Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Thursday December 01 2016, @05:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the define-"best" dept.

I have been using PayPal off and on since 2012 for 2 main reasons.

1 - Convenience, I didn't have to enter a credit card every time I purchased from a site other than usual trusted sites where I store my payment information, like Amazon, and sending payments to friends/family was simple.
2 - Peace of mind.

I recently found that the assumption of (2) was wrong, so I fired PayPal. I don't want to get into the details. Beyond being therapeutic, it won't really make life better moving forward.

That brings me to the question, since I have fired PayPal, I am sure that someone will want to send me, or more likely, have me send them money. Before I go out and research the providers on my own, I thought I would come here. What do Soylentils suggest for peer to peer payments?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @08:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @08:24PM (#435645)

    There is no good solution for online payments without companies like PayPal. The reasons are that there is no single digital standard for these transactions and therefore every payment processor creates their own system and guards it fiercely.* This in turn means that every merchant/service/business needs to choose which payment provider they will do business with and which payment system they will integrate with. This is a huge hassle both legally and technically.

    Many merchants will only choose to accept those payment methods that are easy to integrate with their systems and those that are used by the largest segments of the population. This in turn also means that breaking into the payment provider market is really difficult, because you need a certain critical mass of users and merchants before the system actually becomes useful.**

    I do not like PayPal's business practices, but I'm occasionally forced to use them. In our country we have a really nice system called IDeal, which works great. Except for the fact that it's pretty much only used in this country, so... not so great. It's useless when I want to buy something from an obscure hardware company in another country or something like, for example the Humble Bundle. Luckily Steam at least supports IDeal through GlobalCollect, but of course that means even more legalism and another intermediary taking their cut.

    There are way too many middlemen in finance... Scratch that... There are way too many middlemen Everywhere!

    *They have no desire for standards and will probably even oppose them since the existence of any usable standard would bring competition they do not want for obvious reasons)
    **Bitcoin payments suffer the same problem. Merchants need to integrate with bitcoin exchanges to actually accept it and convert it to regular currency, which again is a lot of technical and legal hassle to serve a small segment of the population.