Bitcoin Forum

PayPal’s cryptocurrency integration is an embarrassing attempt to deceive non-crypto people

Don't know why not many talk about this, but PayPal will not allow.

- No deposits or withdraws of cryptocurrency.
- No paying with cryptocurrency or sending cryptocurrency to other users.
- You will not have access to your private keys.

https://temporaryerror.com/why-you-should-not-buy-bitcoin-with-paypal/

The best part about the Paypal adopting Bitcoin is not the service that it provides, but the fact that it almost acts as a "gateway drug" for a lack of a better phrase. Its the gateway for non crypto personal to adopt a new, and exciting concept, all because a reputable, and large company such as Paypal has implemented it into their system, which by extension improves peoples perception of Bitcoin, and its related technologies. The Paypal adoption is a very good way of intriguing people enough about Bitcoin, that ultimately they'll look more into it, and quickly come to realize the flaws of the Paypal system.

I do think this has been discussed though, there's been plenty of users here talking about how poor the implementation of Bitcoin into Paypal is for the end user, and how much it benefits Paypal, but that is usually the case in a capitalism world.

Paypal just wants to grab the attention the average Joe that heard about BTC in the news and would likely be interested in buying due to the increases in price it has registered.

Generally that kind of people don't have all the information about BTC and the crypto world (I'm not really sure they want to know as well). They just want an easy way to get on the wave and reap the benefits. Enter Paypal a trusted & established company that just adopted BTC and is "happy" to give the average Joe a way into this world.

The move from Paypal is a good move but only for their side, not for their customers ...

Well, the part that the most having benefits to bitcoin is only the adoption that created awareness to their users that could be potentially large investors. You can buy bitcoin in Paypal but not for holding your crypto, you can use it to purchase in a merchant that using bitcoin and supported PayPal as a payment processor. If you were buying and hold your bitcoin in Paypal, that is a different story. Paypal not allow you to transfer your bitcoin, so it does not make sense if you bought it for holding.

In fact, there are already several complaints regarding cryptocurrency on PayPal on this forum. And most of them are related like what you have said. This is actually in PayPal's terms and conditions. And indeed if we don't read it first, we will be trapped in it because we can only buy and sell there and cannot withdraw. If you want to withdraw it, you must first convert it to the fiat available there.

At least, this is what in their PayPal Cryptocurrency Terms and Conditions (https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/cryptocurrencies-tnc)

Yeah, it seems like PayPal uses the moment of BTC to attract many more people using PayPal. It is like a free promotion when very booming issue about PayPal and cryptocurrency several months ago. But in fact, this is not what expected as we are.

Thing is most people don't care. They just want an easy way to get into BTC/crypto (or at least to think they got) and continue their lives. The fact that a reputable company offers them that is just something that Paypal couldn't afford to lose ...

This has been discussed for months, and everyone agrees that what PayPal does is to give people the ‘experience’ on what it feels like buying and selling crypto, even though they technically don’t have any of it on their ownership. Even though PayPal announced that withdrawals in bitcoin would be allowed soon, I still don’t think it’s worth it to use their service at all. But even then, at the least, people can ‘get engaged’ in the buy/sell aspect of the coin and make a profit off of it from PayPal, and that’s what most people are looking for, ease of access to trading so they can get aboard the ship a lot faster.

Yeah, just like them, IIRC, there were threads about this discussion. At first when I've heard about it, I was happy that PayPal which is the said and once a rival of bitcoin before for payment processing suddenly turned and adopted bitcoin. But having said that they have adopted bitcoin and eligible users can use them to purchase, that's at least a good start for their service. I hope that they'll upgrade that soon and allow their users to touch and withdraw the real thing, btc.

PayPal found a way not lose their customers and even attract more and the terms are still favorable to them.

whatever said in that article is 100% true. Paypal is just fooling it's users pretending that they are letting their users to HODL and use bitcoin in the system. but in actual they are playing this dirty game at backend and everything still being done with fiat.

No thanks, I am ok with Bitcoin through direct sources. I don't need a third party like Paypal to control my BTC and fake my money with it's buggy system. I am glad I never used paypal for anything.

They are still tied to some laws that could implicate their company into bankruptcy, I understand the way Paypal did what they did but I agree that the execution was a clunky and failure one. They want to prevent any possibility of money laundering. As the quote above said, Paypal created an unintended benefit for crypto community although gateway drug seems to be on the harsh side of things.  ;D ;D

What I only see to PayPal adopting of crypto is just a media and awareness to its millions of users globally that benefits cryptocurrency especially bitcoin, a lot. The community will only feel the adoption when they enable the withdrawal and the use to purchase to its millions of merchants.

