At 10:19 PM 07/31/2003 -0500, Mac Norton wrote:
I'm not sure that Paypal has met the needs of any enduser yet, so I'd question whether it "succeeded."
Huh? Paypal was wildly successful at meeting the perceived needs of end users. Whether it met the needs of stockholders before EBay bought it is a separate question. It wasn't pretending to be a perfect cypherpunks solution. Paypal gave people who wanted to occasionally sell things on the net a way to receive payments online, quasi-immediately, without going to the major hassle of becoming a registered credit-card-accepting business, and let people who wanted to buy things online send money immediately without sending their credit cards directly to random individuals, and let both sides avoid the delay and bounceability of checks-by-snail, and reduced the likelihood of fraud in the payment process.