Topic: How degenerate is it buying and sitting on PayPal Bitcoin ? - page 2. (Read 1193 times)

Avoid PayPal, they are no good. They are providing this option to ensure that they keep their user base.

Note that PayPal has a reputation to cancel merchant accounts without providing any reason and will block withdrawal of funds for 6 months or more.

User accounts are suspended for vague reasons as well including buying and selling crypto too often. They do this because THEY CAN and are bad news for anything in the financial system.

Funny thing I have been with PayPal since 2003 maybe 2002.  I have three accounts two super active one almost never used.

So I grabbed say 160 and say 100 for the two active accounts.  They are now worth 260 and 177 or

260 became 437


Today I got an offer to buy 100+ of BTC and get a 25 usd voucher for the less used third account.

So I just did that. So I now have put in 360 to get 537 and I have a $25 coupon to use as I please as long as seller takes PayPal.



That offer will be done for 40000 people.

Give me a minute to show screen shot of offer.

For me personally I see paypal as a crooked company that will end up screwing their customers somehow.  But hey how no different from any other crypto exchange.  Only part I dont like is letting them hold it in their custody.  I wouldnt trust their storage opsec.  I find it more for the normies than that of people who have been in crypto for awhile.

I'm not overly concerned about the political stuff. I think there is a very strong contingent of Bitcoin holders and users, as well as more ethical exchanges (at least regarding Bitcoin politics) like Bitfinex and Kraken who will continue running full nodes. I also think a contentious hard fork will only become increasingly difficult to pull off as the years go by, as stakeholders become increasingly entrenched in the existing rule system.

In terms of key security, I also have some hope that offline key storage will become more commonplace among regular users. We need better and cheaper hardware wallets, and we need better offline solutions from wallet developers. At this point, I think Electrum is the only desktop wallet with an intuitive offline wallet UI. That's pretty disappointing, but it's not a permanent limitation. Wallet UX in general is still holding Bitcoin back. This stuff takes time.

Well instead of worrying about the danger of PayPal holding a few billion worth of btc if they have that much. The true fear is governments copying Norway's move of putting some BTC into the entire nations retirement fund.

Norway is small under 6 million and it is only 2 dollars per person so well under 20 million.

Pick the UK with 66 million make it 100 per person and you are at 6.6 billion

Better yet Pick the EuroPean union 450 million add 1% vat to the whole union sink it into a BTC fund.

See where I am going. Adaption or adoption of BTC big time.

The upside of Paypal is it may have influenced Norway to invest in BTC for its pension fund. The upside of Graystone buying a lot of coins may have been a factor keep this up and maybe just maybe we see a dozen countries adding btc into its longterm holdings.

Many talk about 1 dollar satoshi's which is a 10,000,000 bitcoin.  Paypal Norway Gray-stone so dare I say Singapore and UK along with Italy in 2021. With more to follow in 2022.

This can be really bad for the future of Bitcoin. In 2017 Bitcoin community defended itself from the SegWit2x attack by clearly signalling that the users won't recognize the fork as new Bitcoin. But if in the future majority of Bitcoin users will only own custodial Bitcoin and won't know anything about the technicals of Bitcoin, it would be easy to hard-fork the network if miners will be onboard.

You should be careful counting your "unrealized" gains. Until you sell and have the cash out of the asset you should never really count on it. Bitcoin is currently up, but over the last couple months it has been very turbulent and as we saw last time - when it chooses to tank, it will drop very quickly and it is very possible to lose 20% within less than a day. Depending on the amount you have invested and when you started, it might be worth banking a little.

Sadly, this may apply to most people, at least until offline key storage is the norm. Too many people are prone to surfing the internet insecurely and downloading files on the same PC their wallets are on. When I tell people IRL they should have a dedicated offline device or hardware wallet, they look at me like I'm crazy. Most newbies aren't properly securing their wallets, and I honestly wonder sometimes how many ever will.

In a sense, Paypal/Paxos should be more secure than a typical exchange as well since they don't process customer withdrawals. That drastically cuts down on the frequency that private keys are handled and removes the need to ever use hot wallets.

There seems to be no special feature of Paypal's Bitcoin that would convince a lot of Bitcoin supporters to make their purchases there. On the contrary, there are a lot of reasons why they should not make the purchases there.

In my mind, Paypal's Bitcoin is especially tailored for newbies in the market who haven't been sufficiently informed yet as to the basics of Bitcoin and how it is to be truly owned and kept safely.

I've seen so many people here saying "don't use custodial services, they will report you to IRS". Do they plan to not pay tax on their Bitcoin gains? IMO that's an extremely risky thing to do in the US, especially if we talk about big amounts - there's a very high chance that they will uncover it eventually and slap you with such a big fine on top of what you owe, that you'll regret not reporting it yourself.


If you're an active PayPal user and a Bitcoiner, I see no problems with converting your PayPal balance to BTC. But if you're not a PayPal user, and you want to get into Bitcoin through PayPal, this is not optimal. I think it's only good for those who'd have higher chance of losing coins in their own wallets than losing because of PayPal.

