries, it would still be a drop in the bucket and wouldn't drastically change rates.
> those trilions and trilions of dollars of stablecoins sure are bringing down the us' cost to borrow
If you think trillions of dollars in de novo price-insensitive demand doesn’t move a market, even one as deep as the Treasury market, I’ve got a stablecoin to sell you.
Yes, trillions of dollars of new price-insensitive demand would move the treasury market. That's why I named that number! But, there just isn't that much value in stablecoins.
> congrats if you buy a stablecoin - you've effectively financed the US gvt at 0%.
USDC on Coinbase yields interest. The USDC people make a little spread on it, but you aren't financing the US government at 0%, you're financing them at market rates. There is counterparty risk just like with a bank. Unlike a bank, there are liquid markets onchain for other fungibles.
It doesn't cost a stablecoin anything but a bit of electricity to manufacture a "coin". The coin is valued at whatever the peg is, but it doesn't move the m2 needle or any other measure of circulation, until they purchase a treasury (or whatever they claim is backing). How much did it cost mr stablecoin to do all that? And you better believe the US Gov NEEDS this to happen.
Russia's take on the system is correct and we're seeing ASIANs and BRICS run away as fast as possible from $.
Ways out include total protectionism/mercantilism or war.
Gold is parabolic now. 10k by March is completely doable.
> congrats if you buy a stablecoin - you've effectively financed the US gvt at 0%.
As MMT teaches us, a government that issues its own currency does not need to borrow to finance itself, as it can create the money it needs, though it may still issue debt for other reasons.
US govt is financed at whatever rate the stable-coin issuer finances at, which is likely a mixture of T-bills, fed overnight interest rates (via bank accounts), and other assets.
Having access to USD is still a lot better than whatever local currency most of these countries have. All those without any real central bank independence (though FED independence has become more questionable in the US as well).
Oh yeah, if you get a USD savings account from major nationwide banks you'll be getting exciting interest rates of up to 0.02% [1], assuming you have a 'relationship bonus'. BofA gets up to 0.04% [2], with the right tiers.
...fleecing the poor worldwide...stablecoins don't change much in this
Just Devil's Advocate, but isn't that a reason not to use stablecoins? I mean, I can participate in the fleecing of the poor without changing anything at all apparently.
This is the worry of globally-available USD stablecoins.
By swapping the volatility from crypto to lower USD volatility, they effectively create a funnel from riskier currencies into dollars.
Which is the same state that previously existed... except now facilitated by the crypto industry's global accessibility/UX and with less international regulation.
Blessing USD stablecoins at the US federal level was a smart move (from the US-perspective) as it creates a much bigger demand for dollars, and if the US didn't do it then China or OPEC would have eventually gotten around to it as an end-run around dollar hegemony.
Winners:
- Crypto industry (more volume to skim)
- US Treasury (more demand for debt)
Losers:
- Countries with less-stable currencies (lose further control of monetary policy)
- China / OPEC (miss opportunity to push dedollarization further)
TBD:
- Money laundering (once volume grows, KYC and traceability will follow)
Stable coins can print anytime they want, there's no one at the SEC that will regulate it in this admin. As a matter of fact it's pretty well accepted in some circles, especially on subreddits, that Tether did exactly that, printed usdt, purchased btc at effectively 0 cost basis, inflating bitcoin prices by decreasing supply and then turned around and purchased treasuries. Cantor Fitzgerald ran that for them.
Further, stable coins / crypto are almost certainly being used to slop up as much liquidity as possible and has essentially so far pulled 4 trillion out of circulation. If not for that sleight of hand trick, hyperinflation, at least in the USA, would have already happened. Probably still will as there's only so much can kicking that can occur. I know of 30 year olds that literally live in mom's basement and dump nearly all of their just above minimum wage checks straight into Robinhood to blindly purchase crypto. Will forever beat inflation is the mentality.
Sure looks like there's going to be lots of pain for poor and middle class people in the next 5 years.
The total stablecoin marketcap is not that high relative to US debt, and open question whether they're actually buying all the treasuries they claim. Tether has never been audited.
> The GENIUS Act requires permitted payment stablecoin issuers to maintain reserves backing outstanding payment stablecoins on at least a one-to-one basis, and provides that reserves may only consist of certain specified assets, including US dollars, federal reserve notes, funds held at certain insured or regulated depository institutions, certain short-term Treasuries and Treasury-backed reverse repurchase agreements, and money market funds.
