PayPal Launches Stablecoin on Ethereum, Citing 'Shift Toward Digital Currencies' (theblock.co) 40
Silicon Valley-based payments firm PayPal announced it is launching a U.S. dollar stablecoin in conjunction with Paxos. From a report: The new digital token will be pegged to the dollar and "gradually" made available to PayPal's customers in the U.S., PayPal said in a press release. Paxos will issue the coin labeled PayPal USD, or PYUSD. Issued on the Ethereum blockchain, PYUSD will be "fully backed by U.S. dollar deposits, short-term Treasuries and similar cash equivalents," the company also said in its statement. "As an ERC-20 token issued on the Ethereum blockchain, PayPal USD will be available to an already large and growing community of external developers, wallets and web3 applications," it added.
Corporate takeover (Score:3)
Meet the new hot thing. Same as the old hot thing, but safer because of corporations.
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Re:Corporate takeover (Score:4, Interesting)
Other virtual currencies are just nonsense as far as I'm concerned. There are some potential use cases around automated contracts, but so far none are practical.
Re:Corporate takeover (Score:4, Informative)
The reason for Bitcoin is that anyone can pay anyone online, and the government can't stop that.
Except for the pesky fact that you can't just shove dollar bills into your PC and have it magically spit out cryptocurrency, and vice versa. As long as exchanges are needed to actually deal in cryptocurrency, there's always going to be an easy real-world target for governments to stick their noses into.
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1. The government can make Dollars ad-nauseam, diluting value from your dollars and taking that value, and spending how it wants to without taxing you for it. It's a form of virtual theft. If you go to buy an exotic car and suddenly the manufacturer ups the number of examples, devaluing yours a
Re:Corporate takeover (Score:5, Insightful)
Only to the same extent that said governments are also powerless to help you recoup losses from fraud - which when dealing anonymously online, is obviously rampant.
Which brings us back to square 1, the virtual currency has huge downsides and the only advantage is for crime.
That was the intention (Score:4, Informative)
Crypto was always vulnerable. All it takes for a takeover is a 51% attack. And that's easy to do by taking control of the big exchanges & mining pools, which any government or large corporation could do anytime they feel like. It was never the decentralized finance the libertarians wanted it to be.
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which any government or large corporation could do anytime they feel like.
This isn't anywhere near as flexible as you think. Out of the major coins there is one government (China) which could take over one coin (bitcoin) and in order to do that they'd need to take over a significant number of companies all at once so as to not trigger a sudden selloff.
You can't just pretend to take over a company in another country, and that means you need 51% of all mining in your country. And certainly some corporation couldn't do so without sinking huge amounts of investment in for what is ult
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>All it takes for a takeover is a 51% attack
For the record, you have been parroting this totally incorrect piece of shit for around half a decade now. Your older version was that exchanges could somehow have enough of the currency to do a 51% attack, which isn't valid for anything but proof of stake, and obviously even there no exchanges have that amount. Then you changed it to some nonsense about how governments, corporations, exchanges, and mining pools could all suddenly collude to make a currency w
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Now that the hobbyists have been pushed out of the virtual currency space, corporations are trying to take over virtual currencies. Meet the new hot thing. Same as the old hot thing, but safer because of corporations.
Considering the text in BOLD...I guess you are trying to be funny? Maybe sarcastic?
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The beginning of the end of Paypal (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The beginning of the end of Paypal (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say "digital currency" is vague enough to mean little, but arguably most "traditional" currency is already "digital". Much traditional currency is transferred around without actually being literally printed. Much of it are just numbers in databases. There are moves to go to CBDC in various places, which basically means the same "digital" benefits enjoyed by commercial banks today are reasonably provided directly to citizens directly by the central bank.
So their press release is accurate in citing a shift towards digital currencies, but it's misleading as that has no bearing on the relevance/utility of the ethereum blockchain. It's a trick to gussy up the traditional commercial bank behavior trying to get PayPal more credibility while citing the unrelated CBDC stuff.
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It's easy to infer, FROM CONTEXT, that they mean something specifically not what they've been doing already. It's easy to infer, FROM CONTEXT, that they mean cryptocurrency.
There is absolutely no need for you to play dumb "oh it's so vague!!!". It's not vague.
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It is deliberately vague to their purposes, and if it were specifically referring to cryptocurrency, then they would be arguably wrong, as the trend since 2021 has been against cryptocurrency. However, things like CBDC are indeed a "shift toward digital currencies", but that's separate of cryptocurrency and is likely to not even use a public blockchain.
