Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources

I'm not sure I like this idea. Braintree is a legit competitor to Stripe. I'm guessing they have some informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same but if they become 1 company, what's to stop Stripe from raising fees even more?

I'm not a fan of either to be honest, PayPal once told me I was wrong with something related to taxes and a bunch of different reps told me what I was saying and reported was impossible. Their tax division specialists also replied by email with big bold red letters outlining how it's not possible and that I'm wrong multiple times. They were contacted through support cases I opened with other reps on the phone since they aren't directly accessible on phone.

Then I said I was canceling my account with them if this wasn't resolved since it would have resulted in me needing to pay $400 to have my taxes amended. Long story short, after being ghosted for 3 months they replied to me saying I was right and they indeed had the impossible problem, then fixed their tax forms a week before taxes were due.

It's really bad that a random person on the internet discovered a huge issue with one of their partners and their instinct was to require ~10 hours of back and forth phone calls, multiple emails, me giving them the likely problem and solution on day 1 only to be lead on and ignored for months until the very last second.

Not good. Stripe makes restrictions that PayPal allows (cannabis adjacent, adult adjacent) that Stripe blocks. Many vendors will be negatively impacted by Stripes morality police and selective application of their policies.

I typically use paypal for paying contractors, but try to "load balance" across a couple competitors because you never know when one of them will flag your account, nor for how long it will be flagged.

Consolidation in this industry puts my ability to transmit money at greater risk.

PayPal user for 20+ years and it is time to end that dross

Reading about Stripe’s stablecoin ambitions is funny. X uses Stripe, but Stripe on X doesn't accept my Bybit stablecoin cryptocard for a Pro subscription, ads, or boost purchases.

That would be quite a play. Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, Xoom all under one umbrella. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for online card-not-present (CNP) checkout on that is going to be absurdly high and this will take a lot of convincing to beat antitrust. They will probably have to unwind Venmo and Braintree.

Trying to create a monopoly before the lack of antitrust enforcement window closes.

I'm not sure how this is a good thing. There are already very limited options to accept payments online, consolidating two of the major ones is not a great thing.

Paypal is quite popular in Germany but with Wero that popularity will decrease significantly. I expect that all around the Europe.

This would be amazing! Its such a pain having to set up two payment solutions as a merchant and as a buyer it would be great if I could use my paypal credit on whatever purchase I want. Consumers want paypal and merchant want stripe. I really want this to happen.

Do the processing fees really add up? Can't fathom that Stripe is big enough to buy PayPal, but maybe I'm just 10 years behind on this industry.

My worry is that fees might go through the roof without any other options

Why, what is the play here? I know PayPal is used extensively in some countries (like Brazil?) but in most countries there are other/local services that have substantial market share and I do not think that PayPal can compete.

PayPal owns Venmo, though.

I really do not grasp business when PayPal is somehow worth over $50 Billion

It doesn't have assets? It's not a bank

Is it because PayPal is integrated already into so many websites?

Wouldn't it take decades to make back $50 Billion in fees?

Everyone rushing to get these consolidations done before America starts having anti-trust law again, huh?

Not great tbh.

The more time goes on, I'm starting to come around to paypal's original vision of decentralized internet-native money as being the future.

The more the international system breaks down and countries abuse their power via the banking system (especially the US, and from both parties), my opinion of cryptocurrencies transitions from "annoying scam infrastructure for hucksters" to "actually...you might have a point." Still a ton of growing up that needs to be done by the industry.

But no company or country should be able to tax the global economy via payments monopoly and you should not be able to be arbitrarily banned from the economy by these global supra-national intermediaries that have no court system and no democratic levers to pull to reign in their overreach in your country outside of desperate social media posts.

Stripe brags incessantly about how much of global GDP they facilitate...which, cool. I don't doubt there's an insane amount of work required to herd all those global cats and make payments just work. But, they're literally taxing the entire world as a % of GDP due to this dystopian legacy system? Is that the best outcome for humanity?

So... I got banned from PayPal (with no explanation) and Stripe closed my account (with no recourse for 'crowdfunding' after linking to Ko-Fi).

Cool, awesome, that's gonna be a great monopolistic picture for those that get unbanked across the entire Internet.

thrilled that stripe is buying paypal

2 poo companies

I mean less competition is probably not good for anyone.

Paypal have historically been anti-Palestine [1] but recently have calmed themselves (though not yet undone their discriminatory practices).

Then Stripe have historically been pro-Palestine but recently Collison has taken part in Israeli propaganda [2].

Can't wait for these two evil companies to team up.

[1] https://paypal.7amleh.org/ [2] https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/cal...

AI "sez": "PayPal's valuation has declined significantly from its peak of approximately $360 billion in 2021"

haven't been following the drop because otherwise I thought that Paypal was more valuable than Stipe + Advent combined (which seems to have previously been the case) - and so I would have thought Paypal would have been buying the other companies and that this was some weird way to try to devalue a competitor by offering to buy them