Topic: What are the potential side effects of corporations selling fake crypto? (Read 571 times)

I believe major platforms have ways of manipulating the market,  but they all have their  limits. I doubt  how a reputable  platform  like PayPal  would try and do something  of that nature.  Nevertheless,  should they involve  in a falsification  of the real amount of bitcoin,  they would easily  be  exposed.  So far  as, no one has complained  of having experienced  undue delays in withdrawal of bitcoin,  then everything  is fine on the platform.

Honestly, I was expecting this move from PayPal, because it was hard to imagine a giant with 51 billion USD in total assets suddenly decided to manipulate markets in illegal way using false coins, as OP suggested. We are yet to see the impact of this news, though. A 2% rise in price isn't enough imo. I personally wasn't able to find the confirmation anywhere besides coinpedia. Maybe that's why we are witnessing no impact yet.

PayPal has announced you'll eventually be able to withdraw it, they're building out the capability. So OP's concern is largely theoretical since it won't exist in actuality. As a public company, PayPal wouldn't be able to get away with selling something to the public that they couldn't back up though, so even if they weren't building out the capability, their crypto sales to users would have to be backed by crypto purchases in order not to get in trouble with the SEC.

I guess it already started and being tested right now as well. All those "wrapped bitcoin" things are basically saying how they are actually bitcoin but in another chain, why wouldn't bank do something like that as well? Plus what banks do is not just fake crypto, just like in fiat world they could simply make sure that they give loans and expect more back when in the world there aren't enough money to pay that.

In crypto world if banks give a loan they will want more from you right? That is how loans work, so if one day 21 million bitcoin is loaned total, what happens then? How could the interest be paid? That is going to be the real problem with the world because crypto is limited.

selling fake crypto are popular in this crypto currency world, they will create a fake platform and deceive people for their own desire for money, you had an issue regarding paypal? i think paypal would let you cash out your funds, they are new in this industry but paypal is good company. paypal is legit and i will buy soon in paypal digital currency.

Think of the Communist China. Seeing communist countries collapsing one by one, they allowed Western businesses(basically their enemy) on their territories, thus saving themselves from crumbling. Now, is it respect for Western civilization? It surely is. And PayPal is doing the same, allowing BTC on their platform, they are trying to save themselves, to get a spot in the new world economy, where Bitcoin, their former enemy, will be the king.

Any sane crypto person would know that we can't be fully cashless anyway, and even though I am a bitcoin (and many other crypto) maximalist that thinks that we should be 10x of what it is right now in the future easily, and maybe even 20x in the future as well, I still think that doesn't mean that we should be fully cashless that doesn't make any sense.

What I believe would be the greatest achievement for us would be to be a common payment method all around the world. We can go to any place and they will ask us if we will pay with cash or card right? Well how about we add crypto in there as well?

How about whenever I go to anywhere in the whole world, they ask me if I want to spend cash or card OR crypto as well, that would be addition and there is no need to remove the other ones. That is why I think it could be great and I believe it should be like that, not a  cashless society, but a crypto added one.

No I don’t believe that any of these things like this can affect the crypto market, especially Bitcoin. Though I’ve been thinking that the reason why PayPal has been doing this is because they are still new and they don’t have cryptocurrencies in their storage yet, so I guess they don’t want to rush into it quickly, and what they might be doing is that when you invest in their market, they then buy from other real exchanges and then keep the assets for you. Not really sure about this, I’m just saying.

But, if there are companies that are doing such thing as you have said, I think they will be at loss, because if the price should increase heavily and customers wants to withdraw their money ,the company will be the ones to be losing at a moment like this . So that’s a loss for them I think, unless they will use other customer’s fund to cover up.

If that’s the case then its better to Buy bitcoin in somewhere else which is more convenient and allows you to buy and sell. Maybe they didn’t fully accept Bitcoin, they just open a market for them to benefit on it but not allow users to withdraw it, such a useless way buying Bitcoin, I’d rather use CEX for this one.

Is it respect, or is it financial profit seeking? I highly doubt it's the former, since Bitcoin is basically PayPal's enemy. I don't think there is any respect to show in the face of a currency that's willing to literally destroy you as a business.

