Other Coins - Price & Trading topic

Seems that customers can buy/sell/hold crypto, but merchants get paid in fiat. Although I heard it mentioned that merchant support will come later.

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If direct crypto payments are coming later, it will get interesting. If you have your own private keys, it will get even more interesting. At that point, sending Bitcoin to an email address will become safe and possible, as long as they have a PayPal account. That would be a big step forward usability wise.

Ofc, the same will be true for other crypto they support. That’s an appealing thing indeed.

It actually sounds like PayPal could achieve their original goal, via the backdoor of crypto. Nice! :sunglasses:

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I doubt you’ll have the private keys. I’m imagining you’re just gonna be able to receive or send payments to a currency of your choice. But it all belongs to Paypal.

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Yes, I’m quite skeptical, to be honest. A few red flags are:

  • PayPal’s stated reason for getting into crypto simply to “prepare its network for new digital currencies that may be developed by central banks” paired with the fact that
  • Merchants won’t receive payment in crypto because
  • Settlement will be in fiat, providing PayPal—as a centralized repository—with a lot of influence over the price of different currencies

PayPal is setting itself up as an ultimate middleman, thereby introducing inefficiency and added cost to the system. This kind of reminds of how people celebrated the advent of BTC futures, and we all know how that played out. Let us not forget that central banks have made it their stated aim to “tame bitcoin”. Sleep with one eye open.

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Yes, let’s not pretend this is the mainstreaming of bitcoin and independent cryptocurrencies, but at the same time it is going to bring them to many more people’s attention and make them far more acceptable and accessible.

This will ease the path of Safecoin, even if government’s start getting in on the act. We know they will mess up, be late, and leave a wide open door for others to fill before they get their acts together.

Especially when people realise they can obtain their own coin without any government or bank’s ok, just by farming on their home computer.

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You’re probably right, but it would certainly appeal to core Bitcoin fans if they did. They could still take their cut in fees.

I suspect that is to keep the law makers off their back. Tell them it is for their benefit and hope they look the other way.

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Well, they could achieve both. PayPal could offer the best user experience without compromising on the security of crypto. They have the brand and the user base to make it work. I suppose it depends how greedy they get and whether that hampers longer term success or not.

Herein lies the silver lining.

I hope you’re right.

How they handle key management will be very telling.

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  • entirely custodial
  • “The fact that this clause remains in their policy suggests that they intend to limit users to use only their platform for cryptocurrency, stifling competition and preventing users from ever withdrawing their cryptocurrency to the safety of a wallet they control the keys to.”
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Since PayPal is not anonymous, what’s the point of using it to buy/sell/shop with crypto? To make shopping more expensive and more complicated and to make buying/selling crypto less anonymous?

I’ve hit the point where news like these make me smirk at best. Hype shtick after hype shtick. I know that people around the crypto scene are desperate to bring on another crazy bull run like in late 2017, because many, many people hold in hope they’ll make another tenfold. And we’re talking about true corporate silverbacks. But if the hope remains futile long enough, they’ll sell. And it folds… by tenfolds. So… hype shtick after hype shtick.

I think 2017 created unrealistic expectations and it blinded too many people to way too many caveats crypto has always had. But it also taught many a folk a lesson. If you joined too late, you’re gonna pay for the others’ wealth. So many folks got burnt right there, they’re not coming back.

Well, most crypto isn’t anonymous.

But to try and draw out the upsides of this paypal thing, it will certainly bring some significant usability improvements for many people, and it also provides an easy to use off-ramp.

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If you earn and hold crypto, it makes sense to be able to spend it too. Granted, you lose some of the benefits, but you also gain some usability.

This sort of thing does give people more financial freedom. If your currency is being aggressively debased, even more so.

Hayek’s Denationalisation of Money talks about this sort of thing. Not having to use a single money breeds competition. Making to easy to use any type of money, without jumping through hoops, makes it more feasible. This is a good thing.

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Are we really using more types of money? The value of crypto is still expressed in fiat, so it’s still the same type of money in the end. I’m not saying a different way of “moving” money is not a value in itself, but even that value is still fiat.

Good for miners, but not much of a kick towards mass adoption.

Don’t get me wrong, I like crypto, and I use it. I just don’t like the hype,

It’s about big companies recognizing crypto, just like Microstragegy and some other companies are hodling bitcoin now.
So if the big Paypal is accepting crypto now as well, then this is another boost for crypto. Even if it is completely useless as payment.
I expect more companies to follow now

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We choose to express crypto in fiat terms, as it is what we are accustomed to. In time, the reverse maybe true. IMO, it doesn’t matter though - just allow the best money to compete to become the most popular.

What is best? Who knows? People need to figure that out. Perhaps PayPal can’t surface key benefits either (such as anonimity). Having a stable, cheap, fast money may win. Maybe a deflationary one will. I doubt an inflationary one will appeal though.

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The first use case is to hold it as a store or value. Many want to buy bitcoin but they don’t know how or get scammed by some dodgy advert on Facebook. This is a step towards improving that and giving much wider access to the 300 million people that have a PayPal account.

You may not like the hype, but where ever there is lots money to be made you will see hype. It happens with Tesla stocks and will continue to happen to bitcoin until it reaches a very high market cap reducing the volatility.

The next obvious application for PayPal and square is for people that earn crypto to be able to send it to PayPal and then spend as easily as using visa. This may seem like no one would want to do that at the moment, but that could change very quickly. If you look at Brave and BAT, people are already earning a small amount of money through that. Tipping on social media could happen at some point and then you have millions of users earning small amounts of money that at some point they will want to spend.

With the Safe network there would be a lot of money generated by people. Also, if you expect people to spend safecoin to use the safe network we need as many people around the world to be able to buy crypto. Yes, PayPal may not currently allow users to withdraw crypto, but that could very easily change in the future. The first step of exposure and the learning that will come from that is a step in the right direction IMO.

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To add to this:

I think the future see’s us all using apps to pay for things. I really like banking apps like Monzo and Revolut and how easy it is to send money to another person that uses the same system.

The problem is still there though of how difficult it is to send from say a HSBC app to an RBS app. And it’s even more difficult if these banks are in different countries. I think at some point you will see one or a few protocols / cryptos used as the common way to send money between each of these banks. I see PayPal doing this as a step closer to solving that. Revolut has allowed bitcoin buying for a while, I think it’s only a matter of time before Monzo, Google pay and apple pay do the same. At some point the switch will be pulled to allow the transfer of money between these apps to be done via crypto. The user might not even know it is using crypto.

Person to person digital payments are still a poor user experience with fiat. I agree that PayPal is helping here and do QR code transfers from the mobile app. It still isn’t as good as a contactless card payment though.

IMO, the banks and card processors have resisted making this too easy. They probably want to protect their existing markets.

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The banks are starting to see the direction of travel and momentum in this direction. Given negative interest rates but the desire to keep consumers in their own eco-system / brand ‘experience’, they are even starting to sell competitors’ products online. The market is breaking down / opening up more each day, which should be good news for everyone.

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