PayPal is slowly dipping its toes in the bitcoin waters.
The company has partnered with Coinbase, a virtual currency wallet and exchange, so Coinbase users can sell bitcoin and cash out to their PayPal accounts. Buying bitcoin isn’t possible yet, but the small integration is a noteworthy first step.
PayPal did not immediately respond to Quartz’s request for comment.
While bitcoin and its underlying technology, blockchain, has caught Wall Street’s attention, consumer tech giants have largely stayed away from the technology until now. Recently, Quartz reported that Airbnb “acquihired” a bitcoin company and its engineers. Other tech giants, like IBM and Microsoft, have been exploring blockchain tech more closely. IBM developed open source code that’s being used in the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger consortium. Microsoft has been integrating blockchain services into its Azure cloud platform.
Behind the scenes, PayPal’s been showing signs of interest in virtual currencies. A recently published patent application from PayPal shows the company has explored integrating bitcoin and other virtual currencies like LiteCoin and Dogecoin into physical smartphone payments. The patent application was filed in December 2015.
PayPal also held a hackathon in December, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the event. The purpose? To find out new ways for PayPal to use bitcoin and blockchain technology. The attendees included Snapcard, a B2B bitcoin payments company, Coinbase, and Chain. Developers tested things like cross border payments, merchant processing, and creating a digital wallet using bitcoin.
For bitcoin’s growth, even a slight interest in bitcoin on PayPal’s part would be a big win. PayPal has over 180 million customers and processed $1.4 billion in payments in the first quarter of 2016. The payments giant recently added Wences Casares, CEO of bitcoin wallet Xapo and a renowned bitcoin advocate, to its board of directors in January 2016.
http://qz.com/713528/paypal-is-warming-up-to-bitcoin/I'm just wondering why everyone (or most of them) are really happy because of this, and say these are very good news...
If Paypal will adopt Bitcoin, then Bitcoin will be only one currency in Paypal's system, after USD, EUR, etc....
This means for me, that Paypal won't let their system change (I mean the buyer/seller protection part), so they will develop a system for Bitcoin (maybe a kind of escrow system) to let the Bitcoin payments be reversible in the future (e.g. they will only credit the funds only after a successful transaction, after the watiting period, and for the time, they will escrow the funds somehow, to be able to reverse the transaction, if neccessary).
It's Paypal who will win bigger, if Bitcoin join. Also, Paypal will only accept Bitcoin payment from the users, who has completed the AML, KYC, etc. requirements, so Bitcoin won't be anonymous anymore, if using Paypal.