> In addition, the GENIUS Act requires stablecoin issuers to provide monthly public reporting as to the composition of their reserve portfolios on their website, and requires larger issuers (with more than $50 billion in consolidated total outstanding issuance) to publish annual audited financial statements. These monthly reports must be examined by a registered public accounting firm, and the CEO and CFO of a permitted payment stablecoin issuer must certify the accuracy of these reports to the primary federal payment stablecoin regulator or state payment stablecoin regulator, as applicable.
This point is conveniently missing. There's simply more money to be made! Now get out of here with your nonsense ideas of decentralizing money. It's bad for business.
The power of not needing companies like PayPal does not preclude them from offering services that ease its use.
The benefit comes from having the option to go elsewhere. A business that cannot lock you in is more likely to try to retain your custom by offering a good service.
That is the point! You don't need companies like Paypal... Companies often offer services that are "not needed" because people like convenience, ease of use, etc.
You don't need Paypal to use Bitcoin, but there's nothing in the spec that prohibits it.
I think their point is that in the end, most people want convenience. That convenience requires centralization, which eliminates a lot of the supposed benefits that something like cryptocurrencies were promoted with. We've already seen it play out very poorly several times in crypto already.
This adds convenience because I can instantly send ETH from Robinhood to PayPal to Coinbase to my Ledger, without dealing with banking rails or creating a taxable event.
It's not that simple, there's a niuance there - tradeoffs are to to be made if we want to have a decentralized system; it will not scale to the whole planet, if running a node is accessible; and it must be so, otherwise it's not decentralized.
The reality is, we will have a mix of custodian - through third-party - and self-sovereign usage; depending on the context and user's skill
The Internet is decentralized but most of us use ISPs to connect to it. Most of can't access the Internet without these companies.
In practice, the word "decentralized" just speaks to whether anyone can join in the protocol if they want. But it doesn't mean the protocol is easy to implement.
Once upon a time, their corporate and developer sites were x.com even, before they moved to a more professional domain and later sold that one back to Elon.
Someone mentioned this kind of thing in the npm breeches last week. You get desensitized to non-standard “official” urls and it makes it easier for phishers.
Title: PayPal [..] Reimagining How Money Moves to Anyone, Anywhere.
Text: PayPal users in the U.S. can begin [..] today, with international expansion [..] starting later this month.
So immediately out of the box it is exactly NOT for "anyone" and NOT "anywhere".
This is contagious: a couple of years ago Gnosis tried to launch their Gnosis Card[1] on Berlin DappCon with the exact same slogan: "Anyone, anywhere" while only accepting applications from a select group of people living in select EU countries.
I have had discussion with their CEO right there regarding this marketingspeak but he did not seem to grasp what's the problem at all here.
Well in fairness they really have reimagined how money moves to anyone anywhere, they just haven't changed it yet. Plus they used a verb tense suggesting the process is ongoing. If they said "we changed how money moves to anyone anywhere" then that would be inaccurate, but that's not what they said.
I’ve happily avoided Paypal in the last .. 6 years or so. Ever since Revolut came up with disposable cards I’m much less hesitant to give my card details to someone, also PP never stopped being shady and user-hostile in the meantime.
So I’ll continue to avoid them in the next 6 years as well.
One of the reasons I don't think crypto can succeed is because people will only use it if it's convenient, which very likely means corporate involvement, which of course ultimately defeats the whole argument of being decentralized.
Without convenience it will not be successful as a common currency. It does not need convenience to succeed in other ways. For example, as a store of value.
Oh absolutely. They even explain it right in the press-release: "users in the U.S. can [...] with international expansion [...] starting later this month".
Of course it will be as far from "anyone" or "anywhere" as possible, because they will start the crypto expansion in a much more restrictive fashion than TradFi.
So hold on, does this mean I can pay with crypto anywhere that accepts Paypal? Because if so that's kind of a big deal, but not at all clear to me if that is the case...
Wake me when eBay accepts BTC in exchange for silver dollars or even collector coins. They're still afraid to do the very hard thing and challenge the status quo on an even playing field.
I hate paypal, because they froze my money for 6 months and destroyed my mental health for weeks. Compared to other people my situation was not even bad.