Let's add some conspiracy theories to your concerns...

A lot of people are buying bitcoins that are stored on a centralized ledger at PayPal and they have no control over those coins. We know what centralized companies do with that power and that information. (Everything is reported to the governments and the tax authorities)

Another concern is all the bitcoins that are going out of circulation, because it is stored on PayPal's cold storage. (These coins do not generate miners fees, because the transactions are done off-chain on PayPal's internal ledger system)  ::)

I dont think that PayPal only brings worse things for non-crypto users. Because we have spent many years working with crypto and related business, there are still many people who are not even use bitcoin for even once. This creates an opportunity for them to integrate with bitcoin and therefore, if they are eager to learn, they will find sources of knowledge and various ways to own not just bitcoin but also other cryptocurrency

Moreover, many people who do not have time to learn can easily buy bitcoin or ethereum for investment. Since Bitcoin was implemented into paypal, its price was more than a double. Whoever buys bitcoin has earned quite an amount of money

I would not use bitcoin on paypal because there is a rule saying not your keys not your coins and paypal won't give you any private key or recovery seed to your bitcoins. In the other hand, paypal is centralized and using bitcoin as most famous decentralized currency on a centralized place on paypal doesn't make any sense. Due to the recent success of bitcoin, paypal allowed users to have the experience to feel like they are buying bitcoin, by doing this paypal wanted to earn some more attention between people.

If that's the case why we patronized that kind of lousy service, there's a lot of platforms out there that providing a better service than Paypal. By the way, Paypal's crypto integration only serves as a kind of promotion, All we know that Paypal is a popular payment Gateway and also a mainstream player so the crypto industry has benefited a little from that so-called PayPal crypto adoption.

I will not buy Bitcoin on Paypal because I have no reason to buy there...
I am comfortable and used to buy/sell Bitcoin on Binance and Kucoin. I don't know the advantages and disadvantages if I transact there.

This was already a talk of the town when PayPal announced that they will be offering buying and selling of Bitcoin and a few altcoins on their platform. This was already discussed over and over again.

This may not seem interesting as far as cryptocurrency people are concerned but this is surely something new to a lot of people who haven't heard of cryptocurrency yet, or at least to those who have come across crypto in passing but never given it enough attention. This may be a good start to someone who is a complete stranger to cryptocurrency.

I never use paypal and i have not much idea about this payment system.That's why i'm always love to exchange crypto with binance amd kucoin exchange site.

I'm most interested in this feature. I have no reason to buy Bitcoin with PayPal or store it with PayPal because I've been doing perfectly fine without PayPal intervening and because being independent of it is safer. However, I was excited when PayPal announced Bitcoin adoption because there are so many online places where PayPal payments are accepted, but Bitcoin is not an option, so I was hoping that this Bitcoin adoption would allow paying with BTC wherever PayPal is an accepted payment method. And I would certainly like to actually pay with BTC instead of selling it for fiat first.

First, you can't actually use the cryptocurrency to buy and sell things, though Paypal hints that paying for goods and services with cryptocurrencies could be possible in the future. The problem is, every crypto exchange in the world already lets you pay for things with cryptocurrencies.

Probably Paypal see this as a opportunity to deceive users in their platform or even new users that could be interested in using Paypal since bitcoin was a trending topic because of the hype in the market and a lot od social media platform Paypal see this as a opportunity to make it a good advertisement to promote the company since people or invest could be interested if they read that Paypal will be having crypto as well.

Im not a fan of custodial wallet either but putting bitcoin without the needed features was just a promotion probably but im still hoping that Paypal would add those features soon in the platform enable Paypal to be some how like Coinbase atleast. Where i really think they would benefit because of the million users that might be interested.

One of the things I kinda over-rated, just to realize that they weren't really into the game of supporting bitcoin, but to do whatever they like. Anyways, I'm not planning on using such services, cause I feel it's way worse that the other options we've ever had.

paypal tends to be more about global transactions not only for crypto, so why are we not too sure about paypal. it's too common where our bitcoin must be stored in a paypal wallet. So far, what is still safe is to buy crypto on the market, simply put, public exchanges like paypal are still vulnerable to our crypto.

