How does selling Bitcoin to Paypal work on Coinbase (what goes on behind the scenes), and is it against Paypal's terms of service?
Gerard Bitcoin’s momentum among key merchants and platforms on the web keeps accelerating.
After hinting at it a few weeks ago when Braintree enabled Bitcoin-based transactions for PayPal developers, the company is now enabling Bitcoin across the PayPal network for merchants of digital goods.
The company has expressed interest in bitcoin for a while, with eBay CEO John Donahoe saying in the past that it would play an “important role” in the company’s future. Now that large players from Overstock to Wikipedia are now relying on the cryptocurrency for a part of their transactions or donations, PayPal is stepping in.
Through partnerships with BitPay, Coinbase and GoCoin, PayPal will let its merchants accept bitcoin for digital goods transactions. They decided to go with a handful of launch partners instead of a single one, as PayPal’s Braintree did with Coinbase earlier this month. To be clear, this isn’t about adding Bitcoin to PayPal’s
visit here to exchange bitcoin to paypal
digital wallet and it’s only in North America for the moment. These are baby steps for now.
“This is a huge endorsement to the digital currency community,” said GoCoin CEO Steve Beauregard.
PayPal will earn transaction revenue through referral fees, which are pretty common throughout the payments world.
“PayPal is playing the role of the intermediary, but the cost will be left up to the merchant and the payment processor,” said Scott Ellison, who is PayPal’s senior director of competitive intelligence and corporate strategy
Even if PayPal is still the first choice in consumer’s preferences for online payments, Bitcoin offers several advantages that could eventually allow the cryptocurrency to establish dominance.
- In terms of security, Bitcoin comes as strong as the established online payments platform, PayPal. They’re both striving to strike the balance between accessibility and confidentiality.
- When it comes to ease of use, PayPal offers a trusted, universal user interface, eliminating the decision friction created by the multiple options of Bitcoin wallets available. PayPal even has a peer-to-peer system of