I believe that after 10k USD additional AML regulations kick in. Then there are a related class of pseudo-crimes around structuring payments to avoid the 10k threshold. Part of it may be PayPal's policies, but as I understand these things are generally to cover things on their end from regulatory risk factors.

That's just one of the headaches they deal with. Also one of the reasons for using cryptocurrencies. PayPal may be creating the worst of both worlds by combining the complexity of cryptocurrency transactions with the need to abide by byzantine regulations.

Indeed, my orders never exceed 100 bucks, and I have an automatic sweep into my bank account when it exceeds X dollars.

After waiting on the line with support for 4 hours and going through a phishing-tastic email flow, sure. (Maybe your credit card company has a better experience, but who wants to reach the point where you find that out?). With PayPal you just push the button.

A lot of the world doesn't have credit cards.

with Paypal I can link either debit or credit card, so I can choose whether or not I'm going into debt for a certain amount.

Chargebacks, at least where I live, are much harder if you paid with a debit card. Paypal refunds are just the same no matter if you used debit or credit.

Paypal has a bad rep from the merchants side. But for the users, it's just more convenient to link paypal email as payment method instead of others. To the consumers there is no difference between paypal, google pay, or apple pay. Paypal is more universal

> and that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way

Yes, I absolutely do think that. When I make a purchase through paypal, I am redirected to an authorization page hosted on paypal's domain. The recipient never sees my card number. I must authorize each charge. Whereas when I give my card number, the recipient can charge whatever they want, whenever they want, however much they want*

* subject to fraud protection.

This matters because sites do get hacked. The paypal horror stories you see are typically not consumer sided.

I like to use PayPal when signing up for subscription services with recurring charges. It keeps billers that you have authorised in a nice list and you can cancel/deauthorise them directly from PayPal. No surprise charges months/years later from something you signed up for and forgot about...

> that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way

this is absolutely the case for me, multiple times I had a great experience getting refunds with PayPal and multiple times I regretted not purchasing something using PayPal because getting a refund was much harder.

I now use PayPal exclusively for any online purchase > $500 precisely for this reason[1].

[1] unless it's a vendor that I know has a good return policy, such as JB HiFi.

Nonprofits are major targets of card testing fraud, I wonder if that is related

If the merchant screws you on a transaction paid via IBAN transfer, how do you get your money back?

They're not as openly shitty at least.

Crypto was supposed to be an alternative to all this but, well, look how that worked out.

It's still more convenient than browser auto-fill (which I also use).

Paypal is still probably the most popular "easy" checkout option in the UK, more popular than Stripe, Google pay and Amazon pay.

Maybe not more popular than Klarna, but I don't have a debt problem so I don't want to use that. Never heard of Adyen and I can't recall ever seeing Apple pay.