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Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

reuters.com

81–90 of 333 posts

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#81
Not great tbh.

The more time goes on, I'm starting to come around to paypal's original vision of decentralized internet-native money as being the future.

The more the international system breaks down and countries abuse their power via the banking system (especially the US, and from both parties), my opinion of cryptocurrencies transitions from "annoying scam infrastructure for hucksters" to "actually...you might have a point." Still a ton of growing up that needs to be done by the industry.

But no company or country should be able to tax the global economy via payments monopoly and you should not be able to be arbitrarily banned from the economy by these global supra-national intermediaries that have no court system and no democratic levers to pull to reign in their overreach in your country outside of desperate social media posts.

Stripe brags incessantly about how much of global GDP they facilitate...which, cool. I don't doubt there's an insane amount of work required to herd all those global cats and make payments just work. But, they're literally taxing the entire world as a % of GDP due to this dystopian legacy system? Is that the best outcome for humanity?

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#82
post #65

I'm not sure I like this idea. Braintree is a legit competitor to Stripe. I'm guessing they have some informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same but if they become 1 company, what's to stop Stripe from raising fees even more? I'm not a fan of either to be honest, PayPal once told me I was wrong with something related to taxes and a bunch of different reps told me what I was saying and reported was imp…

Paypal offshored all of their support staff.

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Convince who? There is no such thing as antitrust anymore in the USA, it’s merely the size of the bribe required to let the merger go through now

States have the ability to sue to block mergers as well as the federal government. See the recent 11 state lawsuit seeking to block the WarnerMount merger.

Which is funny because regardless of whether or not those states succeed in blocking the merger, those legacy video entertainment businesses will become irrelevant whether they are one business or two, due to the fierce competition from TikTok/Instagram/Reddit/Youtube/Whatsapp/computers/anything on the internet in general.

It's probably the most inconsequential merger, from a consumer standpoint.

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#85
post #51
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, I hate them with a passion as a merchant but I absolutely love them as a buyer and customer. There is a reason why after all these years and other solutions they're still everywhere, and it's not because of their great tooling, their low fees or their awesome support for merchant. It's not because of market lock in either, at least here in Europe they're merely a middle man between my credit card or sepa bank ac…

Nah I thought I liked PayPal as a customer until I found out that they favor large merchants against the consumer. I had a problem with a product and the company was playing games with the warranty. I only had it for 3 months and it was already falling apart. I made a complaint with PP and it was auto denied. I will never use PP for a large purchase again.

Paypal isn't the right place for warranty disputes. They're not in the wrong there.

If you want purchase protection you need to use a card that offers it.

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#86
post #65

I'm not sure I like this idea. Braintree is a legit competitor to Stripe. I'm guessing they have some informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same but if they become 1 company, what's to stop Stripe from raising fees even more? I'm not a fan of either to be honest, PayPal once told me I was wrong with something related to taxes and a bunch of different reps told me what I was saying and reported was imp…

> informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same

This would be like, ridiculously illegal. It's also not practical; if you can steal customers, the incentive to undercut is very strong.

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#87
post #3

That would be quite a play. Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, Xoom all under one umbrella. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for online card-not-present (CNP) checkout on that is going to be absurdly high and this will take a lot of convincing to beat antitrust. They will probably have to unwind Venmo and Braintree.

Convince who? There is no such thing as antitrust anymore in the USA, it’s merely the size of the bribe required to let the merger go through now

Do you have any evidence that you can just bribe your way past antitrust regulations (which are enforced by hundreds or maybe even thousands of attorneys across the political spectrum) or is this just how you feel because you don't like who is in the White House right now?

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#88
post #65

I'm not sure I like this idea. Braintree is a legit competitor to Stripe. I'm guessing they have some informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same but if they become 1 company, what's to stop Stripe from raising fees even more? I'm not a fan of either to be honest, PayPal once told me I was wrong with something related to taxes and a bunch of different reps told me what I was saying and reported was imp…

But there are many competitors no? Adyen at least comes to mind.

Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

#89
post #65

I'm not sure I like this idea. Braintree is a legit competitor to Stripe. I'm guessing they have some informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same but if they become 1 company, what's to stop Stripe from raising fees even more? I'm not a fan of either to be honest, PayPal once told me I was wrong with something related to taxes and a bunch of different reps told me what I was saying and reported was imp…

Braintree was a legit competitor, last time I checked they won't even onboard you if you don't have an established business grossing over 100k/yr.
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