[ephbit]

Isn't PayPal in itself a dark pattern?

Most of my online payment transactions happen with credit card or bank transfer anyway ... absolutely no need for PayPal to annoy me by injecting themselves as man in the middle ... such an annoying company.

[Jxl180]

If you are taking credit cards online, I assume you have a man in the middle regardless. Whether you choose to go with Stripe, Square, Braintree, or PayPal is completely up to you.

[samhh]

Most of those don't sacrifice S75 protection in the UK. PayPal is unique.

[TechBro8615]

Most of the modern financial system is a dark pattern. If we were to reinvent finance from scratch, the result wouldn’t look anything like what we have.

[kristianc]

Crypto is a current attempt to reinvent finance from scratch and all it has achieved so far is demonstrating that perhaps things aren’t so bad the way they are.

[solveit]

The fact that crypto gained any traction at all is a testament to how broken the current system was. The original selling points of crypto were privacy, inflation-resistance, and decentralisation, and that was enough to reach a small critical mass of true believers to provide a minimum level of liquidity. But that's not why crypto got mainstream traction.

After that, the reason people actually used crypto was because Bitcoin was absolutely the easiest solution to send X amount of money to random person Y in an arbitrary jurisdiction in an hour or so. It's been getting better, but there are still circumstances where crypto is the easiest solution, even if you are operating entirely within the confines of the law. If your situation involves a border and small amounts of money? The chances are pretty damn good.

None of this contradicts the fact that crypto is pretty terrible as of now, but that only makes the point more compelling. People are willing to put up with all the terribleness because it fills a genuine need. This forum if nowhere else should know that terrible product with ludicrous success means something.

To head off the inevitable "the only use for crypto is speculation", I would like people making this argument to explain why, out of all the things you can speculate on, crypto is the one consuming more electricity than entire nations and still going strong after a decade of ludicrous growth. Your argument should be specific to crypto and not predict that, say, weed stocks will have a $2tn market cap if you try to apply the same argument.

[playpause]

How do they inject themselves as a man in the middle? I don’t think I have ever been forced to use PayPal to pay for something.

[isjamesalive]

eBay forced its Australian users to pay with PayPal a few years ago: https://www.smh.com.au/technology/accc-probe-of-ebays-paypal...

I’m still annoyed about that.