When Bitcoin first hit public consciousness the knock from economists was that it had a built-in deflationary spiral and that seems to be true. The price keeps going up and up with a few noted bumps. Rising value is great for speculators but it's a death knell for an actual spending currency. You'd be nuts to spend it if you expect it to appreciate. That's why central banks aim for low but positive inflation.
Aside from tax implications, there's no difference between spending $1000 from your salary, and spending $1000 in Bitcoin and rebuying that amount from your salary.
I think the difference here is that Bitcoin is predictable deflationary vs fiat being unpredictable. If you can know in advance the rate, it becomes sorta like an investment vehicle, where instead of dividends you get appreciation of the assets.
To look at it another way - why one would spend $100 from their brokerage account if they know a year later they can spend $110?
Holding money (or crypto) in PayPal is a terrible idea. They are not a bank, they do not abide by banking regulations. They can lock you out of your account and your money at any time and leave you going in circles with their offshore support.
Yes, they are somewhat of a necessary evil if you do any online peer-to-peer buying/selling, since they are the only money transfer service that provides some level of "buyer protection", but you want to do the bare minimum with PayPal to avoid unnecessary risk.
Link one bank account (not your primary) to PayPal to receive money, and transfer received money immediately. Link one credit card for purchases. Nothing else. Do not link debit cards, do not sign up for their "balance account" where money is held in PayPal (no matter how hard they push it with UI dark patterns in their app), do not sign up for their crypto account.
> Link one bank account (not your primary) to PayPal to receive money, and transfer received money immediately.
Costs 1.5%. Or wait a few days.[1] Plus a fee for receiving cryptocurrency. There are additional fees for buying cryptocurrencies, other than PayPal's own. And none of this is FDIC insured.
[1] https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/paypal/pp-balance-tnc?loc...
If you link your bank, and approve direct debit (it’s just a popup with yes/later - very risky move), they will eventually withdraw from it when there are any issues. And most likely you’ll lose more disputes when your bank is linked - but no proof of this so take it with a grain of salt.
Fortunately I can review direct debit consents and revoke them via my bank's web app UI.
I've seen such features on business accounts (Wells Fargo ACH Fraud Filter, JPMorgan ACH Debit Block, etc).
What bank allows that on a consumer account?
Plus they have a history of freezing people’s money for months on end for flimsy reasons.
Staring at a “you can no longer do business with PayPal” email myself. No clue what I did, no recourse, now locked out of a fuckton of global marketplaces and peer to peer transactions that uniquely only work on a platform like PayPal.
I had one of these. My account ended up eventually being reinstated. No reason was given for the initial account freeze or reinstating.
One thing I did - in response to them saying I could no longer do business, I told them that they also could no longer do business with me, requested a copy of all of the user data they had on me under CCPA, and told them to then delete all of my personal information. They did not actually comply and I didn't pursue. I probably should, though.
you should get a lawyer and try to sue in small claims court, it is the fastest path vs. anything they will surface to you. even by saying this I put myself at risk but they are truly a demonic organization
If only there was a technology which fixes this...
It would have to handle chargebacks and resolve disputes.
Those are functions of a marketplace, a low-cost pseudo-legal system so that you hopefully avoid using a state's costly and slow legal system. But if marketplaces also own the medium of exchange, e.g. marketplaces that issue tokens and only allow transacting in tokens (Paypal behind the scenes), their economic incentive is not to resolve disputes, but to create as many barriers as possible to converting tokens back into value as they can get away with, since this becomes the profit center of the business.
And, when the only medium of exchange available to consumers and merchants is through one of these tokenized marketplaces, getting locked out of marketplaces means getting locked out of doing business entirely with no recourse or alternative.
Mediums of exchange should be neutral, and self-sovereign exchange has to be an option in order for marketplaces to offer competitive marketplace services, else they just abuse their monopoly on medium of exchange.
It's pretty nice, e.g. that when I buy a leash, it doesn't also have to walk the dog. Maybe for some, it's ideal to have someone else walk the dog, and the dog walker can even insist on bringing their own leash, but having the option of buying my own leash, putting it on my dog, and walking it myself means I don't need anyone's permission to own a dog, (not a big deal in the case of dog-walkers since there are so many) and substantially lowers the premium that dog-walkers can command in the marketplace for their services.
If this happens to you, I imagine it is grounds for legal action?