Using vs investing in BTC is a significant difference, and those people who've purchased BTC through PayPal definitely aren't truly "users" of Bitcoin. When people find out how difficult it is to purchase and safely store Bitcoin outside of third parties, they will likely just give up and keep holding onto what PayPal or other corporations offer.

the side effects can be felt to both the corporation and to the coin itself . the corporations reputation can get damage if people knew that they are fraud and selling fake products and id say it also damage the coin because people will think that its also the fault of the coin on why they got scammed or loose . not just the single coin that they bought but the effect can also spread on other coins because they will think that all coins are the same scam but if we can give a proper guidance we can avoid that to happen .

You are correct in your perspective.  Perhaps the bright side of this is the Crypto-related literacy step to Paypal users, but with the inability to withdraw funds.  They may have the ability to sell fake crypto.  Because with that policy, it is possible that this is just like investing money for the benefit of the platform.  While online shopping sites alone have a policy of withdrawing funds, the Paypal classmates did not make this policy.  What's behind their policy? Aren't you suspicious?

Yes, i believe you are right but the reason why no company/institution what so ever can manipulate the bitcoin market price for the long term is because we are in the bullish stage and the market demand is high and once the bullish is over the market can be easily manipulated for a long-term.

What Paypal is doing is sort of second layer Bitcoin scaling solution. Yes it is centralised. Yes it is not Bitcoin anymore. But this is what Bitcoin allows us to do and they are doing it. Just like centralised exchanges. People use them for a decade but dont really complain. Having BTC on Coinbase is similar to the moment you withdraw it. It is not really yours. Differences only that you can withdraw. You sort of can withdraw from papal to. You withdraw USD send them to some exchange and buy BTC and withdraw it. Yes, the fees will probably kill you doing this   All Bitcoin second-layers or side-chains will not be real Bitcoins. Lightning Bitcoin will be Lightning Bitcoin. Liquid Bitcoin will be Liquid Bitcoin. They will have more decentralisation then exchanges or Paypal but still. Onchain Bitcoin is only real Bitcoin.

I disagree.

By introducing Bitcoin on their platform PayPal showed their respect for the crytpo currency. Millions of their users(PayPal currently has 286 million active users), who would never think of using BTC have changed their minds. Bitcoin is no longer a "speculative bubble" or "financial pyramid" to them, it's a respected currency. After getting accustomed to it on PayPal's platform, they can buy real BTC outside(which I suspect is happening already).

The first thing that is likely going to happen to these fake currencies is that value will drop drastically. Even if corporations will try to rescue their cryptos they won't be able to fight the whole market. This could be the end for the hole company if they are not careful. Keeping fake currencies a float is very expensive and doesn't work long term.

What else other than feeling the scam but this is going to end the career of those companies no matter how big they are so I believe their will never sell the fake numbers which apply to the exchanges as well. In this case Paypal is not selling anything they just act as a gateway to exchange so they will get the fiat then the exchange will hold the cryptos for them and this happens while buying or selling from a customer.

I think whatever law a cryptocurrency company follows should be in harmony with the good ideals/principles of true Cryptocurrency otherwise it could result to future problems for a decentralized cryptocurrency Network/System.

Ok, but what would they(PayPal) do if people on their platform decided to exchange those fake "BTC" to USD? USD isn't fake on PayPal, right? You can withdraw it, unlike BTC, which you can't. PayPal would be obliged to pay real USD for fake BTC they created. That's why I think it's an unrealistic scenario.


Yes, there can be an effect, but only a short-living one. I think Bitcoin is so strong today that no company, whatever they do, can manipulate its price for a long term.

Whoa!
I am kinda hearing this for the first time. I know this system do exist, but I never knew it existed with PayPal. And to think with all the difficulties of using them, they could offer this type of service is surprising.
I can understand if this happens with fiat, but with Bitcoin, why would anyone want to even do that? This is way too risky.

I also agreed that the PayPal company can't possibly manipulate a trillion dollars market but I was actually talking about the moment when the market hasn't reach $30,000 price if you follow rumors within the cryptocurrency communities (on this forum, Reddit, etc) some people believe Paypal's trading activities impact the dump in price that happens then.

Ofcourse.
It shouldn't be "full cashless" though. People should have the right to own physical currencies whether on centralized or decentralized system. There are lots of benefit in the use of physical currency for society. Virtual currency could easily leave a society vulnerable to tyranny for example.