In fact, reading between their lines, "correcting" their announcement plays right into their hands. They are vague on purpose to refer to one phenomenon th
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afaik paypal doesn't allow "paying with crypto", but selling crypto for $ at checkout, then pay for the goods/service with said $.
so this is not "buying stuff with crypto", but merely a more user friendly way of using an exchange, which is a totally different thing and btw an option paypal has been offering for a while and many other entities for over a decade now.
so i have to wonder where the "huge shift" you are talking about would come from? do you have any data to back that up or are you just shilling
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tbh i'm not very versed in the details, but what you are describing are technical issues. i'm sure a technical solution would soon be found if society actually wanted to (or could be somehow seduced to) use cryptocurrency as a general transaction mechanism. and it has not been because of a lack of trying or lack of eyes on the problem. which suggests that this whole thing would need a major (and thus disrupting) paradigm shift to actually start to work.
to me the real difference here is if cryptocurrency has
Makes sense for scummy PayPal (Score:1)
They've already used every other method available to scam people. Why are they so late to this party?
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i use paypal as a regular consumer practically since its inception. it has been a godsend and the main reason i started bothering with online transactions in the first place. i indeed have read horror stories from pissed off users, but have never ever had a problem with them. while not perfect, i think they're a serious business that delivers a crucial service and does it quite well.
then again i'm not in the us, i'm aware that law in the us tend to be far less protective of regular consumers or citizens in
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I don't want some random ass corporation freezing or keeping my money at their whim with no rights on my side.
I used them as little as possible before they decided to block my account for no discernible reason. Thankfully I never stored any money with them because I read all the horror stories before I used them the first time. If I had any money there I assume they would have kept mine like so many others'.
I don't use Venmo for the same reason. I will accept Venmo if I must and immediately transfer the
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understood. not a problem for me either because they never really had any money of mine, except for the rare refund in transit. indeed the horror stories i read were mostly about (mostly small) business owners depending on paypal for cashing in and getting tangled up in arbitrary bureaucracy, which is indeed troubling. tbh that use case means way more compromising exposure and a lot more potential friction points.
the new digital token will be pegged to the dollar (Score:4, Insightful)
So, let me get this straight. If the "new digital token" works as intended (I guess it's possible), its value is intended to remain stable. It works just like dollars!
The problem I see in this is, we already have dollars. We can use dollars as dollars. We don't need a second layer of virtual money on top of our fiat currency.
Is this weird pseudo-pseudo-currency intended to bypass some sort of banking regulations? Maybe you can sell it in places where it's illegal to have real dollars? I can't see any other profit in it.
Re:the new digital token will be pegged to the dol (Score:4, Interesting)
Worse - it's a private currency that is likely tracked in a traditional database (the sane way to do this), pegged to the dollar, and then they add a blockchain because why?
Like everything crypto, it's dumb if you look at it more than superficially. Only with the extra tracking and pegging to the dollar, this one at least won't be so useful to criminals.
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it's a private currency that is likely tracked in a traditional database (the sane way to do this),
That is indeed the sane way to do this, but it's built as an ERC-20 token on top of Ethereum, so probably not.
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"[...] this one at least won't be so useful to *FBI*."
Fixed that for you.
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I can't see any other profit in it.
A currency with a value that fluctuates all over the place is only good if you end up on the winning side of said fluctuations. Not everyone wants to gamble with their rent money.
That being said, there's still really no point to using PayPal's stablecoin when you can just use PayPal the normal way, especially considering the cost of Ethereum transaction fees.
Re: the new digital token will be pegged to the do (Score:2)
You know what's great about dollars? Anywhere in the world they use currency, someone will take a $20 bill, guaranteed. Even in North Korea.
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As best I can gather the point of a stablecoin is to obtain the benefits of cryptocurrency* while removing the speculative instability that regular cryptocurrencies attract. As people buy into the coin, the coin manager theoretically stores the dollars as backing**.
* The main, intended benefit being the ability to make online payments without being beholden to credit card companies, governments or other large, financial gatekeepers. Hmmm...
** Only a complete cynic would suggest this sounds like a way to get
Ethereum block chain is cheaper than Visa network (Score:2)
They made BTC user feel like criminal a decade ago (Score:1)
In 2013, they went after their users using BTC, asking them to sign document stating that the said user would never use PayPal for cryptocurrency sell or purchase ever again, and blocking their funds unfairly for 6 to 18 months periods regardless of their financial situation.
So to politely put it, this is concerning and Paypal can kiss my ass.
A bit late (Score:2)