In europe, Paypal Sarl is a bank subject to bank regulations
Good point. I should have clarified that I'm referring specifically to PayPal in the US, which themselves state that "PayPal is not a bank, does not take deposits and is not FDIC insured".
https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/paypal/program-banks-tnc
It isn’t subject to the EU statutory deposit insurance, however.
Edit: The above means that deposits on your PayPal account aren’t insured, different from regular bank accounts in the EU. This is a frequently emphasized caveat regarding the use of PayPal as a bank account in the EU.
Is that an issue if you don't plan to "store" money in PayPal but only use it for payments?
You'd be surprised. A lot of sellers don't "cash out" from paypal all that often, letting tens of thousands pile up. (And inevitably, some of them get hit with arbitrary account closures and have that money seized)
In that case it isn’t, but this thread is specifically about holding money in PayPal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45250598
My point is that one doesn’t get all the protections normally taken for granted for EU bank accounts.
I assume you can't use Crypto instead of the bank account link, you probably require both. Otherwise this might have some use as another blast radius reducer for Paypal's antics.
I switched to a hardly used checking account for paypal after they held $20 hostage for a couple months after selling an old video card on ebay. I'd heard some one say their bank account had become frozen by paypal during a dispute and that event reminded me of it enough to get some separation.
Just treat it as your checking account; for anything substantial, move it to the self-custody
What's the problem with debit cards?
Debit cards generally have less recourse for fraudulent transactions compared to credit.
This is all true, but are they actually any worse than any other crypto exchange? I just take it as a given that a crypto exchange can lock me out and steal my money at any time with no legal consequence, and so I try to keep as little money in them as possible. And at least PayPal is older and likely to have more senior engineers and fewer vibe coders, and thus be less likely to lose everything because of an elementary security error.
No startup can compete with PayPal's decades long track record of suspending accounts and freezing funds.
Why does their support being "offshore" matter at all? If they wanted to provide good, user-friendly customer support, they would, regardless of where the reps are?
> If they wanted to provide good, user-friendly customer support, they would
Has this been your experience with PayPal?
They marked my account as hacked (it wasn't), and the first two submissions of a photo of my driver's license from my phone were rejected... not until the third time after calling the third operator was like.. yep, that's a driver's license with your name on it.
That's not even close to the worst stories I've heard... like running Rippa through the ringer.
Fair enough, maybe "outsourced" would be a better way to put it. Basically they want support to cost them as little as possible and do not particularly care whether it actually offers any useful help to customers.
More specifically, their support cannot actually do anything to resolve problems. They read off what their computer screen is telling them. They can't take any actions to fix things.
Because it's offshore so it would be cheap, which already provides a metric that is being optimized.
Offshore support is unloved and powerless. They can't and won't fix any issue. They exist to fulfill the obligation to provide support in the cheapest form possible.
What is this paypal-corp.com website? I immediately suspected phishing when I saw that.
Doubly so when the feature being discussed is crypto related.
Add the end of https://www.paypal.com/us/home there is a Hewsroom link to https://newsroom.paypal-corp.com/ . They use https://about.pypl.com/about-us/default.aspx as well. At one point, employee email accounts used paypal-inc.com. It might not even be a SEO thing, it could just reflect their corporate structure and the different IT teams.
I agree that it is confusing.
It's a little annoying, but as long as the main domain has a paste that links to the dodgy-looking domain then it's bearable.
Ideally, companies would have a page "all the domains we use" as part of their footer links.
So many companies that should know better are helping to enable phishing by using random domains.
one thing with these stablecoins is they're pushing to buying of 'us-debt'.
congrats if you buy a stablecoin - you've effectively financed the US gvt at 0%.
now the US gvt can inflate away that debt at 0 cost to them, and pass on the cost to you.
that's why a bunch of these stablecoin companies are pushing it as a way to save for people in distressed economies.
what a way to steal from the poor.
that's why the crypto act was called GENIUS act.
It’s actually more of a win-win situation if you look closely.
Stablecoin issuers earn yield from holding U.S. Treasuries, which sustains their business model. Meanwhile, people in distressed economies get practical access to a digital dollar, often cheaper and faster than navigating restrictive exchange rules or paying steep conversion fees at money-changers. That’s meaningful when local currencies are unstable or losing value.
Of course, not all stablecoin issuers are trustworthy, and some governments under economic distress may ban or limit these instruments. But when the setup works, both sides benefit.