Anyway, I don't believe every society will go full cashless. It will be imposed on others or they will be decieved into accepting it.

This is true! When it comes to manipulation side of things then the ownership of a certain company or industry wont really be that enough when it comes to manipulation of prices.
Unless if this do talk about several numbers of big holders then with some involvement of unknown whales which do held more than coins than them that could possibly
change off the entire one.We cant really tell on what could possibly happen behind the curtains but knowing that they can do all sort of things as long they would able
to benefit them.About manipulation then they can do it but wont really be giving out significant effect.

If they were willing to manipulate markets using real BTC, market cap would not matter at all. Liquidity is pretty much the main factor that matters when it comes to influencing markets. But if they wanted to manipulate markets using counterfeit (non-existent) BTC, all they have to do is just take off the limit for BTC purchases/sales. At that point, there is an infinite counterfeit BTC going in and out of PayPal's system making Bitcoin's scarcity artificially vanish.

You mean, they might be short selling those fake BTC, knowing that they can manipulate the market to make the price go down? That's an interesting point, but does PayPal have resources to manipulate a market with $1 trillion cap? I personally don't think so.

In principle it is the same that they to do gold, we know there is a limited supply of gold but governments increase the supply of ‘gold’ by selling paper gold, which is nothing but a piece of paper that supposedly represents real gold but that is not backed by it, this keeps the price of gold depressed as there is way more paper gold than real gold, if governments and businesses like PayPal begin to offer paper bitcoin that you can never withdraw but that tracks the price of bitcoin then they can increase the supply and slowdown the growth of the price of bitcoin as people buy it as if it is the real thing and artificially increases its supply.

How can they manipulate something that is not part of the blockchain, their transaction is just their make up, with numbers not real I don't know how are they going to do that or are they capable of doing this, people might think it's illegal because it's not part of the blockchain or explorer but this is PayPal, which is a centralize corporation trying to be part of decentralized technology.

You make a good point but I believe they will have everything sorted out before they can plan to sell fake BTC (that's if they do just like USDT does) since they are also aware of the volatility of the market which I believe they can handle properly and they have to partner with Paxos (which handle the crypto while Paypal handles the fiat).

Even if SEC wasn't a threat, selling fake BTC would put PayPal  at risk of a big loss. What would you do, if people bought millions fake BTC on your platform, and then the price rises by 100%, and they want to exchange them back to USD? If BTC in your customers' accounts were backed by real BTC then no problem, you could sell BTC on the market at the high price and provide your customers with USD, but if they("BTC") were fake you would have to pay out the dividends from your own pocket,  which could lead to bankruptcy.

Unfortunately I think this is the greatest threat of services like that, they are framing bitcoin not as this revolutionary technology that is here to bring back some power back to the people, they are framing bitcoin in a way that makes it seem as yet another asset in which you can speculate in, obviously people like us know what's up but most people that only hear about bitcoin in the news only know about its price and how it can bring them profit but it is unlikely they know what it is and what is its function.

Yes, a full cashless centralized economy is very dangerous for individuals because there is no freedom for personal finances, whatever we have will be intervened by the authorities. The current Paypal policy is quite strange and there will be many suspicions from users of the platform if it is not immediately clarified. I'm sure, Paypal will change this policy until the many complaints that come to them.

The strange practice of not letting customers withdraw their coins sound worst than using fiat currencies on traditional banks. Atleast the banks allow people to withdraw their funds inform of physical currency like paper. Guess people will simply convert the "crypto" to fiat and withdraw them physically if they can't withdraw them to their crypto wallets outside of PayPal space.
By the way, this one the the reasons people should be suspicious of cashless economy, especially on centralized platforms.

I think you can say PayPal is offering cryptocurrency service just like the OTC but the only difference is that people can not withdraw or deposit their coins. Technically, they can sell fake coin but they know the consequences they will face by the SEC so they won't do that but there's the possibility that price of the market not to influence or be intact with the capital market price and circulation since they seem to offer OTC market and OTC price are always mute to life market.

At first, reading that one couldn't withdraw their BTC from PayPal, I thought "That couldn't be true!". But then I checked their official FAQ, and I saw these two things there:



Well, now I understand some concerns.

But let's discuss the following. If they were selling fake BTC to their customers on PayPal, wouldn't that affect the BTC price negatively, because a part of the demand would be covered by fake coins? Yet, the opposite is happening - the price is going up.

