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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?
(Score: 3, Informative) by JNCF on Thursday December 01 2016, @10:28PM
having the advantage of blissful ignorance, it sounds like it is analogous to open-source s/w, where it is *possible* to audit the source code and *theoretically* catch any malfeasance going on, but *most* people don't, trusting the hive-mind will have a drone somewhere crunching the numbers and catching any eee-vil...
I like your analogy, but if going to stretch it to one of its natural breaking points (all analogies have them): many eyes can still miss cleverly disguised backdoors whereas a single computer can independently verify the blockchain given the data. To me this seems more comparable to checking the md5 sum so that you can make sure the code wasn't tampered with en route -- and yeah, those are outdated. Being fed false data is a serious worry, if you're not verifying the data yourself. Some folks don't feel the need to be paranoid. Other folks are sort of paranoid, and will bother to check that a transaction has been processed by multiple blockchain viewing websites, but aren't paranoid enough to actually download the blockchain. Even among those verifying the blockchain on their own computers, there is the question of how many blocks past a transaction you should verify before trusting that the transaction is recorded -- a competent attacker could forge a small number of blocks once in a while, but they shouldn't be able to outrace the entire bitcoin network for a decent number of blocks. An attacker making 10 fake blocks in a believable amount of time would be incredible, but there are miners that could pull off 2.
and the other thing -again, based on ignorance- is that if once you download this 110 Gb blockchain, do you have to periodically update it with new transactions added to the chain,
To make a new transaction based on the known funds of one of your addressees, no. To make sure that a new transaction is actually recorded in the blockchain or to check and see if anybody has sent a transaction to one of your addresses, yes.
AND presumably it is only those additional transactions to download/add, NOT download the whole 110+Gb blockchain, one presumes...
One presumes correctly.
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Thursday December 01 2016, @11:51PM
thank you, jncf