The whole purpose of crypto is to exchange money online like we exchange cash in person, so who wants PayPal as a middleman on a tech designed not to have a middleman? Who will use that

I think the opportunity here is getting money from a bank account to an ETH or BTC wallet using "normal" means and not setting up a new account on a crypto exchange. Unless you're getting a paycheck in crypto, someone has to be a middleman.

PayPal 20 years ago made it easy to engage in internet commerce across various world currencies. And now users of PayPal have an easy way to commerce with two more world currencies using a familiar trusted interface. Another way PayPal as the middle man helps: "Unclaimed links expire after 10 days", which sounds like it avoids the problem of accidentally sending bitcoin into the void.

That's the purpose of crypto, yes. As it turns out people like having trusted authority in their money movements, and so now we're watching the crypto world just re-invent the financial industry basically as a digital twin.

Just look at Tether, the darling of the stablecoin world, which is minted by a handful of institutional clients. If you squint hard enough, you can see the banks.

Absolutely. Cryptocurrency should make payment middlemen obsolete. PayPal should get laughed out of the building here. It's incredible that this has any legs at all. This thread should be full of the names of Ethereum wallets.

MetaMask, Trezor, MEW, Status

For people who won't setup any wallet this can be useful. Self custody wallets are scary for some users.

The duality of crypto.

"Paypal is horrible. With bitcoin, you won't need Paypal anymore!"

"Paypal supports bitcoin. This is good for bitcoin."

I imagine that most people who use cryptocurrency for payment at all will still need to convert it to something else sometimes. Attempting to use it for everything would be pretty hardcore.

Decentralized Finance!

>so who wants PayPal as a middleman

The governments that are threatened by private citizens transacting outside their purview obviously.

> The whole purpose of crypto is to exchange money online like we exchange cash in person

No, the whole purpose of crypto is to provide an unregulated financial playground for speculation and scams. As they say, "the purpose of a system is what it does".

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Scammers, who will need to exit the scheme at some point, while laundering gains in the process. Good thing techbros at PayPal will help with that minor nuisance :)