If you "withdraw" to USD, it's converting to fiat.. not withdrawing. Withdrawing is what you have mentioned in your second paragraph.

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Thanks to you all for your replies; quite interesting to see how many out there trust their guts with PayPal without ever questioning what they're actually selling or... if they're even selling anything. As some users here mentioned, if PayPal does not let you withdraw your coins, it means it is possible that they are not even selling you anything at all!

I'll take one hypothetical scenario: say a 3-letter agency decides to work with a large corporation on a plan to destroy the cryptocurrency economy. If we're talking a hypothetical collab between an agency and a corporation such as a bank, I'm quite sure the destruction of crypto economies is at the best interest for both parties.

3-letter agencies are known to doing classified operations that are in their interest; why would a fiat-threatening economy that they simply cannot control be let alone?

Therefore, the question is.. how hard is it really to sell a currency that does not exist? You pay me $47k in my personal wallet and I hand you out a piece of paper having "1 BTC" written on it. How do you know whether your 1 BTC truly exists or I sold you nothing for $47k?

This is a potentially threatening issue we may be confronting without even knowing it. I still find the ways Revolut and PayPal work as suspicious, but the fact that so many people really trust them and their way of "selling BTC" is very interesting to me.

I wish I could merit some posts, but I always remain out of merits and I already owe so many people some. Interesting read this topic is.

As others have sated both PayPal and Robinhood currently only allow for buying and selling but no transferring. As much as I absolutely depside PayPal and their scummy corrupt corporation, I highly doubt that they are manipulating things in this manner.  I think regulators would be able to catch this if they were trying to do so. Just my two satoshis anyhow.

Where you said that it can’t be withdrawn from their platform, I think the right word to use there is that you can’t send and receive. You can actually withdraw it on their platform and that’s by converting it to US dollar or any currency, before you can then send the money out or withdraw to bank.

What they do is that they don’t allow people to send out cryptocurrencies and you can’t also receive cryptocurrencies, unless you’re using their merchant services, you can then receive cryptocurrencies, but you still can’t send them out. And we can’t tell whether the coins we are buying are real or not. It’s up to you to decide whether you’re going to trust them or not, and if you happen not to trust them you can start making use of another exchange or wallet .

What paypal is doing is simply a version of what derivatives and CFD exchanges offer.

I personally think that this will not necessarily have a great impact on markets - Paypal would still have to comply with certain regulations that require them to hedge their positions, meaning that they can't simply create positions out of thin air to manipulate the market.

But at the same time, I am worried that people will miss the point of cryptocurrencies altogether - it is not primarily designed to be a speculative vehicle. But the way that Paypal and others are framing it eliminates the underlying technology of blockchain altogether, meaning that BTC is no longer transactional. That should be worrying but we can't do anything to stop private companies from offering these products.

If anyone is ever bored search engine keywords: paypal horror stories.

There are many paypal horror stories posted on the internet. Many stories of paypal canceling accounts for trivial reasons to confiscate the holdings of its clients.

If those stories are true, would it really matter much if paypal engaged in illicit activity? If the stories are true, they may have done so for years, without being held accountable or having their user base take action.

Perhaps a question we can ask is, what action can people reasonably take if paypal abuses its role.

PayPal has informed that they will be allowing the customers to withdraw the coins this year and there were reports that they purchased a large quantity of bitcoin directly from the miners and that is when the price started to rally if i remember correctly, if they are not allowing this then they will die off eventually as no one is going to spent money on numbers without the real coins.
 

One result that could affect them is that it can affect their credibility. Selling Cryptocurrencies just to boost their popularity would not be a great move for PayPal so I guess they are doing it for a reason and its a good thing that they would try and test it out right now since there are a lot of people who wanted to buy it and this gives them the opportunity to do so. I guess the only thing that PayPal can do is boost their own credibility while they are also boosting/promoting Bitcoin's utilization.

First, PayPal is well regulated and since they are centralized, I believe they know their way out when such problems arises.
I don't think it will be really easy to manipulate with PayPal  interface, their policy alone is never friendly. I don't think a customer will buy bitcoin and want to manipulate his way out of that environment.

Indeed, PayPal is a bit dubious, how they apply the terms & conditions. Moreover, we also cannot have the private key. Initially, I also thought, could it not really be crypto.

