PayPal Now Lets All US Users Buy, Sell and Hold Cryptocurrency (engadget.com) 41
It was teased last month, and now it's official: PayPal is bringing its newly-announced support for cryptocurrency to all US accounts. Engadget reports: PayPal says all eligible users can start buying, selling and holding bitcoin, litecoin, ethereum and bitcoin cash. Beginning next year, PayPal also plans to bring cryptocurrency into Venmo and will allow users to pay merchants with their cryptocurrency holdings (the digital currency will be converted to fiat currency). The company hasn't detailed its plans to make cryptocurrency trading available in other countries, but says it will come to "select international markets in the first half of 2021."
Paypal holding my money? (Score:2)
Try reaching for a live customer support person from Paypal. It's virtually impossible to get a hold of 1 thru their automated phone system.
Imagine there's a glitch in the cypto transfer and you need to talk to someone...
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"Try reaching for a live customer support person from Paypal. It's virtually impossible to get a hold of 1 thru their automated phone system."
Your not wrong, but who is your go to that provides good human customer service for your bitcoin holdings?
Re: Paypal holding my money? (Score:3)
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That is hard to believe. There is no point in buying Bitcoins from Paypal, if you can't spend them.
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I can't get even a live customer support person at my (previous) physical bank of 20 years.
There's a reason I moved to an entirely online bank, because then I have to be given a facility to be able to do all those things online myself, and I'm no longer paying for something that doesn't do the job I need it to anyway.
Pretty much, the death of live customer service has saved me so much money I regret it not happening 20 years ago. Banks, credit cards, cloud services, telephony suppliers, utilities, airlines
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My old bank would leave my on hold multiple times for 20 minutes a stretch when I called to deal with issues they caused. (they accepted a transfer from my account that I did not authorize and with the wrong name. then locked me out of my account for 30 days). When I had my employer send direct deposits to a different bank, my bank called me and asked why I did that. I tried to close my account over the phone and transfer the remaining balance to a different bank, and they wanted to charge me $30 for it. In
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In Europe, Paypal is precisely a bank.
scary trend (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't wait to set up my account with paypal right after I give facebook all my financial info to make it even easier to buy stuff
if you think getting locked out of your email account with no recourse, no chance of finding out why, and no hope really of getting it back is a bad experience, try suddenly becoming effectively penniless in the digital world; these folks have some of the scariest customer-relations stories since the devil started acquiring souls
sometimes I think I can actually feel the fingers getting tighter around my neck and deeper in my pocket from the new surveillance economy we've created
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PayPal Now Lets All US Users Buy, Sell and Hodl Cryptocurrency
FTFY,
So that means they (Score:2)
Re:So that means they (Score:4, Interesting)
I would assume yes, they are. When Square Cash integrated Bitcoin into their accounts, I bought small amounts - talking $10 increments up to about $80 over time just to see how it worked out.
It was all very smooth and legit. I still have a few decimal places of Bitcoin in my account. But when I have sold, I received a 1099 with the following statement: "NOTE: Cash App does not report your Bitcoin cost-basis, gains, or losses to the IRS or on this Form 1099-B. Cash App reports the total proceeds from Bitcoin sales made on the platform."
If you play your taxes honestly, keep track of gains and losses. I don't see anything nefarious here.
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Of course.
Paypal are, at least in the EU so I assume the same in the US, a bank.
All banks are required to provide information and processes to aid in detecting and preventing money laundering. It's the law. It's a literal requirement of holding a banking licence.
Despite the fact that some banks seem to think they're immune and, decades later, get caught helping this kind of thing (wait for the Trump ones...), expecting a bank to do anything OTHER than monitor and report your finances is a really ridiculou
Lies (Score:2)
The headline is a bold faced lie.
The let you buy, sell and hold a share in Paypall's omnibus account.
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Paypall's
So much better!
Not content to be a bank that isn't regulated (Score:2)
Oh well, the House Always Wins (President Trump aside).
transferring a wallet (Score:2)
Re: Paypal arbitrarily locking accounts (Score:1)
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And when PayPal locks your account with no explanation. Then what?
Happens with well establish banks too. It's rage inducing from either. The "free market" hasn't sorted out this problem in decades (centuries?). Maybe we can sit back and hope legislation comes around to protect consumers, but it hasn't happened yet, mostly the opposite has happened.
Yet people wonder why BTC and other cryptocurrencies were created. The removable a central agency that applies surcharges to every transaction is such a clever idea that it must be discredited before old-fashioned financial inst
In other news... (Score:1)
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derp
somebody simultaneously didn't RTFA, nor do they know anything about cryptocurrencies and custodians.
They do not really support cryptocurrency (Score:4, Informative)
It is a bit like Revolut. You don't have a Bitcoin address you can use to fill up you account, and you can't pay to a Bitcoin address.
The PayPal terms of service state: "You currently are NOT able to send Crypto Assets to family or friends, use Crypto Assets to pay for goods or services, or withdraw Crypto Assets from your Cryptocurrencies Hub to an external cryptocurrency wallet. If you want to withdraw the value from your Cryptocurrencies Hub you will need to sell your Crypto Assets and withdraw the cash proceeds from their sale."
It means you don't actually own any cryptocurrency, and this is good only for speculation.
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It is a bit like Revolut. You don't have a Bitcoin address you can use to fill up you account, and you can't pay to a Bitcoin address.
The PayPal terms of service state: "You currently are NOT able to send Crypto Assets to family or friends, use Crypto Assets to pay for goods or services, or withdraw Crypto Assets from your Cryptocurrencies Hub to an external cryptocurrency wallet. If you want to withdraw the value from your Cryptocurrencies Hub you will need to sell your Crypto Assets and withdraw the cash proceeds from their sale."
It means you don't actually own any cryptocurrency, and this is good only for speculation.
"..., and this is good only for speculation" doesn't just cover this article, but almost all crypto currency usage. Add ransomware and drugs, and you've covered the rest.
Why ? No thanks (Score:1)
Zero inflation is good? (Score:2)
John Maynard Keynes would disagree. Money stuffed in a mattress is not being used for economic growth, slowing down industrialization and possibly reversing it. This would slide us away from western welfare capitalism and back towards feudalism. Modern egalitarianism and class consciousness wouldn't allow it, and we're have riots. Like the Occupy movement plus the October Revolution, equal parts stupid and violent.
Fuck PayPal (Score:1)
Does this meen im unbanned? (Score:2)
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If you thought, it was for payment, you failed to study economics. If the money is sound, the Gresham's Law is the reason why nobody will use it for payments. If the money is unsound (e.g. BCH, BSV, ETH..), it will behave like a fiat currency. As Voltaire famously said, 'Fiat currency always eventually returns to its intrinsic value -- zero.'
Uhhh title format? (Score:1)
Serious . . . but also . . . get off my lawn.
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Looks like pretty standard US English style for headlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I remember thinking this looked silly at first, since we don't do this here in the Nordic Countries. One explanation I've seen is that back in the days of early printing press, font sizes and styles were limited, so they needed this extra effect to make headlines stand out. I would also guess that earlier newspapers needed to cram more text on a single page to conserve paper, which also explains other quirks of ne
Could anyone tell me what is keeping these afloat? (Score:2)
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It's not a bubble if people are buying it for practical use.
Bitcoin is a technology for transferring money across the globe independently of banks or governments. If you want to use that technology, you need to buy some bitcoin. More and more people want to do that, so the price is going up. Of course, a lot of the price increase is due to speculative investment, but that doesn't mean the whole technology is a bubble. On the other side of the coin you have increasingly cryptocurrency-friendly governments