Still nice, but paper BTC derivative != real BTC
Doesn't help utility until they start accepting BTC deposits which i foresee to be their next step. They created their paper btc walled garden, and before anyone can sell their btc notes they must first buy them, this is squeezing the supply so next logical step is to let people deposit & convert their real BTC for PayPal BTC derivative sort of like GBTC fund
Folks are saying their NY license absolutely requires them to own 1BTC for every 1BTC they sell via their app. This would preclude them being a fractional reserve via synthetic bitcoin would it not?
My position on this has been simple from the beginning. Bitcoin does not care who owns it. It does not care how people do business with it. It does not care if your use is legal, or regulated, or not. It does not care if you are an African merchant, or a commercial bank, or a teenage girl, or the worlds largest payment processor. Any of these can use it to whatever extent they choose. It does care (so to speak) about people who try to do a rope-a-dope and route around it's consensus. The first really BIG rush on a fractional reserve could put the company foolish enough to play that game in the ground over night.
I have never thought PayPal represents the ethos of OUR bitcoin community, and BitCoin threatens PayPal for sure. So it is in PP's best interest to find exactly the way that they can make the most money out of providing services around Bitcoin as well as using it for their own settlement purposes.
Censorship resistance means exactly that for everyone.
Idealistically i'd prefer everyone to be their own bank, but realistically i realize that it's not attainable nor really warranted. With great power comes great responsibility so to speak, and there are a lot of people who're not ready nor want that kind of responsibility. We should educate the population of their options and constantly improve UX but my gramma shouldn't choose between not having BTC at all, and having to punch out her 24 seed words from her coldcard on a stainless steel plates inside a faraday casge and then coming up with some ingenious multisig inheritance plans. Sort of like cash and gold, some people prefer to self custody them in safes/under their mattresses , and some prefer to deposit it with a bank. The second best option to everyone being their own bank, is for everyone
who wants can be their own bank. I know i've lost few BTC due to my stupidity, I can't imagine what people who constantly forget where they parked would do.
As far as PayPal, there's a difference between them being the other side to their BTC transactions and running a fractional reserve. The former, where they don't really purchase the BTC on the market and just show you the balance, in essence means they're taking a huge short position on BTC. I can't imagine that happening and them being a public company would surely require them to disclose such exposure on their balance sheets. The latter where they buy BTC but then lend it out to someone is more realistic but also risky and would have to be disclosed. BTC is not their core business, if they do lend it out they're insuring it with their own $250B market cap as they just can't loose your BTC in a boating accident without whole company going bankrupt.
tl;dr it's not a good idea to force your grammy into a Faraday cage, and overall it's net positive for people to get their first exposure to BTC through PayPal, expecting PayPal to enable BTC deposits next, and then enable transfers out their "paper BTC" to other walled gardens like cash app, robinhood wallet, wechat wallet, tencent wallet, yandex wallet, Africa wallet, Europe wallet, every other country wallet etc... Of course all settlements between those walled gardens would have to be with real
BTC on lightning