In my opinion, many have talked about the bad application of bitcoin on paypal and the benefits for paypal. Because big companies like paypal have implemented it into their system, which further increases people's perception of bitcoin.

and even Paypal controls the private keys associated with any cryptocurrency you buy through Paypal. What that means is you have only illusory control of your cryptocurrency, not actual control

 bitcoin as a currency at PayPal's 28 million merchants; 17% of these users have already used the app to buy and sell bitcoin (BTC, +1.82%).
For 99% of Americans, it was impossible to get a house or a car or a college education without a loan from a bank. Bankers abused this power. They were always a smug bunch. But we needed them, and they knew it.

because no one really knows is bitcoin on paypal real or not. While you cant withdraws money from there you shoudnt by crypto there

For the vast majority of the experienced users out here, purchasing Bitcoin through PayPal makes no sense (unless they make more functions available, such as making payments with Bitcoin). But there are millions of not-so tech savvy people out there, who would rejoice at such an opportunity. These people usually have a hard time in purchasing BTC from the exchanges and then storing it themselves.

I am just coming across this, because I don't use it, and if I may ask, if implementing all these, what's the essence of adopting Bitcoin to their platform? This is actually why most times, centralized platforms can not be trusted because almost everything they do is for their own advantages not for the benefit of their users. Nevertheless, right from time any platform that do not give me power to control my crypto assets, I don't bother having anything to do with it, and as such I think these are enough reasons not to use PayPal for anything relating to Bitcoin. However, the advantage PayPal brought to the crypto space is that, it brought more awareness and attention on Bitcoin, as people will to a nice extent understand the potential of Bitcoin and what it also offers.

You are right. These are the hinderences for many users buy I believe they will gradually add more features yo their crypto services.
Earlier, PayPal was not at all supportive of cryptos and would ban accounts dealing with cryptos.
Now they have started supporting them. We will soon see more changes in PayPal for crypto.

All these points put me on the idea that PayPal offer air to their customers, not Bitcoin. No private keys, no deposits, can't sending - they offer a nothing. Do PayPal have information on how their cryptocurrency will be backed and what evidence they can provide? It seems to me that you shouldn't deal with them.

Yes, they trade only air or as say - artificial bitcoin. Also trading Bitcoin on paypal might cause your account to be blocked (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/k1f1n0/paypal_blocked_my_account_with_all_my_funds_for/). Paypal can also freeze your funds for 10-14 days for suspicious action (even receiving $30 can be a suspicious action. I have my funds frozen for 2 weeks without any reasonable explanation).

If you have issues with Paypal, get ready to be answered with default answers from FAQ and support not interested in solving your case. Dont forget that you might wait for days before Paypal support even answers you, as it seems they are lack of employees in support.

If we use Paypal to buy bitcoin in a large amount, Paypal will know who their customer that do that is, and maybe they will investigate from where our money comes from.
It could attract an alarm from our bank too, especially if we transfer big money from the bank account to Paypal, and that can make our account gets investigating by them.
We know how to buy bitcoin so far, so I think we do not need Paypal to buy bitcoin.
But maybe for people out there who already become the Paypal members, they will still use Paypal to buy bitcoin because they can get convenient to buy bitcoin from there.

and want to add - very hight fees!

The brokerage Robinhood, is the same. They are buying and storing the BTC that their clients but but their clients are not allowed to withdraw it or send it elsewhere.
Makes you wonder if it was a "lets put something together and see if it gains traction" thing. And now that it did seem to be popular they work on the next step.
Lets face it, if they did it and 100 people bought BTC, they would all be thinking "Wow, it's a good thing we did not spend that much money working on it"

Both PP and RobinHood claim that withdraws are coming soon, both are large heavily regulated businesses. No reason to think it's anything other then it's just big business slowness.

-Dave

This is very similar to a ploy, in order to control users more, they can block funds without giving a reason. We wanted bitcoin to be popularized and in the end, we see how it is used in illegal actions.

There's a sense if you wanted to purchase in the merchants using bitcoin and to have bitcoin, you can use Paypal because they are widely accepted for most merchants as a third party payment method. But if your purpose is to save and invest in bitcoin, that's totally no makes sense there because you even don't own the private key, and also you cant transfer your bitcoin into a bitcoin wallet, it should always on the Paypal platform.

At least, this Paypal was brought a good impact on bitcoin and people get awareness on it.

As we have already discussed this many times before, almost all of us agree or there was a consensus among the community that Paypal in a way does seem to give regular non crypto users the experience on how to deal with cryptocurrency. But in my opinion it is somewhat lacking in a sense that the non crypto consumer will not experience the "hardships" of learning real crypto like downloading wallets, stalking coins, doing transactions and checking in the blockchain and others. I feel that Paypal should not hijack that experience.

