Another friendly reminder that PayPal is not a bank. They don’t carry FDIC insurance. They aren’t regulated like a bank and you agree that they can do fuck all to your money at any time for any reason or no reason.

In other words,

STOP USING PAYPAL!

This is now the millionth time that there are news that PayPal can and will do this and that there is almost 0 legal action you can take.

Why oh why on Earth do you still keep money stored there? I understand using it for transactions, sometimes it is the only way but there is no need to keep the money on it, or is there?

At this point, sorry, your own fault for trusting PayPal.

Yes, simply put, that’s how it works. You should read the whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

The first sentence:

A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution

All transactions are public and verifiable. How is that less accountability?

And what recourse do you have?

More than using Paypal, obviously. Depending on the amount, you can take them to small claims court, or get lawyers involved for larger sums. The great thing is that they cannot claim you didn’t pay, and you have proof of services rendered, or products purchased. And if you don’t trust the merchant, don’t buy from them.

So there is a network and backbone to it.

Yes, Bitcoin is not a currency, it’s an open permissionless network of trust secured not by access right managment and opacity but game theory and past energy. Very useful to build currencies. I recommend you Andreas Antonopoulos work, his content age very well and everything is under CreativeCommons. A great video to start is : What is Bitcoin and why does it matters?

The problem with current transactions isn’t the money itself, it’s the services that use that currency.

It really depend where you live. For Venezualian, Lebanese, Turkish and many more people there is huge problem with their currencies and banking services. Also in Africa many ex-french colonies are forced to use Franc CFA which is basically an economic-leash by the french government. We can debate on the many issues with the USD currency but these are little (for now at least) compared to others.

You know you can build an escrow out of a smart-contract (even on Bitcoin) using multi-sig to ensure both parties are satisfied ?

LOL. You’ve done this, I presume?

Yes, in fact I use the Lightning Network almost daily.

That’s a weird name for a small claims court.

I’ve never had to take any company to court, because we have consumer protections. That covers purchases with crypto.

So why would you bring up small claims court if it’s not even necessary? Can’t keep track of your own story?

You asked what recourse you have, I assumed you realised we have consumer protections in Canada. Then you tried to twist it into whether I’ve personally taken someone to court. That’s irrelevant since the point is that consumer protections already exist, so your whole argument falls apart. You’re just baiting at this point. And yes, I have returned stuff after paying with cash, crypto and credit card. This is not uncommon.

No, you’ve never actually shown that there’s recourse against bad actors. You brought up small claims court, but dropped the subject - likely because there’s no legal framework for that; then you mentioned nebulous “consumer protections,” but still can’t manage come up with any description of how a bad actor would be held to account in such a situation.

With a credit card, for example, this is typically a very easy process that can be accomplished via one’s bank’s website, supported by financial regulatory frameworks.

Yep, same, I did some competitions with a friend, they sent me my half of the winnings via PayPal, his account is hacked and the hacker for some reason tries to claim back all the winnings. Even though the hacker only got access once and my friend was in constant contact with PayPal, they still dragged it out for months and months, every week sending me warning about my account being in debt despite the fact my friend had already told them about the hack and proven his identity.

It’s funny that a hacker with a random IP and no verification can fuck my life up for 6+ months with a single click, but my friend with all is documents and login history can’t convince PayPal they need to stop trying to take ~£60k off me.

As soon as it was finally sorted I deleted my PayPal.

What “bad actors”?

How does this differ than using cash? Or credit card. You are not being clear. What recourse do you have when using cash, for example?

Are you trying to make a joke? Have you actually completely forgotten what the original post is even about?

Are you concerned that Valve runs away with your money?

The post is about the *payment processor* being the bad actor. In that case, crypto is an alternative because it bypasses processors entirely.

If the bad actor is the *merchant*, then you already have consumer protection laws, and beyond that the legal system, same as with cash, crypto or credit cards.

You haven’t shown how cash or credit cards are inherently less risky than the Lightning Network. With cards, you can be debanked or have your account frozen by the processor (which is what happened in this post). With cash, a merchant can just take it and not deliver. Crypto doesn’t make this worse. In fact, it removes the risk of being debanked while functioning like digital cash (crypto payments can be made directly, not just through custodial processors).

Chargebacks exist with cards, but they’re double-edged (e.g. fraud, arbitrary reversals, censorship).

If you don’t understand crypto or don’t see the problems it solves, that’s fine, no one’s forcing you to use it. But dismissing it as “less accountability” doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.