That's not how any of this works. You may not receive any interest on your stablecoin balance, but the issuer certainly does. Why would they offer to lend money to the US government at zero when they can get the market rate and pocket it? What's more, these are mostly short-term instruments This means any increase in inflation will be reflected in their yield.
> You may not receive any interest on your stablecoin balance, but the issuer certainly does
A bunch of zero marginal cost capital funding purchases of U.S. debt would absolutely push down rates, possibly lower than inflation, because if you’re a stablecoin issuer you’re not constrained by yield.
This is a dumb-money venture. And if there is this much money that is this dumb, Treasuries aren’t the worst place for it to go.
Even if every dollar of market cap for every crypto currency in the world was invested into us treasuries, it would still be a drop in the bucket and wouldn't drastically change rates.
All those trilions and trilions of dollars of stablecoins sure are bringing down the us' cost to borrow.
> those trilions and trilions of dollars of stablecoins sure are bringing down the us' cost to borrow
If you think trillions of dollars in de novo price-insensitive demand doesn’t move a market, even one as deep as the Treasury market, I’ve got a stablecoin to sell you.
Yes, trillions of dollars of new price-insensitive demand would move the treasury market. That's why I named that number! But, there just isn't that much value in stablecoins.
> congrats if you buy a stablecoin - you've effectively financed the US gvt at 0%.
USDC on Coinbase yields interest. The USDC people make a little spread on it, but you aren't financing the US government at 0%, you're financing them at market rates. There is counterparty risk just like with a bank. Unlike a bank, there are liquid markets onchain for other fungibles.
It doesn't cost a stablecoin anything but a bit of electricity to manufacture a "coin". The coin is valued at whatever the peg is, but it doesn't move the m2 needle or any other measure of circulation, until they purchase a treasury (or whatever they claim is backing). How much did it cost mr stablecoin to do all that? And you better believe the US Gov NEEDS this to happen.
Russia's take on the system is correct and we're seeing ASIANs and BRICS run away as fast as possible from $.
Ways out include total protectionism/mercantilism or war.
Gold is parabolic now. 10k by March is completely doable.
> congrats if you buy a stablecoin - you've effectively financed the US gvt at 0%.
As MMT teaches us, a government that issues its own currency does not need to borrow to finance itself, as it can create the money it needs, though it may still issue debt for other reasons.
US govt is financed at whatever rate the stable-coin issuer finances at, which is likely a mixture of T-bills, fed overnight interest rates (via bank accounts), and other assets.
didn't you just explain the USD game? (fleecing the poor worldwide through inflation...) stablecoins don't change much in this.
Having access to USD is still a lot better than whatever local currency most of these countries have. All those without any real central bank independence (though FED independence has become more questionable in the US as well).
Aren't they sort of printing new dollars privately accelerating the fleecing? Or am I wrong?
Not anymore than a USD deposit account. Just with extra steps.
> Not anymore than a USD deposit account
These typically pay interest. (Or have retail servicing costs attached.)
Oh yeah, if you get a USD savings account from major nationwide banks you'll be getting exciting interest rates of up to 0.02% [1], assuming you have a 'relationship bonus'. BofA gets up to 0.04% [2], with the right tiers.
[1] https://www.chase.com/personal/savings/interest-savings/inte...
[2] https://www.bankofamerica.com/deposits/savings/savings-accou...
...fleecing the poor worldwide...stablecoins don't change much in this
Just Devil's Advocate, but isn't that a reason not to use stablecoins? I mean, I can participate in the fleecing of the poor without changing anything at all apparently.
It's a reason not to use dollars in any form if you are outside of US (and probably inside as well).
Usually the local money is even worst. (Hi from Argentina! Not so bad this year so far...)
This is the worry of globally-available USD stablecoins.
By swapping the volatility from crypto to lower USD volatility, they effectively create a funnel from riskier currencies into dollars.
Which is the same state that previously existed... except now facilitated by the crypto industry's global accessibility/UX and with less international regulation.
Blessing USD stablecoins at the US federal level was a smart move (from the US-perspective) as it creates a much bigger demand for dollars, and if the US didn't do it then China or OPEC would have eventually gotten around to it as an end-run around dollar hegemony.
Winners:
Losers: TBD:sure, but there's something twisted in ripping off e.g. poor africans from the other side of the world...
sure, it couldn't happen without the local warlords, but still...