That's it. But that is what exists in their T&C about cryptocurrency.
As I quoted here taken from this PayPal Cryptocurrency - Terms and Conditions
It is said that:

Depending on market share and depending on price per bitcoin they can do some nasty things, but I would only hurt them to want to hurt bitcoin.  If you have in fact amassed enough market share to make a dent if you did something negative it would hurt your own holdings as well as degredate your company's outlook.  But if they didn't care about these things for some reason than yeah they can hurt a lot of people

The PayPal platform and the platforms used by cryptocurrencies are too different in their principles and most of them are even opposite, and therefore there can be no question of a large integration in the near future, so the cryptocurrency community should still be happy that platforms like PayPal at least accept bitcoins and contribute to the greater popularization of cryptocurrencies

We already have something similar with gold, there are gold certificates that allows you to trade but those gold certificates are not backed by real gold, so far everything seems to be OK but what will happen once the economy begins to go through big troubles and people want actual gold? What will happen in that scenario is that real gold will skyrocket and gold certificates will crash, and I expect the same to happen to whatever PayPal is doing since it is obvious they are not offering real bitcoin.

Well, you are sort of wrong in that regard. Paypal is not an exchange and they started to sell "fake bitcoins" and everyone loved it and bought billions in bitcoin from them. How did they sold "fake bitcoins" you say? Simple, they didn't actually give people the bitcoins, they just told people that "here it says you won 1 bitcoin" and that's it, it was actually just a number and not the real bitcoin itself, nobody actually owned any bitcoins, it was just a number on a page and that's it, if you want to withdraw that, you have to cash out to fiat and withdraw that way, so paypal never really needed to own bitcoins at all.

Did they owned bitcoins? Sure they did, they didn't want SEC to investigate and destroy them, but at least they have shown the world how you could actually end up telling people they own bitcoins without giving them the real bitcoins.

For now at least, PayPal is handling BTC as part of their merchant services - in other words, just as PayPal started out years ago with fiat, buying Bitcoin there is ONLY loading a 'wallet' for use with merchants participating in the PayPal system. So while you cannot exchange back to fiat or send BTC to outside addresses from the PayPal wallet you CAN spend it at merchants accepting PayPal.

When PayPal started this they had already announced that eventually things will change. Just *when*, who knows.

They literally just inflate their assets by essentially borrowing your funds in exchange of an 'agreement' that they are holding something for you. If they cannot provide withdrawals for 'your crypto' that you bought from them, there probably isn't one to begin with. While I do agree that PayPal taking part in the crypto scene is bringing things closer to people, it also has its own demerits, especially the one that people aren't able to actually hold their coins. The experience is very limited to just buying and selling right now, though I hope that PayPal would soon provide actual withdrawals for their customers to get the full experience of being a bitcoin owner through the simplicity offered by PayPal's platform.

How can they do that they are using fake stat, how would the market read that when they do not have a data integrated to sites like CoinGecko, they can show anything in their dashboard but the market aggregator like Coingecko and Coinmarketcap is still the best parameter and besides they only accept US resident only how would Asian like me knows what's they are showing.

Market manipulation would be impossible if they are just going to use numbers on screen to scam people making them think it's a real trading platform, they would just get the money, nothing else. But for sure this will make a bad image to all of the cryptocurrency, people will start to spread FUD, and the mass adoption of cryptocurrency will be too far again for us to reach if this scams won't stop.

But if PayPal would be a scam in the end, they won't get easily away with it because many people will file the right accusation to them and they would be easily get caught since they are popular and well-known.

I think if they sold a lot of fake BTC to their customers, the BTC price would drop, but it would drop on their platform only. That could affect the price of real BTC on other markets, but only on the level of how some news affect it - not much. Since there won't be additional supply of real BTC to the market, the price, formed by supply and demand, could drop only because of decreasing of demand from the people who took the news about low BTC price on PayPal platform seriously. Later those people will realize that PayPal's price has nothing to do with reality, and they will start ignoring it, and then another news about BTC pice on PayPal platform will not affect the market at all.

In short, as a result of the hypothetical scenario, only PayPal's reputation would be harmed, and that would be it.

