I don't understand why most journalist/users don't spend <5min on the wayback machine to see that this exact wording has been in the ToS since Sep 2021, and very similar wording since before that time. They didn't add anything after the backlash. People equate the 'Updated' message to mean that the wording is new, it is not. https://web.archive.org/web/20210922061858/https://www.paypa...
The article is saying that PayPal could "presumably" charge your linked bank account. If you read their actual user agreement it's clear that this is not the case - which makes sense, because that would open them up to a world of lawsuits. Speaking from experience, the reality is that when you owe PayPal money and they will try to withdraw it from your PayPal balance and then go to collections like any other business would.
The U.S. dollar in a competitive, fair, and efficient market cannot be tied to the services of a few companies. Individuals must have the right to spend money independently. People have a right to participate in markets.
Theres a few options - force all online sales to also accept bank transfers.
Create a gov owned company that competes with these services (like USPS).
Or regulate payment services on what can be considered things they don't have to service.
I think governments should create a digital cash equivalent. One that cannot be tracked any more than regular cash can (at least legally). With all the benefits and downsides, because that's the only way it would be trusted enough to work.
I think this would be a major boon to any economy that implements it well. People have no problem paying for small services in real life, because paying 30 cents is easy. Online though? It's not. It's hard for the people getting money and the people paying money.
The problem is theft of your funds without your consent over your unpopular political speech. Bitcoin cannot be taken from you by any third party, provided you self-custody and adequately protect your keys.
>If I buy a video card with bitcoin, but get sent a brick instead, how does "Blockchain as Arbiter" get my bitcoins back?
Unrelated to the problem being discussed, but still a problem. Unfortunately, this is not a problem unique to Bitcoin, nor a problem adequately solved by PayPal, as explained in other comments, so it's hardly a robust criticism against BTC.
Full dislcosure: I own BTC, but less than 0.5% of my net worth, I do not own it for speculative reasons, and I do not view it as an investment or store of value, only as an alternative payment network.
> The problem is theft of your funds without your consent over your unpopular political speech.
As much as I want to roll my eyes at this, it's important no matter what your political opinion is! For now we might be talking "unpopular" but what if you have political speech that is popular but opposes what the people in charge at the time think?
BTC doesn't help with transactions, you still end up trusting a 3rd-party (or the party you're transacting with, in which case a bank transfer would also work fine). There will be no censorship to send your BTC, but you can't give guarantees about what will happen for the other part of the transaction without this trust.
The use-case you mentioned is just that of a bank account. The right to have such a bank account should be enforced by regulation where it's not the case yet, as storing your wealth in an asset with such high volatility is not an actual solution.
Legally, no, which is why I don't use PayPal and never will again, but to the layperson, who almost invariably does not read those contracts, and might be incapable of understanding the contract even if they chose to read it, I suspect it would look, sound, and feel a lot like theft.
But again, that's the beauty of Bitcoin. There is no dense legalese with sneaky technicalities that allow other parties to seize your funds over the contents of your speech, so long as you self-custody and adequately protect your keys. I understand that's also not something all laypeople can be expected to do, but I prefer to have the option than to not have the option.
Paypal refused me a refund after someone didn't even send me a brick, but just sent me someone else's FedEx shipment confirmation. Didn't even say my address and was delivered before I ordered. I was instantly denied because their shitty AI dispute process just checks the FedEx zipcode. Paypal wouldn't even let me talk to a real person. Fuck that company.
Use a credit card instead. Luckily, I payed paypal through a credit card. So I disputed it through the bank instead.
Bitcoin fixes it by reducing the number of scammers in the chain. if you deal with a seller and paypal, either the paypal or the seller can scam you. paypal is immune to bad press because their reputation is already rock bottom, so they don't even lose any reputation anymore by rampantly thieving and scamming. At least if, with a cryptocurrency, the seller scams you, you can voice it somewhere their reputation will be at risk. It doesn't delete the risk but the fixes the problem of "middle man is a scammer and thief and nobody is willing to do anything at all about it" that exists with paypal.
There's nobody you can complain to to get your money back from paypal in many situations, especially when it comes to receiving payments. If you use a credit card or have a bank send them money you have better options, but many people scammed by paypal have no recourse when they are on the receiving end of the money (which is the primary reason you'd have money held in paypal to begin with, as typically if you're sending it along you're not letting it sit there in the account).
None. Bitcoin is the only way to solve this problem, 100% outright. As long as trusting other humans is a part of the equation, problems of corruption, censorship, etc. will always be a problem.
You do realise that money was created to deal with a lack of trust, and that every time you ‘transact’ in money you’re actually expressing your lack of trust in your counterpart’s ability to “make good” on a barter?