PayPal offers another option plus it gives BTC wider exposure. There still are many people who haven't heard about BTC and crypto, if they use PayPal, they will now know about it through PayPal.
Also it instill trust in them when some big reputed company like PayPal endorse BTC.

I had my paypal still alive now so I hope for them to reconsider the policies and make it a lighter and more convenient. I'm using paypal as another payment method for more than 5 years and I don't have encountered any problem so far as I already linked my card it my account.

Even I had my PayPal account a few years ago. But here in India, the government imposed all sort of restrictions on PayPal, making it useless for freelancers. And this is also one of the reasons why freelancers in India started accepting their wages in Bitcoin or Ethereum, rather than PayPal USD. The restrictions are still there and hardly anyone is using PayPal in India nowadays. And with all these limitations in place, I don't think that they (PayPal) will ever make Bitcoins available for Indian users.

I think considerations will always be made but maybe it will be seen from an economic point of view too, whether it is profitable or not. because they also hope that there will be feedback that will be made every application that will be made. business does seem cruel when it determines the matter of sharing profits.
but I hope your problem can be resolved properly.


wow, I just found out that there are countries like India which are famous for their renewable technology that don't accept paypal.
but indeed every government certainly applies something after it is calculated correctly and whether it can benefit its citizens or not make the country experience difficulties, after implementing this.
same as in my country paypal is not a problem but bitcoin is problematic and is not recognized as a legal payment, while exchanges and others are not problematic.
so each country certainly carries out the rules after receiving and accommodating the pros and cons of implementing it.

^ I have no reason to use PayPal. in my country, Paypal lost from local digital wallets, and for transactions via digital wallets, I use the wallet. I have already bought Bitcoin in Kucoin, Probit, and Indodax and can make withdrawals to my personal wallet at will. if those who buy Bitcoin on PayPal can't withdraw their Bitcoin, so why would they buy Bitcoin there!

Of all the numerous places to buy crypto why would anyone prefer PayPal well.maybe for their customer that might have interest in crypto especially for PayPal that is know that they always block some accounts. It is very risky if anyone will put his or her bitcoin on PayPal platform. However, in an other way rounds, it makes some of their rival to consider also accepting bitcoin which also mean that bitcoin is getting popular everyday. With time more integration with other crypto and stablecoin will be also be considered

There are many other places to buy bitcoin and not just paypal. Paypal only provides bitcoins to be bought and sold on the paypal platform and cannot be sent outside the paypal platform.
People who buy bitcoins are paypal maybe because they don't really know how to buy bitcoins other than on the paypal platform. Popular markets such as Binance are good places to buy bitcoin without the need for KYC for transactions with a limit of 2BTC / day and that's fine.

More reason why we all should help these victims who have been dealt with by PayPal incorporated, they are likely out to deceive newborn in cryptocurrency industry. From day one, their TOS aren't such we should welcome into this sphere because the industry has made things simple. Most importantly, if not your keys then not your coins and this should be avoided like plagues.

I will never use Paypal, it's too risky for me. I spent half of my savings on bitcoin, I need to make sure it's safe.

First of all, this service is fully managed, which means that users will not have their own private keys;

Secondly, PayPal intends to "provide educational content to account holders to help them understand the cryptocurrency ecosystem

good point. I have a question, will you use paypal or you're actually using it? Up to now, I have not used it yet out of the fear of risk.

Those restrictions were imposed almost a decade ago. The government was looking to shore up the collection of tax revenue and some of the officials were concerned that PayPal is being used to transfer payments to Indian freelancers from foreign nations and most of this money doesn't show up in tax returns. Therefore they removed most of the PayPal functionalities in India. For example, in India you can't store any money in your PayPal account. You can only make or receive payments through PayPal, using your bank account or credit card. But nowadays most of the freelancers here are getting their payment in Bitcoin or Ethereum instead of PayPal.

To be honest i have never purchased Bitcoins from PayPal.
In fact I didn’t know that PayPal has an option to Buy Bitcoins as well.
I can understand OP’s concerns. And the solution might to be it is P2P.
You can buy Bitcoins at P2P platforms through your PayPal funds , but again it’s not safe.
As PayPal has chargeback option, so better be careful.
Moreover i won’t advise to buy through PayPal, you can go with the other alternatives.

This is called karma) people will always find an alternative and any government restrictions will only popularize Bitcoin.

In PP you cannot buy cryptocurrencies, but some tokenized abomination.

I don't think that any person who has at least a clue about crypto will buy in PayPal.