If you just read what you stated then it would be big disaster for the "crypto currency economy". Just crunching the numbers around but no money flooding into the cyrpto is straight away a false-trap! I am not sure if the information really true because if this would have been the case then we would have seen billions of dollars in negation graph already. Since the paypal-crypto duo, lot of people have started to invest. That's a real money and there is no way they are faking such crypto-fiat buy-sell. One, PayPal will get illegitimate crypto provider tag and second Musk himself is bitcoin enthusiast so he won't let down his investors like this. 

PayPal is one of the most trusted payment processor out there, and it has been in existence since 1998. They operate as per US laws, and therefore the users don't need to worry that someone will take their money and vanish (similar to a lot many small sized exchanges have done in the cryptocurrency sector). The user functionality is limited right now, but I hope they will make full functions available to the users in the near future. For those who use exchanges such as Huobi and Kraken, there should be no issue in using PayPal. The risk involved is the same.

If you see how Paypal sells their Crypto service, it seems as if this is part of a scam. Another possibility is that these are only the initial stages of maintenance which are still in progress. As long as no one feels cheated by their services, there is no accurate evidence regarding the fake crypto they are selling. The data is that Paypal users still feel safe and secure with the services provided by Paypal so that's enough so far.

I don't think any corporations are selling crypto but they are most likely buying and trading it, and we can argue that fiat currencies are also just numbers on screen, because if all people would withdraw all dollars from their bank accounts it would be impossible to pay them all.
Paypal on the other hand is a black hole for crypto and I don't like what they are doing but they surely introduced Bitcoin to more people and made it more popular with masses but they have done zero education of importance of decentralization.
Someone can fool newbies with fake crypto but they would probably end up in jail sooner or later.

This sounds a bit like a ponzi scheme to me, you are allowed to deposit money but not to withdraw. Not sure if this is even legal. How can there be a fixed value if you are not free to trade that crypto? Maybe the are just at the beginning to setup their crypto coin. But still, I don't think a lot of investors are going for such coins that can't be bought and sold whenever you want.

A few days back, I paid $75 in transaction fee for a total of 5 transactions, which were worth a sum of $750. The fee will go up further, as the number of users are increasing at a tremendous pace. Now this situation is not viable. If I am paying a fee of $15 per transaction today, then tomorrow I can expect the fee to rise to $30. And the day after that, it can be $60. Now this is where third party processors such as BitPay and PayPal comes in. They will allow you to invest in cryptocurrency, minus the fees. Most of the users don't care, because they get the full amount when they sell their cryptocurrency. So personally, I am not against this model.

Afterall, the exchange rates increased from $10,000 to $40,000, solely due to the adoption by PayPal. Everyone is benefiting from the price rise, including the OP. Still if you are not happy, just ignore them and don't use their services. Even I don't have an active PayPal account currently.

This is what I meant to ask and the main danger I think these companies are posing. By selling just the text value of a currency and not the coin itself, the markets would more than likely go through negative repercussions.

I keep reading that PayPal would not be able to easily get away with this, but we forget that before everything, BTC has seen strong hostility from governments and uf there was someone to sell false BTC in order to manipulate markets, it could be the government itself! It would not be the first time they conduct illegal actions, would it?

What I was curious about is what selling unlimited false BTC could lead to, putting aside all the legal trouble PP would get into.. My question isn't really "Could they?", but more of a "What if?" hypothetical scenario..

You'd need to get at least a few major exchanges on board with this conspiracy, because if just one exchange tried to make fake trades, everyone would quickly notice it and then no one would use this exchange and there would be an investigation. But even with a big conspiracy to manipulate the market, researchers might be able to spot it, with mathematical tools and blockchain analysis, such abnormal trades could be spotted, and there's a huge chance the people involved would go to jail.

That "can't withdraw" thing is the most important part, because paypal could have as much as 100+ million bitcoins all sold on their website if they want to, how? They can do that buy just giving people bitcoin on their accounts but as long as you can't withdraw it, what are you going to do? You have to cash it to fiat and then move it around right?

Well, that means they do not have to abide the regular laws of bitcoin, they just put up "you have 0.5 bitcoin" type of thing in text there but where is that 0.5 bitcoin? Where is the proof that paypal has the backing bitcoin right there on their wallets? That part is the problem and I think that will not be fixed anytime soon, I believe it is going to be around for a very long time as well. There will be even more companies who did this and try to get away with it as well. This is why we should try to stop it.