Stable coins can print anytime they want, there's no one at the SEC that will regulate it in this admin. As a matter of fact it's pretty well accepted in some circles, especially on subreddits, that Tether did exactly that, printed usdt, purchased btc at effectively 0 cost basis, inflating bitcoin prices by decreasing supply and then turned around and purchased treasuries. Cantor Fitzgerald ran that for them.
Further, stable coins / crypto are almost certainly being used to slop up as much liquidity as possible and has essentially so far pulled 4 trillion out of circulation. If not for that sleight of hand trick, hyperinflation, at least in the USA, would have already happened. Probably still will as there's only so much can kicking that can occur. I know of 30 year olds that literally live in mom's basement and dump nearly all of their just above minimum wage checks straight into Robinhood to blindly purchase crypto. Will forever beat inflation is the mentality.
Sure looks like there's going to be lots of pain for poor and middle class people in the next 5 years.
The total stablecoin marketcap is not that high relative to US debt, and open question whether they're actually buying all the treasuries they claim. Tether has never been audited.
Times are changing:
> The GENIUS Act requires permitted payment stablecoin issuers to maintain reserves backing outstanding payment stablecoins on at least a one-to-one basis, and provides that reserves may only consist of certain specified assets, including US dollars, federal reserve notes, funds held at certain insured or regulated depository institutions, certain short-term Treasuries and Treasury-backed reverse repurchase agreements, and money market funds.
> In addition, the GENIUS Act requires stablecoin issuers to provide monthly public reporting as to the composition of their reserve portfolios on their website, and requires larger issuers (with more than $50 billion in consolidated total outstanding issuance) to publish annual audited financial statements. These monthly reports must be examined by a registered public accounting firm, and the CEO and CFO of a permitted payment stablecoin issuer must certify the accuracy of these reports to the primary federal payment stablecoin regulator or state payment stablecoin regulator, as applicable.
https://www.lw.com/en/insights/the-genius-act-of-2025-stable...
I thought the whole point of a decentralised ledger was not needing companies like PayPal…
This point is conveniently missing. There's simply more money to be made! Now get out of here with your nonsense ideas of decentralizing money. It's bad for business.
I thought the point was more that you can't be required to use companies like PayPal in order to use the underlying technology.
The power of not needing companies like PayPal does not preclude them from offering services that ease its use.
The benefit comes from having the option to go elsewhere. A business that cannot lock you in is more likely to try to retain your custom by offering a good service.
That is the point! You don't need companies like Paypal... Companies often offer services that are "not needed" because people like convenience, ease of use, etc.
You don't need Paypal to use Bitcoin, but there's nothing in the spec that prohibits it.
I think their point is that in the end, most people want convenience. That convenience requires centralization, which eliminates a lot of the supposed benefits that something like cryptocurrencies were promoted with. We've already seen it play out very poorly several times in crypto already.
This adds convenience because I can instantly send ETH from Robinhood to PayPal to Coinbase to my Ledger, without dealing with banking rails or creating a taxable event.
PayPal has been slowly circling the drain for years, grasping at highly questionable Hail Mary's like crypto coins.
It's not that simple, there's a niuance there - tradeoffs are to to be made if we want to have a decentralized system; it will not scale to the whole planet, if running a node is accessible; and it must be so, otherwise it's not decentralized.
The reality is, we will have a mix of custodian - through third-party - and self-sovereign usage; depending on the context and user's skill
better call up the Bitcoin CEO and Vitalik to voice your complaints that a third party you don't have to use at all is using your favorite network
The Internet is decentralized but most of us use ISPs to connect to it. Most of can't access the Internet without these companies.
In practice, the word "decentralized" just speaks to whether anyone can join in the protocol if they want. But it doesn't mean the protocol is easy to implement.
Is this a legit PayPal domain?Sounds like a fake domain.
Once upon a time, their corporate and developer sites were x.com even, before they moved to a more professional domain and later sold that one back to Elon.
https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/crypto
Bitcoin trading on PayPal has been available for the past five years.
Yes, the newsroom is linked to at the bottom of paypal.com.
Someone mentioned this kind of thing in the npm breeches last week. You get desensitized to non-standard “official” urls and it makes it easier for phishers.
PayPal, teaching users to become phishing victims since 2019
https://www.attejuvonen.fi/paypal-sends-phishing-emails/
https://who.is/whois/paypal-corp.com
Anyone can put anything in their WHOIS.