You are right - stay away from PP!

Wait so if you have btc... you can't send the btc to your paypal account?  Im confused with this.  But you do have a btc balance in your paypal account though when you buy btc with your paypal balance.  So you can't withdraw the btc and transfer it to say coinbase or your own wallet or someone?

valid no debat. you are from indonesia  ;D

in my opinion paypal still best for payment in ebay and other merchant also become gas fuel for bitcoin price but this
 - No deposits or withdraws of cryptocurrency.
- No paying with cryptocurrency or sending cryptocurrency to other users.
- You will not have access to your private keys.

kinda true maybe in further they start fixing it

and dont forget the spread guys  :D

It's a gateway for people to start into crypto while getting the chance to earn from it too. It is definitely an underwhelming release but for sure they will release updates in the future that will make the cryptocurrency feature of PayPal much more bearable, enjoyable, and easy to use. For now, us old-timers have no reason to invest on it other than to test it out, but this works well for people who got into the cryptocurrency industry a bit later than us.

Indeed, the initial goal of Paypal to accept Bitcoin transactions is only to provide servers to Paypal users. Especially for Paypal users in America to
get to know Bitcoin better. So it is very natural that Paypal while only allows its users to make Bitcoin transactions only on the Paypal platform.
But by looking at the data that shows Paypal users enthusiasm for Bitcoin, it is possible that in the future Paypal will provide full service.

So users can deposit or withdraw Bitcoin, so Paypal can function like any other exchange. So for now it's best not to buy Bitcoin with Paypal, because
we cannot withdraw the Bitcoin that we have out of the Paypal platform. But if we intend to buy Bitcoin for a long-term investment there is nothing
wrong with buying Bitcoin with Paypal.

Exactly, basically people who buys bitcoin in paypal uses their service just for holding coin and nothing more, sort of investment but they don't fully own the investment that they bought.
It's really silly because that also mean people buying imaginary things just because profit. Might aswell buy the real thing just for sure so there's no possibility of manipulation to the assets.

Yeah people who buy crypto on PayPal are probably the same type of people that investing the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust lol

It's more like personal choice. Those who want to keep their BTC with PayPal and Grayscale are fully aware of the dangers. The same goes for cryptocurrency users who want to keep their coins in exchange wallets. Even the experienced users are divided on how to store their coins. Some want to go for hardware wallets such as Trezor and Ledger, while some others prefer paper wallets. And there is another section that favors online wallets and lite wallets. In the end, the choice lies with the user.

Obviously i wouldn't like to let my bitcoin allow on their wallet cause thus i would lost freedom of my owenship cause paypal wouldn't give the access of that fund i mean private key.as well as i would also lost the facilities of transactions too.can't sent bitcoin to any friend or relative if i need to sent.even i don't know if I'm really buying the real bitcoin or the virtual one cause there is no way to find out.so not going to buy bitcoin from paypal

i do agree with this. we cant blame users to buy btc under paypal platform as it is their funds in the first place. but they should know the risks involved if they are not holding their private keys. if nothing else, paypal is a good introduction to noncrypto users. once they become knowledgeable with crypto, i am sure, they will look for other options how to manage their crypto portfolio.
paypal will pave the way for noncrypto users to become crypto users. so that alone, is already a good deal with this move from paypal. and to add, i dont think forum users will use paypal for crypto purposes, because they already know how to deal with crypto on their own.

To be fair you should be buying anything with Paypal. I have always hated it so much. I hate that so many places support it but no other better methods. It is by far not the best method it is just the most well known and one of the first ones to come out which is directly connected to your bank account and I guess the fact they hae been around for such a long time makes people trust them.

I was very happy when I found out that Paypal accepted Bitcoin purchases, and also this news made the Bitcoin price soar up. But after reading
the rules, I was really surprised. The rules have been mentioned in the opening post, so I don't need to repeat them. In conclusion, I also became
not interested in buying Bitcoin on Paypal, with all these rules. Maybe those who buy Bitcoin on Paypal are only Paypal users who have no knowledge of
the crypto world. But indeed Paypal can't blame for making these rules, that's their right, and we can't do anything. But I believe in the future Paypal
will definitely improve these rules, because if Paypal does not improve these rules it will be unable to compete with exchanges or other platforms.

I have no plans of buying  bitcoin with PayPal, anytime soon. Well for some of us, we' ve never liked the operation  of PayPal. It comes with too much restrictions  coupled  with unnecessary  KYC verification  with the least of transactional issues. Moreover, accounts are not allowed in a number  of countries  around the world.