Even Binance can do the same right? I mean they can place as many sell and buy orders they want and manipulate the market. But the problem is that if they do so, they are at risk of being caught in first place and then there is a chance they might be at the losing end too.

Very interesting topic actually and it might be something that is currently going on in the market without us realizing that happening. I mean yes I won't associate illegal and such activities from Paypal but there is no reason to believe them either. That is why a centralized platform selling and buying Bitcoin was not a great thought. The aim of BTC was to remove centralization and now a centralized payment processor is allowing its purchase and selling.

This is basically it. As I've stated before, the average Joe doesn't even care what it means not being able to withdrawal the coins from Paypal. To him the concept is quite straightforward : he can buy the crypto and then use it to pay for other services. To him that's the perfect analogy and ends up suiting his needs. I believe that they could easily implement that feature (withdrawal crypto) but I thin that they thought that it would confuse their clients and simply decided going the other road (the one that will keep whales and other people away from PayPal, but will please the remaining portion o their clients).

I personally don't use Paypal to buy and hold crypto so I have no idea of the matter however its quite alarming to hear such news. Paypal is very popular so for those who are not so familiar with crypto and would want to but btc would most likely resort to using Paypal.

Is there any indication as to why others can't withdraw? Like is there a KYC issue involved here or holding period? Minimum withdrawal? Additional validations needed? Either way, none of these should be sufficient reason to prevent consumers from withdrawing. If its 'fake' BTC then some way or another it will be eventually revealed or held accountable. Paypal can't run away from this given the number of users they have. Or is this there way of making you use the BTC as an option of paying other goods?

Well a company like PayPal are audited regularly and they use cold storage to store their coins, so it will be easy for auditors to compare their database with the actual bitcoins that are reflected on the Blockchain for those wallets.  

Now what some "Ponzi schemes" have done in the past, was to take people's money and then to "fake" their internal ledger systems to show that they are having those coins, but they were selling them and taking the profits. They just keep a small amount of Fiat (cash) of the the total that they were suppose to have to pay the dividends to their network of victims. (When there are no "new" money coming in and before they get exposed, they cut and run with the profits.)  

                                     If you do not control the Private keys, you have zero ownership of those tokens.

The corporations will give the "average Joe" what he wants.He wants profits.He doesn't care about blockchain technology,crypto mining,etc.If he wants numbers on a screen and the illusion of making more money,the big corporations are going to give him this illusion.
Selling fake coins is as illegal as selling counterfeit money or fake goods.The authorities will have to step up,when such crime happens.
Selling shitcoins/tokens,created by those corporations should be strictly regulated by the SEC.

To be honest, things like this ("they don't let you withdraw") should be discouraged on a true cryptocurrency networks because it seriously undermine the ideals/principles of well decentralized cryptocurrency such as self-custody, running nodes, or controlling your own coins/assets. Centralized exchanges even let you withdraw.

I would warn network users (like they were warned about keeping "huge funds" on Centralized Cryptocurrency Exchanges) about the risk of using a true crypto in that manner...

I think it would be a good idea to determine how risky this is to a cryptocurrency that has lots of coins on the platform before deciding whether to use/hold the cryptocurrency long-term

Yes. A lot of reviewers did that already and proved that you can't withdraw the bitcoin's you hold onto your account in PayPal.

It's just them taking advantage of the situation and making it appealing to users and letting them have it virtually but not own entirely. Check their rules and agreement which I'll quote below.

It will be easy, if people have the proof to identify or detect that the cryptocurrency that the company is just a number on the computer and not a real code then they would know for sure and most coin developers wouldn't really want their cryptocurrencies faked, and when the people know that, they will stop using the fake cryptocurrency and in the best case scenario, some of this people will try to sue the company or a far worse scenario is since the cryptocurrency doesn't leave the company and can be spent only on company partnered businesses the people will just overlook it and just keep on using that one.

I'm guessing that they indicate that in their Terms of services and whatnot that users are basically asking Paypal to buy and store crypto in their places. Closer to say that they are much similar to third parties, both in the sense of buying crypto and storing crypto. It can be called fake crypto, and at the same time not maybe? It highly depends on how much you actually trust private companies tbh. I'd consider it fake, though I'd still try it if given the chance.

