this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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Since all the comments are reflexively negative cuz crypto is filled with scams and nonsense with no need I’ll explain why this is actually useful in some scenarios i and friends had experiences with.
Trans artists can now accept commission payments without revealing their deadname. (Before this my friend had to rely on actual crypto like bitcoin which had high fees, and if they didn’t immediately transfer out to their bank it wasnt a stable price)
Friends who are no longer a citizen of a country (escaping russia due to death threats and lgbt status), or are seeking asylum (due to ukraine being invaded, south american coups by the US making their country unsafe), can now accept a stable currency thats not super shady and backed by a company with a professional reputation (friend had a company hire them to teach painting online and the company learned how to use the shady coin Tether to pay them because there is no way they can open a bank account for now. They accept crypto and then trade it locally for pesos/dollars)
Accept donations from any country without revealing your full name. Paypal is one of the few services that is accepted worldwide and this stablecoin makes it even easier for south americans to receive donations safely without making their full name publicly available to trolls/harassers.
These have always been potential benefits of crypto. If paypal makes these actually attainable without all the other burdensome bullshit that would be awesome.
I doubt paypal would work this way in russia or other troubled countries tho. They've banned a couple of my friends without stating a reason for being under shithole states. Just crypto feels more reliable than that sort of pp-backed crypto.
I guess the purpose of this PayPal coin is the same as Tether: to circumvent some of the regulations that comes when trading cryptocurrencies with real USD.
They will probably require some KYC verification process before you can buy the coin, so PayPal will know exactly who you are. It’s up to PayPal to reveal your registered name or not.
I also doubt they will allow to send the coin to people outside US. They explicitly state in the page that it’s for US customers only.
You bring up good points about it being potentially useful for facilitating the movement of money across borders (and potentially doing so more anonymously now) within the PayPal ecosystem with fewer fees, but it's an unnecessary step for pretty much anything else within PayPal as far as I'm concerned. It's also definitely a bad place to park money long term unless you like inflation eating away at your buying power.
I'm not sure what you mean about high fees with Bitcoin, though, are you talking about exchange fees from fiat to Bitcoin and vice versa? I rarely pay any fees simply moving Bitcoin around.
Bitcoin has high fees if you’re moving Bitcoin between wallets within the blockchain. You don’t pay fees if you’re moving Bitcoin between wallets within the exchange, because those transactions aren’t registered to the blockchain. It’s essentially just registered into the exchanges internal spreadsheets.