[indigochill]

Can you expand on this line of reasoning a bit? Specifically, what's stopping a competitor from eating Paypal's lunch right now? They have a majority market share now, but disruption still seems a possibility. Often it seems would-be disruptors get bought by the goliaths, but that's on the owners of the disruptors making their company purchasable such as through accepting investor money.

On the flip side, if we did get new laws, why would the goliaths not use their country-size budgets to lobby for the laws to just ensconce them as the government-approved monopoly (maybe not directly, but for example by throwing up legislative barriers to entry against would-be competitors)?

[marcinzm]

>Specifically, what's stopping a competitor from eating Paypal's lunch right now?

There's already regulations (or industry rules) regarding money laundering, credit card processing, credit card charge backs, international money transfers, etc, etc. That alone creates a decent barrier to entry.

Then there's other issues such as merchants lying, customers lying, refunds, stolen accounts, etc. PayPal closes accounts (and so on) as a consequence of trying to deal with all these issues.

I'd posit that PayPal does not suck because it's PayPal but because of the product itself and anyone who tried to fully replicate it would run into the same issues (and thus suck just as much).

[barry-cotter]

Gee, if it’s that easy to find a new payment processor when Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Stripe and four others all drop you on the same day SubscribeStar should have a new payment processor by now. They don’t. It’s been three weeks. No member of the payment processing cartel will touch you if MasterVisa won’t because then they’ll get you cut off.

https://twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/1076886857445711872?s...

Long twitter thread on the relation between MasterCard, Visa and Patreon and how the credit card cartel is attempting to minimise political risk.

[michaelt]

  Specifically, what's stopping a competitor
  from eating Paypal's lunch right now?

Perhaps being a payment processor is actually difficult, and Paypal is doing a tolerably good job?

I only hear people bitching about their paypal account being locked once or twice a year, whereas I assume paypal deal with hundreds of attempts at credit card fraud, chargebacks, complaints about ebay goods and suchlike every day.

[justtopost]

Oh, they deal with it. But always on terms favorible to them. I sold off inventory to my old CoLo and they froze all my funds for 6 months until lawyers got called, and somehow their fraud investigation magically vanished. They are no better than mafia.

[outoftheabyss]

Paypal relies heavily on mastercard and visa to process payments, if these companies refuse to play ball with a competitor (which I would say is incredibly likely given the cosy relationship these companies have) then what chance does a competitor have? Merely being usable is in Visa and master card's hands, let alone eating into any marketshare

[zarkov99]

Others comments have addressed the difficulties with creating a PayPal alternative. New laws would be vulnerable to corruption, yes, of course, but that is not a new problem and there are mechanisms to fight it. As things stand now we are fast and sleeply sliding back to the Rober Baron times as more and more of our lives are gated by a handfull of players.