Bitcoin Forum

Can Bitcoin replace PayPal?

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/10/business/will-bitcoin-replace-paypal/index.html?iid=article_sidebar

i don't think bitcoin will ever really replace PayPal since they PayPal is an actual wallet that allows for currencies and payment methods for purchases.  I don't think fiat currency will be going anymore.  What is more likely to happen in the next few years is paypal allowing Bitcoins and more likely creating their own BTC Wallet so that people can pay for their goods and serivces...while taking a hefty fee of course!

Nice to see this issue getting so much of coverage in CNN. And the program was more or less unbiased as well.

My prediction is that by 2016, some BTC payment processor will overtake Bitcoin in market share.

I don't understand why everyone thinks it's so hard to use bitcoins? And this thing: "At the moment, the Bitcoin experiment doesn't offer simplicity. It complicates matters by people having to understand another way of doing things.". When the telephone came people had to learn it to! And the same applies to the computer and the internet. It might take a while before people uses bitcoin on daily basis, but it will happen.

Given the choice between the two, I can see no reason at all to use PayPal.

Hmmm.... at this point, it is pretty immature to claim that there is no advantage in using Paypal. It is easy to fund your account, and PP is accepted by 99% of the online merchants.

Coinbase is the new Paypal. $25,000,000 in new funding today by none other than silicon valley VC giant Andreessen Horowitz.

Recent comments show that Paypal's CEO is not at all adverse to the concept of bitcoin, although still not sold on its utility as a currency.

Prediction: Paypal will adopt XBT as a new 'currency' soon (mostly out of necessity to maintain their market share).
This will make them a bitcoin wallet, exchange and payment provider all at once. Their shareholders will eventually demand it.

Vendors and customers will run from Paypal as soon as a viable, widely accepted alternative exists. Vendors generally hate Paypal and view them as a necessary evil - chargeback and reversal rates are much higher than for regular credit card transactions due to the ease with which fraudsters manipulate their "customer protection" policies.

Once customers realize that they're the ones ultimately paying for chargeback fraud, a 2-4% discount for using bitcoin will be welcomed.

This is ridiculous. Paypal will never adopt Bitcoin. Doing that means cutting down their profit margin by 90%. JP Morgan has recently finalized its plans for the "Bitcoin killer". I think PP will soon join them.

Already they have shutdown the production of physical BTCs (http://www.geek.com/news/us-government-shuts-down-production-of-physical-bitcoins-1579581).

that would be hilarious if paypal were to adopt a cryptocurrency/bitcoin.. "in addition to the transaction fee, we also need to charge you 3% on all merchandise sold.. so that we can make a lot of money." bitcoin is not even reversible, so i don't think paypal would like it.

That's not the way they'd do it. They'd just process bitcoin transactions like any other Paypal currency, with their normal fee structure, buyer protection, reversability etc.

I see your point. Most places don't take bitcoin and so I use bank cards, etc. more than bitcoin. However "given the choice" I would and do use BTC. In the future I expect many more outlets to accept it.

Those plans are 15 years old , and they aren't that willing to put them into practice.

I think bitcoins has the potentials of being used as an alternative to PayPal and the benefit of less-fees and smoother system but for  established e-commercials. PayPal has been working for them for years and it might take sometime for them to use bitcoins as a new payent method.

Paypal will integrate bitcoin if they can reduce their operating costs, or if they can make money off of it.

They are looking into it & trying to figure out how this new technology fits into their business.

It can reduce the operating costs. But they will lose money out of it as well, due to the reduction of profits.

Why would their profits be reduced?
There's very small chance that they'll have a separate fee structure for bitcoin. They already use dozens of different currencies and they all have the same fee model. Why would they treat bitcoin any differently?

I think you're assuming on-blockchain transactions with bitcoin fees - which they definitely wouldn't be doing (except for transfers in/out of the Paypal system)

That's the main disadvantage for PayPal.  They make tons of profit off of Credit transactions and currency exchange.  If they offer BTC, there profits will be quite low assuming there are alternatives out there.

Then who will use them? If they are going to charge people 4% for BTC transactions, hardly anyone would chose Paypal.

yes it can!

buyers will use paypal if they add services to bitcoin, like money back guaranteed and "approved" marchants, don't you think?

Ask this the guy who just spent 18k$ as transaction fees for 0.5BTC

It was his own mistake. He was using a brain wallet, and by default the remaining portion of the 0.05 BTC was converted to transaction fee. This fee was divided by 400+ pool members, although a few were honest enough to give them back.

https://blockchain.info/tx/a2d1e19331f4ea274079c94382560bbb4f32165ed647a33adad651a604e7caa2

But you have to agree that it is a turn off for a person that has just got into bitcoins and isn't quite the geek type.
Personal opinion , but if my mother would read about this episode I bet she will not be touching bitcoins too soon , no matter how much I try to explain.

The press just loves to make titles like "Can bitcoin replace -insert random word-"  :P

Probably the same 100-or-so million users that use them today!
(For all the same reasons)

That is correct. I hope that the development team does something so that situations like these can be avoided.

What made me sad was the fact that only 4 people were honest enough (out of 400+) to transfer the coins (i.e transaction fee) back to him.

https://blockchain.info/address/1Jt35Ww1GjM9iGyTM8mAyBmCPPdPz7Z35A

1% , this is good.
I would have bet on two. The pool operator and a freak of nature.
The crypto community is not as generous as it is vocal.

We need better clients that even a 5 year old can use without screwing up too badly. It'll have to come at some expense (fees, instantaneous transactions, etc), but there is clearly a market for it. The developers should concentrate on the underlying architecture and third parties should be developing more user friendly clients.

In all the time I used brainwallet.org's source, it always set the change to be sent back to my sending address, not to fee. What implementations are people using that they are fucking up their TXes so badly? It seems like I'd have to go light years out of my way to find and use them. Or are people trying to construct raw TXes without knowing WTF they're doing?

There is no way that bitcoins will replace paypal even though it sucks its easier to get and recieve and if there are any problems you can get your money back

I sure hope so. Fraud doesn't exist for a Bitcoin merchant.

So we go from a few people scamming a few vendors , to a few vendors scamming a lot of people :).
Each system has its advantages and its disadvantages , that's why we have lots of payment processors.

The second case is much worse than the first. If we can't prevent this particular problem, then Bitcoin will never become popular with people who sue them to purchase various products online.

Precious metals were valuable because they are pretty and easy to form. Now they are valuable because we all think they are. The same could be true of anything else that can't be produced by just anyone.

Precious metals are valuable because their supply is limited, just like the case of Bitcoin. We just have to improve the security issue. Once we do that, we can take Bitcoin beyond gold.  ;D