201–210 of 239 posts
Wow, the "bitcoin" responses to that thread. Talk about trading one problem for another....
Yeah, everyone suggest to move from platform with 0.001% incidents rate, to the scammy bitcoin where no one is responsible for anything.
I run a legally operating one-man business providing electronic services to customers (mostly other businesses) in EU, US and Canada. The EU customers pay me with bank transfers like civilized human beings, but Americans and Canadians always insist on PayPal because, apparently, North American banking system charges an arm and a leg for international bank transfers, so they'd rather pay with CC.
I didn't mind having to provide PayPal with scans of a bunch of sensitive documents. What I do mind is pretending my PayPal balance is not real money but virtual tokens with little legal protection and the possibility of being arbitrarily frozen for an undisclosed reason. That, and their horrendous fees (including currency conversions based on rates they pull out of the ass) for which they don't even provide anything resembling a legal invoice (a screenshot of an HTML table won't cut with my IRS).
Someone, for the love of God, tell me there's an alternative a teeny-tiny business like mine could use.
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This applies to most centralized external services, but especially those that handle money. If your application or business relies 100% on one of these services that could be shut down or have your account suspended or removed, make sure to have a backup plan in place to switch it over to a self hosted option or another offering from another company.
Business? I'm a private individual buying stuff on Ebay. The only time I received money on PayPal was from friends who paid back small loans, like taxi trips or restaurant bills.
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I wouldn't use ebay if I couldn't use paypal. I don't want to use my CC for any online xacts if I don't need to. I'd rather use paypal to protect myself or just shop at a site I trust (e.g. Amazon). People who receive monies via PP need to protect themselves by assuming PP could freeze their account at any time. That means keeping the minimum amount of $$ possible under PP's control. I know there are regs to that but…
Some of the banks and some 3rd party companies are now offering a system to digitally generate "one-time" use card numbers that are automatically destroyed after a successful transaction.
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I think that's not a great comparison. Hacker News is still essentially a niche site known to people who care about a specific set of fields relevant to startups. If you asked a random person on the street they probably wouldn't know about Y Combinator, much less Hacker News. I'm not sure how to measure the actual level of recognition of a brand name, but I feel that Hacker News falls into the second or third tier of…
The popularity is not the most important factor in a brand trial, it's the domain. There can't be two companies with the same name in the same niche, which is what is happening here.
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That's not really a practical way to acquire bitcoin since there is very little economic activity in the cryptocurrency world besides trading various cryptocurrencies. I know this first-hand since the e-commerce startup I work for brings in roughly 300k USD in sales monthly, with bitcoin sales never having exceeded $80.00 USD worth of value and often none at all.
May I ask where you work? And also, why bitcoin? It's a slow cryptocurrency right?! Do you make users to wait for confirmation(about 30-40 mins)? You could experiment with fast Altcoins and convert to Bitcoin eventually.
> why bitcoin? It's a slow cryptocurrency right?! Do you make users to wait for confirmation(about 30-40 mins)?
Those decisions are outside of my responsibilities, but we use bitpay to accept bitcoin payments so it all works in real time. I suppose bitcoin was selected because it's the most popular coin so it is most likely to service customer needs, but I believe bitpay allows you to accept a few cryptocurrency options.
> You could experiment with fast Altcoins and convert to Bitcoin eventually.
IMO, there's no reason to bother doing so since experience has demonstrated that nobody really uses cryptocurrency to buy typical retail goods.
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They intentionally named their site that way to capitalize on Google search result traffic. If you read their articles, you realize they can barely put together two English sentences with proper grammar and structure. Furthermore, most of their articles are stolen from other sites. I've seen journalists from Motherboard, The Register, and Bleeping Computer accuse them of blatantly copying articles, and when I checked…
So ... PayPal made the right call.
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Some of the banks and some 3rd party companies are now offering a system to digitally generate "one-time" use card numbers that are automatically destroyed after a successful transaction.
I've seen virtual CC numbers for one time use here in the USA but not sure if they're still available. It's still a hassle to setup, configure, use, etc, which is its fall down. Simplicity is PP's strength, IMO, which is why it's got staying power.
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So ... PayPal made the right call.
Cutting a business off from the financial system seems like a fairly harsh punishment for plagiarism, especially when there are other routes for a remedy. We may never know if that was the reason, though, so it's hard to measure whether justice was done or not.