Yes, but they could have used WePay, Stripe, or some other alternative. Remember Diaspora? $80K in donations frozen by PayPal. Once you get your account unfrozen, as Diaspora learned, your momentum stops. So it's doubtful that they'll make over $45K now, without another appeal. On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 5:19 AM, CypherPunk <cypherpunk@cpunk.us> wrote:
On 09/05/2013 07:06 AM, Dan Staples wrote:
Why did they use Paypal? Probably because they are aspiring to gain popular attention and support, and most people don't use Bitcoin; they use Paypal and credit cards for online transactions.
Of course Paypal is a liability in terms of privacy and the risks of them doing something just like what they did, but if MailPile hadn't gone with Paypal, it's likely they wouldn't have gotten the amount of funding that was donated so far. It's always a tradeoff of risk, especially when you're aiming to go mainstream.
Oh I completely understand why they used Paypal. Like you said, not enough people use Bitcoin to really make a successful go of a Bitcoin based fundraising campaign. I'm just saying I'd like to see Indigogo offer Bitcoin as an option. I'm sure a lot of people would use it and it would also be a good way to get people interested in Bitcoin.