I have a side business that makes a gadget, akin to a guitar pedal. It has worked flawlessly for me, for well over a decade. Occasionally I casually search for an alternative (to have a backup) but have never found one.
PP lets me accept payments from a completely passive website. No code! While I love coding, maintaining an active web page is a cost. My IT costs are zero.
I think PP's buyer protections help my business too, by letting people feel confident that they can cancel a deal, and that I don't get any of their personal information except their shipping address. I don't want that information, and I don't want to be responsible for keeping it secure.
I absolutely drop quite a bit of guard if PP G&S is an option. A lot of that being because I have been on the other side (seller, selling digital goods such as dev and design) and have seen how quick PP is to yank those funds back.
Is that a good thing, or is it crazy that such a simple concept (if consumer claims they don't get a product, you provide proof of delivery or we take the money back) has been almost unique to PP for so long?
Yep, attempted signing up to Claude recently, wanted cc number, name and address directly on site. No paypal. Wow. In the end my card was rejected and I couldn't even sign up. Wow++.
Increasingly, I'm seeing crypto as the best thing long-term. No one's going to deny me service based on who I am and where I live (or could be living,) let alone giving that info over to third parties unnecessarily. No false positives leading to rejection either based on that information which shouldn't even be asked for. Identity should be a choice, not a requirement or a coercion. Like this, even bitcoin enables a high degree of anonymity.
What's with this whole "Billing Address" bull^^^^? No one needs to know that when I buy something with cash at a supermarket or use a credit card at a gas station.
If someone wants to know exactly who I am and where I am (or could be) then there should be a card for that which will co-exist with the crypto. Does PayPal provide names of buyers to sellers? Also, a buyer's protection thing could exist as some type of adjunct escrow service for sellers to use.
"He warned investors never to share their 24-word recovery phrase and said large holders should avoid keeping direct access to their full holdings at home."
That's the last thing that should be solved. Remove the temptation for crime.
The billing address "bull" is part of a basic fraud due-diligence feature (AVS - Address Verification System).
You can get back different match levels (matched the house number only, the zip code only, or both) which provide some insight into potentially sketchy transactions. Some payment gateways allow you to auto-decline based on the results, or the merchant can choose to follow up depending on their scale and risk tolerance.
Plenty of petrol stations ask for the zip code on the unattended keypad when making a purchase for the same reason.
So when you sign up for a CC the address is used by the bank/institution, but when you tell a merchant they don't even cross-check with the bank... ever? They'd have to, otherwise what's the point in asking for it? Maybe the bank only shares zip codes? If so, why not just ask the buyer for a zip code?
Every time you make a cc purchase online, the seller, if they get your details directly can then go out and use your details to make purchases of their own from your card. That's insane, let alone having your name and address details. No wonder cc companies get fraud.
If I am going to use a credit card, let me hand over the number, and then send me an email to confirm the purchase. Not sure what the flow of that would be and if/how to use confirmation codes. Also, the last thing I'd want is another "app". Maybe optional 2FA.
Thanks.
Crypto debit cards are on the rise anyway.
Another idea would be to have a once-only disposable CC number generator. New purchase, get new number. Also, when new numbers are generated, the bank can record the who/when/where of the request and it can be matched with the when/where/how it is used later, and how many times to get a clue if an account is compromised as a fallback protection.
Imagine if those numbers went on a blockchain for merchants to use. They could see if/when a number was already used, but not necessarily need to use/integrate with it - but the bank would. Crypto address generators are commonplace now but addresses are very hard to key-in. So the blockchain would be a security layer on top of the conventional transaction, which could work without it if need be.
I have a side business that makes a gadget, akin to a guitar pedal. It has worked flawlessly for me, for well over a decade. Occasionally I casually search for an alternative (to have a backup) but have never found one.
PP lets me accept payments from a completely passive website. No code! While I love coding, maintaining an active web page is a cost. My IT costs are zero.
I think PP's buyer protections help my business too, by letting people feel confident that they can cancel a deal, and that I don't get any of their personal information except their shipping address. I don't want that information, and I don't want to be responsible for keeping it secure.