PayPal plans a much wider embrace of cryptocurrency, including Venmo use

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PayPal CEO Dan Schulman provided new details about the company's recent embrace of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on Monday, describing plans for shopping tools as well as potential partnerships with central banks.

Schulman's remarks, which came during an earnings call after PayPal posted record third quarter revenues, follows the company's announcement last month that it will soon allow users to buy cryptocurrency within its app.

According to Schulman, starting in the first half of next year PayPal will let users draw from cryptocurrency accounts to pay for goods and services at 28 million merchants that use the company's platform. The arrangement, he says, will not result in any incremental fees for either consumers or merchants.

Next year's expansion will also enable customers to use Venmo, its popular peer-to-peer payment service, to buy and shop with cryptocurrencies.

PayPal's bullishness on cryptocurrencies, Schulman implied, is based on early response to last month's crypto offering. He said the size of the waiting list for access to crypto, which is now available to 10% of PayPal customers, was two or three times as great as what the company anticipated. Schulman said the service will be available to all U.S. users in the next few weeks.

On a broader level, Schulman pointed to the fact that companies and central banks are experimenting with cryptocurrencies, and to the utility of digital wallets. Such wallets are often equated with the payment services offered by Apple and Google, but also include apps used to store Bitcoin and other new types of money.

“Digital wallets are a natural complement to all forms of digital currency,” said Schulman, adding that PayPal is in close talks with central banks and regulators to explore new uses for these wallets.

In response to an analyst question, Schulman said PayPal views cryptocurrency systems—which rely on a tamper-proof online ledger known as a blockchain—as cheaper and more efficient than ACH, which is the network that supports the existing banking system.

PayPal is not the only company seeking to bridge the conventional financial system—which Schulman described as "not working" for many low-income people—with the newer world of crypto technology. Last week, cryptocurrency giant Coinbase announced a debit card that can be used at ordinary merchants, while MasterCard in September announced a service to let central banks test out digital currencies.

Despite such efforts, any attempt to introduce cryptocurrency in day-to-day commerce faces a significant obstacle in the form of the U.S. tax system. The Internal Revenue Service treats any crypto transaction as taxable event, like selling a stock or a piece of real estate—meaning a PayPal user who buys a coffee or groceries from a crypto account could be forced to declare a capital gain.

Schulman did not address the tax implications of PayPal's crypto plans on Monday's earnings call. Cryptocurrency advocates have been lobbying Congress to create a so-called de minimus exemption that would excuse small-dollar transactions from IRS scrutiny—an effort that has yet to bear fruit.

 

[Carding 4 Carders]

Why PayPal sucks and cryptocurrency is the future​

Let me start by stating the following: PayPal sucks, and if you use It, I advise you to remove it.
Why am I saying this?
Apparently, you should have the guts to even consider contacting these corporate overlords.
And no matter what you ask, they will soak all the information out of you and "safely" store it.
Their password forms have a maximum of 20 characters, which if you're familiar with hashing, should be a huge red flag.
If not, here's the gist: hashing means turning a piece of data that can be of arbitrary length into a string of characters that has a fixed length.
The output of the hash function does not store information, and therefore the original data cannot be obtained from the hash. Instead, the hash is a kind of" signature", proving that this bit of data will always return the same "signature" hash and that only this piece of data can generate this particular hash.

Let's look at this with an example. Open your Linux terminal and type the following command.

$ echo "Foo bar" | sha256sum

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This command will return the value "0b64696c0f7ddb9e3435341720988d5455b3b0f0724688f98ec8e6019af3d931", which is our hash and can be considered the" signature "of our text string"Foo bar".
Change any letter anywhere, and the hash changes a lot.
But every time you enter that particular string, it always returns the same hash.
This property is really powerful for storing passwords on servers.
This means that when you enter a new password that you will use for your account (i.e., the password that you will use for your account), you will not be able to use it. A hash function can be executed, and this output can be stored in the server database. Then, when you enter your login password and run the same hash function, you can compare it to what is in the database.
If it matches, great!

You have entered the correct password.
But the database doesn't really need to know what your password is, it only needs to know the hash.
From which the input data cannot be feasible obtained, which makes it very secure.
Now, on the database side, system administrators usually want to be able to configure their systems in such a way that they can plan for the future and know how many records they will be able to keep on that particular server.
Hashes make this very simple, you will always have the same fixed-length value, so divide the available database storage by the length of your hashes (along with the rest of your database table parts, such as usernames, IDs, emails, etc.), and you can see how many records you will be able to store.
Except when you don't use hashes.

The admin can't determine how long passwords will last if they are only the length that the user chooses.
So the (possibly incompetent) admin tells superiors to limit the number of characters a password can have – minimum character length (which is good), but also maximum length (which is terrible).
And that's exactly what PayPal does. Their account passwords can be anywhere from 8 to 20 characters long. But why?
If they used hashes, even a 1000-character password would create a fixed-length hash.
So it's likely that they store their passwords in plain text.
Not as "secure login" as they advertise it, is it?

So from a security point of view, they are terrible.
The fact that these corporate giants advertise the service as "free" is even worse.
They don't just manage your money ... they forcibly accept you.
Whenever they don't like what you're doing, which can be very normal, they can suspend your account.
Your balance is blocked and you can't withdraw it, delete your cards, or delete your account.
Effectively, this means taking hostages, whatever you put into it.
This is the price of a" free service " in PayPal.
Steal your money when they see fit.

Luckily for me, I only have a small amount of money in my blocked account.
But there have been cases where people have run their business through PayPal and received thousands of dollars stolen from them by PayPal, blocking their account, for no apparent reason. This is evil.
Their support team is also pretty terrible.
They require so many layers of verification, so much identifying information (that they may not be able to store securely), that it's very frustrating, and you spend more time just verifying yourself rather than actually getting them to do their job.
Overall, it's not a very good system.

Why is cryptocurrency the future?​

Cryptocurrency is something that overrides the whole idea of corporate overlords or government agencies that can print money on demand.
Instead, there is a limited number of coins (so there is no inflation), you get into the driver's seat, all transactions are publicly available (via something called the blockchain, which is a sort of verifiable transaction log), and most importantly, its value is determined only by supply and demand, not by what anyone determines it to be.

Now it is often thought that cryptocurrency is a way to earn dormant money, "get a rich fast scheme".
It's not that simple. When a cryptocurrency begins with a stage called an initial coin offering or ICO, coins are largely given away.
The investment fires when the currency takes off and you are rich.
If not ... well, say goodbye to your investment. So in this sense, it's like investing in the stock market.
If, however, you invest your money in an established cryptocurrency, its price is stable, it will not accumulate, and because its supply is limited by design, it will continue to increase slowly, but steadily increase its value over time.
This approach is similar to when you keep money in a Bank, they will give you a percentage of it at the end of the year .. at least when the cost of maintaining the invoice was lower than what they would give you.

Anyway, the most famous cryptocurrencies right now are Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero.
Mining them is no longer very profitable, but investing money in it gives a stable income.
Personally, I prefer Ethereum because its blockchain is very light, the client looks good, and it converts the current value of your coins back to regular currencies.
Monero, on the other hand, is designed with anonymity in mind, making it a great choice for darknet purchases.
Finally, bitcoin .. this is a bit overrated.

Its blockchain is massive, totaling over 200 GB, and takes weeks to clone your local machine.
But for his protection, he is the founder of the cryptocurrency, so he definitely deserves an honorable mention today. Thanks to Satoshi Nakamoto for creating it.
So now you know it, PayPal sucks and cryptocurrency is the future. And as always, stay cautious