PayPal Ushers in a New Era of Peer-to-Peer Payments with Ethereum and Bitcoin
56 comments
·September 15, 2025Tarball10
throwaway-0001
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.
Havoc
Plus they have a history of freezing people’s money for months on end for flimsy reasons.
seydor
In europe, Paypal Sarl is a bank subject to bank regulations
Tarball10
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".
squigz
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?
Tarball10
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.
loloquwowndueo
> If they wanted to provide good, user-friendly customer support, they would
Has this been your experience with PayPal?
vorpalhex
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.
Analemma_
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.
spacebanana7
No startup can compete with PayPal's decades long track record of suspending accounts and freezing funds.
dzonga
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.
this_user
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.
JumpCrisscross
> 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.
mothballed
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.
attila-lendvai
didn't you just explain the USD game? (fleecing the poor worldwide through inflation...) stablecoins don't change much in this.
scotty79
Aren't they sort of printing new dollars privately accelerating the fleecing? Or am I wrong?
toast0
Not anymore than a USD deposit account. Just with extra steps.
bilbo0s
...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.
scotty79
It's a reason not to use dollars in any form if you are outside of US (and probably inside as well).
olivia-banks
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.
CalRobert
I thought the whole point of a decentralised ledger was not needing companies like PayPal…
1970-01-01
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.
Lerc
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.
ecb_penguin
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.
Night_Thastus
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.
pants2
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.
null
xhkkffbf
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.
dotancohen
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.
linhns
Cash is king for me.
baobabKoodaa
What a weird timeline we live in. Absolutely bonkers.
Kelteseth
Is this a legit PayPal domain?Sounds like a fake domain.
Macha
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.
baobabKoodaa
PayPal, teaching users to become phishing victims since 2019
merolish
Yes, the newsroom is linked to at the bottom of paypal.com.
clickety_clack
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.
1970-01-01
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.
lagniappe
As they say not your keys not your money
sneak
You can be sure that the “anyone, anywhere” claimed is a lie.
smoyer
Is this using x402 under the covers?
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.