That's what I was aiming at, don't sell till they enable real coin withdrawals.


I don't think they even need to run this scheme, Paypal has some serious fees, and BTC will not be the exception, yet they will make a lot of money, why risk not only these but their entire company and getting involved in this? Indeed Paxos might be cheating them behind their back and feeding false information but again, why would they do this, any financial gain is clearly outweighed looking at the consequences.
Indeed a hack might be something more serious but I still haven't heard of a serious cold wallet hack from a custodian, a real hack not an inside job.


The story of the BMW 8-series 

They have a Bitlicense, which requires 100% reserves. Not a guarantee of anything obviously, but they appear to be doing everything very by the book. I'd be much more worried about a hack than intentional fractional reserve.

Honestly, it's pretty cool to see "Your crypto" in my Paypal dashboard. Not cool enough that I'm going to load up my Paypal account, but if I ever have some cash on there, I'll buy some Bitcoin IOUs.

I like it.  Not for serious holdings, but for what you seem to be doing.  I did this in Robinhood back in the day...

If it turns out they are fractional?  Then I would frown on it.  But if they are actually custodying BTC then yeah... doing something small to help make them successful is not a bad idea.

And if they chose to have a fractional BTC reserve?  It would very possibly be their undoing.

_edit_ LOL.  I just looked at my Robinhood monies.  I bought it back when they first went live with synthetic BTC.  It's up like 400% heh.  Hopefully you see the same thing in Paypal.

I think its ok on the side for a fun hold of small amount of funds.   Say put it this way, you have a wallet existing with BTC in there, you can sell from there any time as usual.   What you could do is transfer spare change from paypal type sales into BTC and then sell the larger amount from your wallet if you wanted to and in this way you are neutral overall.
   I believe I read Paypal will eventually allow sales to be settled in BTC, otherwise yea its a funny thing.   If crypto ends up purely speculative then we can be sure it wont survive, the real hard line price is matched to actual trades occurring and settled by Bitcoin.    Always we are going to see a froth BTC price settled on top of the hard line Bitcoin, both can be rising but imo we'll always fall back to the less speculative pricing.

You are no worse then all the gold coin collectors.   I got some gold coin just for fun over a decade ago, it doesn't do anything.   I've gained tons of money on it, its doubled in price for me but its kinda silly because the utility of a lump of metal doing nothing is limited and I dont want BTC to be a do nothing theoretical idea.   Im not negative on gold, it has an ironic position in an economy but I think BTC will lose to gold for this placing (or any other solid element) because its virtual, BTC has to be used, efficient and enabling business to occur or I stop being bullish tbh.

Would be nice to see more countries do this move.  Very likely better than PayPal, but I live in the USA so I put around 250 and 170 into PayPal accounts. As it is a mainstream move.

Would I ever consider putting in 1 btc to each account no. Even if I got lucky and solo mined 2 blocks or so. Paypal won't see much of my money/coin.

it only makes sense for those who have funds on paypal and have no plans on using those funds, so keeping it in form of "bitocoin IOU" is better than keeping it in form of "USD IOU" on paypal. because at the very least you can gain some profit on your USD IOUs.

as for taxation, it is on the profit you make and all the IRS stuff is inevitable when it comes to any US based centralized company that handles this kind of stuff so you should have already made peace with that kind of invasion.

It's fine in moderation. I just wouldn't let it comprise more than a couple % of my total stash. As long as we all know it's just a shitty bank account, with all that entails, it's fine. I would definitely report your taxes to the penny. I'm more paranoid about the CRA and IRS raiding Paypal's records than I am about Paxos getting hacked or something.


Those fees though. I know it's zero fees for a couple more weeks but, just saying.

We didn't get 4mb blocks because the idea of going back to Satoshi original size annoyed people, this on an international scale would be weird.

And $2 for every citizen who have an average gdp per capita of at least $40000, I'd call it innovation. What do they care if their $2 sinks or if it doesn't. Although pension schemes look like a way to trap peoples money for investment for 35 years so...

My point exactly you don't want BTC to go mainstream.






I supposed you are pissed off every Norway Citizen now has some BTC in their retirement account.

https://news.coingenius.ai/norway-grants-its-citizens-2-worth-of-bitcoins-through-the-countrys-oldest-pension-fund/

or will that be okay for you.

Is it too common or is it innovative?

You tell me.

I agree 100% on the need for safe and secure mainstream, branded custodial services to facilitate consumer adoption. For most, the soft wallet user experience has been lacking for over a decade and has no doubt been responsible for countless coins being lost or burned, and certainly dissuaded many from engaging with crypto further.

But I do not believe that I need to promote adoption by supporting the likes of Paypal, who change their terms on a whim akin to Google or FB. Imagine the poor folks who will have their "crypto" frozen in the future due to some nonsensical policy. Sure, they'll get access to it eventually but will suffer undue stress in the interim. I have more faith in Gemini or Fidelity to get this right.

As for myself, having lived through enough hardware and exchange scams over the years, there's just no way I would consider leaving substantial coin with anybody but myself.

This old school guy says NYK, NYC.