I could create an account, buy a domain name with a gift card, and put your username in the WHOIS.
I assume this is a trolling effort on your part?
I agree. Strange URL, bare page, and the fonts are rendering oddly for me.
OP asked if PayPal was a real company, before they edited the comment.
Title: PayPal [..] Reimagining How Money Moves to Anyone, Anywhere.
Text: PayPal users in the U.S. can begin [..] today, with international expansion [..] starting later this month.
So immediately out of the box it is exactly NOT for "anyone" and NOT "anywhere".
This is contagious: a couple of years ago Gnosis tried to launch their Gnosis Card[1] on Berlin DappCon with the exact same slogan: "Anyone, anywhere" while only accepting applications from a select group of people living in select EU countries.
I have had discussion with their CEO right there regarding this marketingspeak but he did not seem to grasp what's the problem at all here.
You can't make this shit up.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4_6aOUagY4
Well in fairness they really have reimagined how money moves to anyone anywhere, they just haven't changed it yet. Plus they used a verb tense suggesting the process is ongoing. If they said "we changed how money moves to anyone anywhere" then that would be inaccurate, but that's not what they said.
I’ve happily avoided Paypal in the last .. 6 years or so. Ever since Revolut came up with disposable cards I’m much less hesitant to give my card details to someone, also PP never stopped being shady and user-hostile in the meantime.
So I’ll continue to avoid them in the next 6 years as well.
One of the reasons I don't think crypto can succeed is because people will only use it if it's convenient, which very likely means corporate involvement, which of course ultimately defeats the whole argument of being decentralized.
Corporate involvement isn't that bad as long as the user can exit to fully decentralized operation in case of abuse.
Without convenience it will not be successful as a common currency. It does not need convenience to succeed in other ways. For example, as a store of value.
Great. I can't wait to attach recent utility bills with every stablecoin transaction.
I find it hard to trust and believe any corporation incapable of rendering a responsive website on mobile
As they say not your keys not your money
I’m so confused I remember this headline from like 8 years ago
Is this using x402 under the covers?
Excellent question.
What a weird timeline we live in. Absolutely bonkers.
You can be sure that the “anyone, anywhere” claimed is a lie.
Oh absolutely. They even explain it right in the press-release: "users in the U.S. can [...] with international expansion [...] starting later this month".
Of course it will be as far from "anyone" or "anywhere" as possible, because they will start the crypto expansion in a much more restrictive fashion than TradFi.
Cash is king for me.
So hold on, does this mean I can pay with crypto anywhere that accepts Paypal? Because if so that's kind of a big deal, but not at all clear to me if that is the case...
Wake me when eBay accepts BTC in exchange for silver dollars or even collector coins. They're still afraid to do the very hard thing and challenge the status quo on an even playing field.
Cool. Wake me up when Paypal isn't trying to police what kind of porn people can watch online.
They are probably not the one that care, it's most likely Visa / MasterCard that have an issue with that.
Nope. If there is someone more eager to police content than Visa, it's Paypal.
There are sites that still support Visa / Mastercard but removed their Paypal support. SubscribeStar, for example.
PayPal locks people out of their money. Screw them, never using this shit again.
I don’t understand all the immediate negativity surrounding this. Can someone in the know explain what the ramifications are?
People who hate crypto will hate anything that has anything to do with crypto.
People who love crypto will hate anything that has anything to do with legacy censorship-prone fraudulent financial institutions like PayPal.
Who is this for?
the people that neither hate nor love crypto?
I hate paypal, because they froze my money for 6 months and destroyed my mental health for weeks. Compared to other people my situation was not even bad.
When Bitcoin first hit public consciousness the knock from economists was that it had a built-in deflationary spiral and that seems to be true. The price keeps going up and up with a few noted bumps. Rising value is great for speculators but it's a death knell for an actual spending currency. You'd be nuts to spend it if you expect it to appreciate. That's why central banks aim for low but positive inflation.
Aside from tax implications, there's no difference between spending $1000 from your salary, and spending $1000 in Bitcoin and rebuying that amount from your salary.
I think the difference here is that Bitcoin is predictable deflationary vs fiat being unpredictable. If you can know in advance the rate, it becomes sorta like an investment vehicle, where instead of dividends you get appreciation of the assets.
To look at it another way - why one would spend $100 from their brokerage account if they know a year later they can spend $110?