son of bitches!
PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds
331–340 of 366 posts
Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't grant your premise that crowdfunding constitutes "presales." Crowdfunding is an inherently speculative activity, a way to invest in a team with the hopes that they will create a product that you'd like to see in the world. Trying to fit Indiegogo into a presales model to justify PayPal's outrageous behavior here is a Procrustean approach that helps no one.
That's even worse than engaging in presales! It's practically fucking gambling the way you describe it, why the fuck would Paypal be enticed by that subtle shift in framing?
Because there are no legitimate chargebacks if a gamble falls through. The presale risk is gone.
Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's even worse than engaging in presales! It's practically fucking gambling the way you describe it, why the fuck would Paypal be enticed by that subtle shift in framing?
Yeah, it's "gambling" the way donating to an artist you like is gambling. And who's trying to entice them? Again, if doing business with Indiegogo projects is incompatible with Paypal's risk profile they shouldn't do business with Indiegogo projects. That seems straightforward. Bizarre to think we should be sympathizing with, enticing, or otherwise fellating PayPal in this situation.
Bizarre to think we should be sympathizing with, enticing, or otherwise fellating PayPal in this situation.
While I understand how easy it is to sympathize with the merchant here, as none of us will ever be payment processors, the reality is that the sum of your suggestions or assertions, if explored just as a thought experiment, quickly lead to a world where nobody can do payment processing without imposing absurdly high fees. Of course we can all see how unfair it seems to have all this money promised by seemingly wide-eyed and clear-minded open source software supporters. But Paypal has millions of clients and has to act in a way that generalizes across all of them, and which requires the least amount of trust to be placed in those clients. The only argument that Mailpile has is "but we're not evil," which is true, but still insufficient.
Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
What bank are you using, are you in the USA? The best rates I know of right now are Ally Bank at .84%. My local bank pays .01%
No, in the UK. I may have been exaggerating a little, but without searching at all, my current bank, Halifax, offer 1.3% http://www.halifax.co.uk/savings/accounts/easy-access/online... I'm curious about what I'm missing, I'm sure I have some misunderstanding here. EDIT: that's a 12 month rate! I suppose I'm just a victim of misleading advertising.
Not only is it a 12-month rate, but it's also only on balances of under £50,000. The extra interest is a bounded cost the bank is willing to pay for customer acquisition knowing the average value of a new customer in terms of fees and other revenue generated. A business that wants to earn some interest on millions of pounds without agreeing to switch revenue-generating services to that bank as well is not going to get the same offer.
Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, you can probably multiply your savings x10 every year by yourself anyway, no need to use a revolutionary currency for that. http://blockchain.info/charts/market-price?timespan=all&show...
Nice, logarithmic scale. Really smooths out those bubbles :)
Bubbles? We are at $120 currently. So the only "bubble" is always the last one. I used logarithmic scale to make the x10 increments more obvious.
Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand what the difference is between Paypal's handling of payments and remittance of funds, which are governed by its contracts, and the terms and conditions of the work we do, which are also under contracts.
You're describing negotiations that happen before significant money and services have been exchanged; this PayPal "negotiation" occurs after. This turns out to be a rather large difference. Indeed, it's the difference between a contract negotiation and a hostage negotiation.
For the better of part a decade, Paypal has published a "Terms of Service" which you are required to agree to before you can use the service. Business users are required to agree to the TOS again. They regularly email customers regarding changes to the terms of service, and these terms of service are always publicly accessible.
If someone chooses not to read the TOS, that's on them and it is their failure as a business operator. If they wanted to renegotiate the standard terms of the TOS, they should have approached Paypal before agreeing to the TOS or before launching their business activities.
It's not a hostage negotiation--there's no requirement that you start using, or continue to use Paypal.
Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, you can probably multiply your savings x10 every year by yourself anyway, no need to use a revolutionary currency for that. http://blockchain.info/charts/market-price?timespan=all&show...
Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
What is this, another reddit meme that will be repeated until the end of the internet?
Bitcoin can only go to zero or +inf. Past performance is a way to show what haters are losing every year for denying Bitcoin.
Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You know, do their risk management before they let the vendor take payments? They have a very clear policy on presales and you would expect that people that do presales through PayPal read those damn policies. They are even written in an FAQ and not legalese.
Their policy is fundamentally incompatible with IndieGoGo's model. So why do they accept payments for IGG campaigns in the first place? You can't have it both ways.
Not all of IGG's campaigns are for pre-sales of non-existent products. IGG also handles campaigns for charities and art projects (Indeed, when I went to the IGG website, the 8 projects displayed were for charitable programs.)
Thus, Paypal can have it both ways.
Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've lost me. Why would a consumer ever bother with BTC? Especially if both ends of the transaction are paying fees, spreads and paying for an escrow service. Also, does the merchant set your prices in BTC, and change prices a few times per week as the exchange rate fluctuates? Or are the prices in USD?
Who said anything about an escrow service? One of the whole reasons to use BTC is irreversibility. You can build a crowdfunding site on atomic USD->BTC->USD transfers, precisely because there's no possibility of chargebacks. Crowdfunding is fundamentally a "pay cash in advance for some probability of a return" model, and BTC is the "cash" part that would make that work. Credit cards are very bad at being cash.
Before my transfer agent will send the irreversible transfer of bitcoins, they'll want to receive their USD by some irreversible means.
Why bother with the bitcoin sandwich? Why not transfer between the agents using Western Union or Hawala or whatever?
Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue with PayPal is not that they take steps to insulate themselves from fraud and chargebacks. The issue is that their process for doing so is unilateral and -- as is well-documented -- offers essentially no options for resolution unless you are lucky enough to be able to bring significant media pressure to bear on them. That is a problem. Unfortunately, I think the only solution is to encourage people to basic…
> ... encourage people to basically sue PayPal at the drop of a hat. I haven't looked at the PayPal ToS/EULA/whatever in quite a long while, but I imagine that you must agree not to do exactly that in order to use the PayPal service.
In sensible jurisdictions you can't sign away your rights like that, although you may pre-agree to binding arbitration or a particular jurisdiction.
However, I've not heard of someone successfully suing paypal, even in the small claims court :(