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Paypal is awful. It's not to be trusted under any circumstances. They often reverse your transactions and lock your account for any reason, or no reason. A fri
by sillysaurus3 9y ago
Paypal is awful. It's not to be trusted under any circumstances. They often reverse your transactions and lock your account for any reason, or no reason.
A friend of mine offered a student some programming help. They used Paypal to pay. The student decided they didn't want to pay and told Paypal it was a fraudulent charge. Now my friend doesn't have the money and a strike against their account. (They contested that the charge was valid, but Paypal didn't care.)
BTC sadly is up to $3 in transaction fees, so it's not too lightweight at this point.
- LeoPanthera 9y agoBitcoin Cash is a fork of BTC with large blocks, which increases capacity and therefore reduces fees. They're about US$0.01 right now.
- dmm 9y agoI recently had two < $.50 fee BTC transactions quickly verified. Segwit, among other things, is a block increase and enables the lightning network which will allow fast, cheap transfers.
- LeoPanthera 9y agoWorth noting that the Lightning network is off-chain. Whether you care about that or not is up to you.
- tradersam 9y agoUse Litecoin or Ethereum instead. Both are more secure, more stable and faster.
- zdkl 9y agoYeah litecoin doesn't get mentionned nearly enough but this sort of thing is it's raison d'être! Btc has grown to fill the large tx space but there are trustworthy coins designed for smaller, cheaper interpersonal txs. Don't use etherium for interpersonal because thet're not aiming for this use case long term. They want to be an underlying platform where ltc/doge were explicitely designed to settle small debts with friends or tip cam strippers. You don't have touse it on those strippers but if it's good enough for them, you should take a look.
- ojr 9y agoBitcoin Cash has support from the best mining farms money can buy, it will be hard to compete with the transaction price for the foreseeable future
- SeoxyS 9y agoPayPal is not very trustworthy, I agree. I use it as a last resort, and cash out any deposits of over $50 immediately. Facebook and Square are my preferred methods. But when I have to deal with people who have Venmo, but have never heard of Square and Facebook Messenger Payments… PayPal is usually a decent middle ground. It's pretty ubiquitous.
- madeofpalk 9y agoFor what it's worth, PayPal owns Venmo and has so for quite a while.
- nrhk 9y agoTransactions are like 10 cents right now with SegWit I think
- astura 9y agoI don't really understand this comment. There's nothing stopping the student from doing the same thing with Vemno (especially since Venmo is owned by PayPal), and that sort of thing has happened many times before[1][2]. Venmo also has a strict "no business/commercial activities using personal accounts" policy.[3] [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/09/venmo_scam_and_fraud_why_it_s_easy_to_get_ripped_off_through_the_mobile.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/09/venm... [2] http://gizmodo.com/reminder-venmo-wont-protect-you-from-scams-1731331859 http://gizmodo.com/reminder-venmo-wont-protect-you-from-scam... [3] http://jolt.richmond.edu/2016/10/21/ignoring-the-venmo-user-agreement-could-cost-you/ http://jolt.richmond.edu/2016/10/21/ignoring-the-venmo-user-...
- tedmiston 9y agoThe buyer in Venmo has pretty much no recourse whereas in PayPal it's pretty much the opposite… likely something to do with their early relationship with eBay.
- astura 9y agoSo? The GP's complained his or her friend got scammed through PayPal as the "seller" (of services), not the "buyer." My point is Venmo would not have have protected the friend from this scam and, in fact, it would have been 10 times easier to pull off the scam because Venmo forbids this sort of buyer/seller commercial transaction with personal accounts. Nobody has any sort of "protection." The big difference between the two services is PayPal is designed mainly for commercial activities and Venmo is designed for already established friends to more easily chip in for gas. The friend was very naïve to accept a PayPal payment for a business transaction that wasn't covered by PayPal's Seller Protection while simultaneously expecting PayPal to protect against fraud. PayPal does cover sellers when there are unauthorized (or "unauthorized") charges but it doesn't apply to services, just physical goods (and excludes certain items like gift cards). It's like saying that the post office shouldn't be trusted to deliver greeting cards because a stranger sent you a fake check through the mail. [I've successfully used PayPal's seller protection for an unauthorized charge and it was a real easy process.]
- Camillo 9y agoWhy didn't your friend go to the student's university and tell them the student was paying people to do his assignments? I bet he would have changed his tune right quick.