#3 Bringing Paypal into the mix and making our own market.
So I'll be setting out a more concrete plan for how we can utilise Paypal for buying Steem.
This I think is necessary for Steem to grow in this crucial period. And if Steem doesn't innovate then another platform will to our detriment.
I had some nice feedback already so I'm moving the idea forward. Here are the links for previous posts.
Intro: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@nikflossus/the-difficulty-of-investing-in-steemit
#2: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@nikflossus/bringing-paypal-into-the-mix-and-making-our-own-market
The problem at present is that the necessity of using Bitcoin to buy Steem hinders expansion. Bitcoin is still not 'normie' friendly and it takes a determined and sustained effort to learn about crypto currency and then acquire some.
Paypal in contrast is 'normie' friendly. Even Grandmas use it when buying and selling on Ebay! However Paypal has a reclaim feature which currently makes it unsuitable for our uses. As with credit cards, the payer can reclaim the money from the payee for almost any reason.
This is the key. Almost any reason does not include donations. A link to this question being answered on the Paypal forums is in post #2.
So this is how we move forward.
- You agree to donate to Steem via a Paypal address
- You send your Paypal credit
- Once received, as an unconnected 'thank you', you are credited with Steem to the market value of your donation.
For this we need a few things.
- A tame whale who has a Paypal account and is happy to act as escrow
- A volunteer, willing to donate Paypal credit to a stranger
- A blog post where all details are displayed so that everything can be kept open and honest.
I am happy to act as the volunteer to donate. I suggest initially we keep the maximum transaction to, say $5 to minimise risk and I am happy for the whale to take a small commission to cover unforeseen difficulties. Once we have done one transaction we can try further more, refining the process and perhaps ultimately with the idea of creating a 'market' tab on Steem to automate things.
But first we need a tame whale (or big fish) to act as escrow.
Please feel free to resteem or mention this to anyone who might be able to help. It's essential we continue to innovate if Steem is to become the platform we know it has the potential to be!
Steem on Steembuddies!
There are a few issues with this. The first is that the account acting as an escrow will have to have a business account. There will be transaction fees.
Second, many small transactions can trip an alert for fraud. The account could be locked for weeks during an investigation. During that time no funds go in or out and a secondary PayPal account is not allowed.
PayPal isn't as friendly for international fund conversions from what I saw. Others may be able to give a more definitive answer on this.
I get that Bitcoin isn't "big" like PayPal, but a lot of sites are bringing it to their platform. Etsy is the biggest I can think of right now that I've used. It takes a bit of trust from each party but it can work out so much better for everyone. Yeah, sellers will still have my info if it isn't a digital purchase, but for digital purchases they don't have my information stored on the sale and the transaction sites.
Why not a personal account? And what are the fees for buying bitcoin? Perhaps we could combine transactions.
Perhaps a fraud alert could be a problem but we'd being with one transaction and slowly increase. I doubt that would flag up on their metrics. We could also switch to a dedicated account.
I agree that bitcoin is easier but I'm more concerned about getting new users now. The sooner we can get this moving, the better. Problems can be ironed out as we go.