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.