Never bothered to check. I have a GBP Coinbase card but I've only used it once. I sure as shit hope they don't load the spread on top of charging 2.5% but you never know.

I don't think it's ever going to get anywhere, or anywhere significant. As ever humans love to centralise too much. I hope it keeps its doors open long enough to catch on with enough people but it's always going to be an outlier.

I think the the biggest change to come out of this will be the massive cranking up of the rush towards cashlessness in many places. Lots of reports of businesses refusing cash. There's now talk in the UK of how to keep the cash system alive. I really can't see it lasting if it requires benevolence and inconvenience to keep it going. Businesses will vote with their feet.

If you do enter with gusto and stick around you will certainly learn a lot about yourself, and the nature of others. The life lessons people have picked up through being involved in this would certainly make for an interesting read.

In general my opinion of humanity has lowered considerably through getting involved in this, and it wasn't all that high to begin with. Greed sure is an overwhelming emotion.

Yes there have other options in the past but they all looked so wretched no sensible person would touch them.

I assume at some point an established broker will offer btc as a deposit and withdraw option, if not an actual trading pair.

Enough gold dealers do it.

The older I get the more the phrase 'not my problem' seems beautiful to me.

All the same I expect decentralisation will become more prominent in the minds of populace and the tools created to give it to them will be truly impressive. Who knows where we'll be in 120 years but the last few years have clearly shown the existing order of things is starting to creak horrifically.

Bitcoin is one path beyond it. Education is the main path and the knowledge of how truly corrosive the existing order of things is will only grow from here.

Yes. The bad stuff, in the way it is currently set up, affects Paypal's own customers, not Bitcoin itself.

I can imagine many Paypal users will have the same trajectory. They'll buy it on there, learn more about it, realise they are now trapped and then either attempt to escape or quit in disgust.

There aren't many ways it can develop. Paypal either keep users in their walled garden while the rest of the world gets on with things completely unimpeded, or they open it up to the real deal.

The only potential threat is them controlling a vast number of customer coins. They can't influence mining or development. A global company stealing, sequestering or losing everyone's coins is not a normal occurrence either.

If coins have been sitting unmoved for 10 long years I think it's safe to say the security measures of the owner are good enough. If they could've been had away they no doubt would've been.

There've been increasing numbers of early coins moving around. I guess the owners reckon The Big One might be on the way.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ftx-launches-bitcoin-pairs-top-093007591.html

I've always found it very strange why so few people have tried to pair crypto trading with stock trading. Looks like the stocks here, and there are only a few of the most obvious ones, are tokenised and you can also trade fractions of them too.

No idea who this lot are but they've partnered with established names to facilitate this. Americans aren't welcome of course.

The majority of them are on a platform which means it's under a person's control which also means they can hijack it or someone can hijack them. It takes out the custodial element but ultimately you react to what your screen is feeding you and that's a way in for the nefarious.

There've been a few cases of conventional exchanges and these having their domain or hosting compromised. If that happens you're rather wide open.

Same rates as the cards already available in other countries. That's a beefy rate but others like Wirex hide theirs with a spread. I guess it's more relevant in the US where banking is so painfully stone age. In Europe you sell and send to your bank account and it's done in an hour or less so I guess the main market there is for people worried about their bank getting arsey.

In the UK, yes. Once it's gone it's gone. But it has to be a certain type of transfer and it's usually the most common one. There are countless cases of men in the middle and phishing where the banks told people it was their fault and that was that.

You certainly can't deny his balls deepness. I wonder what a private poll of all of Microstrategy's staff and investors would come up with if asked how they felt about it.

We may find out he's been detained against his will when he attends every board meeting wearing a UASF baseball cap and forms a mob attacking nocoiners.

It'll increase their control over their own citizens and economy so I guess in theory they'll be making more money. Internationally I can't see many nations or investors wanting to adopt something that remains under full Chinese control at all times. A flick of a switch and off your money goes.

Though it's odious ultimately it doesn't really matter. Anyone who uses Paypal immediately excludes themselves from the actual Bitcoin network. It's a few database entries moving around and nothing more.

That isn't controlling or undermining Bitcoin. It may be sidelining potential users. If they wise up they will leave and seek out the real deal.

Yup. There'll be plenty of them too. Paypal attracts scum wherever consciousness exists. This will pull in more of it. It'll really ramp up when you can withdraw the real deal which is why it may never happen.

Which transactions? I've never done one where XRP was remotely possible, not that I'd do it as by the time I converted it back it would cost more than Bitcoin fees.

As for being 'higher than they need to be' it's us lot who decide the fees by bidding against each other. They are exactly what we all decide they are.

I gave up on that earn site ages ago. It hardly ever bore any relation to reality. No idea why they don't fix it or take it down. It must've caused an awful lot of inconvenience over the years.

I can't be fucking arsed to figure out that Jochen site. Bitcoinfees.net does a good enough job for me.

Let's hope adoptees don't get their messages mixed. I can well imagine mindless druggists logging into Paypal thinking 'oh wow, no one can stop the bit coin, right?' and then lasting a few seconds before their door is booted in.