On that note, I'd say that for the price of having buy, sell, and conversion of crypto to be used to pay to other merchants is that it became more "centralized". It's basically like how the current fiat system works, but they pretty much applied it to crypto. Some may agree, some may not, after all, some value having it easy, and some value having their money be personally managed by themselves.

RobinHood App (they are not actually giving to the poor, quite the opposite) does that too.

The way it works they are printing endless money because people give them $$$ and in return just receive a number in the app.

This money they can loan or hedge out. Like if they have $1bn of virtual bitcoin they would only need to use a small percentage
of that to back it up in case everyone wants to sell suddenly and pull it out.

Banks work this way too, they only have 2% or 3% reserves of the actual money people have in their accounts.

The worst can happen RobinHood gamble away the customer funds and cant pay you out anymore.

The best advice is to not support these systems because you only own your bitcoin if you own your keys.  

The no. of average Joes they can attract right now is probably way higher than the number of people like us, which is already a win for them

It's obviously impressive that they seem to care about something that was previously falsely known as a "criminal's coin", but to me that means absolutely nothing if they don't give you the option to hold it in a non-custodial wallet and only sell a number, an unidentifiable currency. I'm more interested to know about the potential plans they could have to attack crypto markets instead, because I'm quite sure PayPal does feel threatened by BTC's existence. They had enough time to think of an attack strategy, and I suspect this is it.

By integrating BTC in their service offerings (for their US customers so far, according to their press release) has a tremendous impact in the public eye in, at least, two ways:

• It shows to the general public that BTC isn't just something that is being used in the perceived market that they see as "darknet", neither is some sort of currency that is used to finance illegal activities. I mean, it still CAN be used for that, but most of the bad activities in this world are funded by money and I don't see anyone going mad over it. This adoption shows the general public that this is something to be trusted and that should be pursued if they have any interest in it.
• By having such an easy way to access the BTC market, Paypal is able to grab the attention of the average Joe, the one that hears about BTC rising while shopping or while going to work. If that average Joe is able to find a trusted service that is able to sell him this so called "bitcoin" that he just can't stop hearing about and, at the same time, provide him an easy and already established way to give sell him BTC (by means of his already paypal account) why shouln't the avera Joe buy from them? It's a win win scenario for both sides.

Now this flexibility comes with a price (at least from my point of view).  Here's a quote from their press release :


You are only able to "buy, hold and sell". If you truly want to get your coins out of Paypal you can't. That takes us to the next major question : If you can't withdrawal your coins/investment, are you really "buying" BTC? Or are you just speculating on it's price? If we go to the paragraph about how Paypal intends to use BTC/crypto in a transaction we get this :


If I'm understanding this correctly you never end up paying with actual BTC. The crypto is "traded" to it's equivalent fiat value and then used to pay a purchase. The merchant will only receive fiat and not any kind of crypto. While Paypal went to great lengths to "broadcast" BTC to the US base, is this the way forward?

The same concept is adopted by Revolut, a leading fintech in Europe. They are the equivalent of Venmo in the US (from what I could gather). They are basically an online bank, where you can hold for wealth, buy stocks and buy cryptocurrency. If we go to the terms of dealing with cryptocurrency using them as a Broker we get this (Cryptocurrency Terms):


So is this good for BTC/crypto ? If we look from the point of view that it allows people to get more up and close with this world and interact with it's price, yeah it's a good thing. Can it be considered "fake crypto" ? I really hope not. I think that deep down there's some kind of cryptoasset involved mostly because if some agency/entity that regulates them found out that they were handing out "digital numbers" to their customers they would be fined really hard.

Will these services gather the attention of people like us, which understand some basic concepts of BTC, and what it means to have no way to withdrawal our funds? Hell no. These services aren't targeting neither us nor the whales, they are targeting the average Joe that just wants a piece of the action ...

I'm not fully aware and only have limited information about Paypal's term related to Crypto but it is for real that you can't withdraw it?

What's the purpose of buying BTC on Paypal if users can't able to withdraw it?

PayPal has started selling "crypto" but they don't let you withdraw. Hence, if you think about it, they could easily only literally sell numbers on a screen rather than a math-backed, miner-verified real cryptocurrency.

I was wondering what could happen from an economical point of view if they (or any other corporation) did this and suddenly wanted to manipulate markets using false coins. What could PayPal do to BTC?