>You do realise that money was created to deal with a lack of trust
I disagree. I posit that money was created to establish a fungible, divisble, common store of value for the purpose of facilitating exchange of goods and services of dissimilar value that are not always needed by the counterparty. Without money, the barber would need to pay for his groceries with haircuts. This poses problems if the grocer or farmer does not want or need a haircut. No trust violations needed here - barter is simply more difficult without money, even if there is absolute trust in your counterparty's promise to deliver the goods or services they offer as described.
The “half barter” theory of the origin of money has been refuted — there is no evidence that ‘primitive’ societies use barter and eventually experienced an urge to facilitate transactions by introducing “universal tokens”. Bated is what people habituated to money revert to when money is not available (those famous “cigarette economies” of POW camps) but that’s not the same thing — indeed it’s just indicative of pervasive cognitive bias. Rather, all evidence points towards money arising for the sake of political centralisation: demand that taxes be paid in terms of these tokens and you create scarcity (tax bills due soon! need money!), a way to pay your soldiers (actually, displaced village folk), and a local demand for the tokens you’re paying them with. What do native societies use: mental tallies of favours and goods rendered, because after all our evolutionary environment is small units of fifty or less individuals in a high-trust environment. I suggest you read Debt by David Graeber, of Occupy Wall Street fame.
> You do realise that money was created to deal with a lack of trust,
No, it wasn't. Money was created as a proxy for trading value because of the cumbersome nature of barter. If we have a commonly agreed upon way to exchange value (money), I can paint your house and you can give me money and I can use that money to go buy food or other people's services. The only "trust" in that is the chosen form of money. Hence why state currencies are less trustworthy and something like Bitcoin (which requires no centralized intermediary) is more trustworthy.
That's not really accurate; favors aren't fungible. I can't give you potatoes, and then use that favor to take a cow from your neighbor. You have to keep track of the balance somehow.
True, but in the fifty-or-so individuals in a high-trust environment as has been true for most of our evolutionary history, keeping mental tabs on running totals is really no difficulty at all.
And yet when you send via Bitcoin, you're putting 100% trust in them following through on fulfilling their end of the deal. Only NFTs/smart contracts fix this, but for them to affect things in the real world you either need society or some oracle to use that smart contract as a source of truth.
Which means you have to actually have discernment and encourages the individual to build long-term relationships, not transactional ones.
It's a bit abstract/esoteric, but using something like Bitcoin would re-humanize commerce vs the increasingly transactional nature of the world enabled by fiat/printing.
> How does bitcoin handle any form of fraud, misrepresentation, or contract dispute?
It doesn't need to. That's up to the individual to be more discerning (a long-term good thing as it re-establishes reputation as an asset and focus on community). On an international scale, services could easily be created (think BBB) that act as a reputation scoring system for buyers who want extra assurance (or even insurance which could be offered as a service to skeptical buyers).
They only agree to take on those roles when they have the tools available to offset the costs of doing that business.
In particular, they want to be able to do things like: Reverse transactions, correctly identify all parties, freeze accounts that are in dispute, fine users who abuse their services or mislead them.
So again - how are you avoiding trusting other people, exactly?
Banks are not what I described. A bank takes custody of your money and controls your access to it. With Bitcoin, you hold custody (if you want) and distribute it at your own discretion without permission. Contrast that with a bank, withdrawing any large sum of money requires permission from a manager or other authority, gets reported, etc. I don't want that as it's not of anyone's business when/how/in what sum I spend my money.
What I suggested was a company that assigns ratings to companies (banks do not do this) and offers opt-in insurance in the event that a transaction is fraudulent.
> Reverse transactions, correctly identify all parties, freeze accounts that are in dispute, fine users who abuse their services or mislead them.
This is the problem. I don't want those things present for all transactions, only some. These "services" can be used to unfairly target and censor people. What I described would not make that possible.
Viable, but foolish considering it's cumbersome and we live in an age where perfectly viable technological solutions exist. It's like having an iron but pressing your shirts between books out in the sun.
My definition of "cumbersome" above is tradeability. Bitcoin can be transferred to anyone in the world in a few minutes (w/ on-chain confirms in ~10-60m or lightning confirms instantly).
I've done business with people all of the world in places that have weak or non-existent banking thanks to Bitcoin. None of the above options made that possible.
I see where you're coming from, but do these require you to register? Do they need a billing address? Whats stopping someone from just getting a new one?
Censorship need not be targeted at the consumer/buyer, it can be targeted at the merchant/seller too. Even though you can obtain such cards anonymously, the fact that they still utilize those corporate payment networks means those corporations can block all transactions being sent to targeted merchants without needing to know the identity of the customers.
I used to pay rent with Zelle. It maxed out at $500 per transaction, but I could just do a second transaction to make up the difference. Same recipient, same day.
I like how the headline rightly calls the terms "objectionable," which is exactly the word they use for content they don't like, where they alone get to decide how that term is defined and in what context.
