I never got scammed with Paypal either. But I don't think I'll ever use it for trading again. That's mainly because I got tired of the stress and wasted time rep checking. I had enough rep that I rarely needed to go first. For me, the final straw wasn't being charged back, but stupid shit like Paypal randomly blocking me spending $5 or $10 of my own money on a Humble Bundle, when the account contained thousands of dollars.
I won't be like the OP and say Paypal is a piece of shit. It's good for some people, for some things. It's just a service that has major drawbacks for virtual item trading, so I don't use it any more.
So now I only use Bitcoin for cash trading. Bitcoin got a lot more useful in the last year or two. It's still volatile, you still have no recourse if it gets stolen, and letting anyone else store much of your bitcoins for you is risky. But now there are a lot more places to spend it, so I'm not stuck holding Bitcoin long term if I don't want the risk.
I can just spend it at sites like Newegg or Overstock or Expedia or via Gyft. I can use it to buy stuff I need, pay for holidays, that sort of thing. I also keep some in cold storage offline. BTC used to be a huge hassle to cash out, but personally I've never needed to cash out. There's no need to cash out bitcoins if I can just spend them, is there?
Really, it's money now. True, it could be worth 10% less or 10% more tomorrow, but I can live with that or I wouldn't be here trading crazy virtual items that can lose half their value at the drop of a hat
Paypal is still the king, but compared to a year ago, a lot more traders are using bitcoin (about 5% of Dota 2 traders accept bitcoin, for example).
Ironically, while I was writing this, dispenser.tf popped up a couple of messages to say people bought some of my keys with bitcoin. It's automatic. All I have to do is put more keys in my trading bot occasionally, and set the price, then I can do something more interesting while the bot collects money. It beats selling for PayPal :p
Skyrider Wrote:I agree on the fact that payPal is often used for scamming, of which is rather sad to see. But PayPal is also the only (as far as I know) money transfer system that has detailed information regarding the transactions done between people.
With bitcoin every transaction is public: amount, time, source and destination address. It can be anonymous because people usually don't know who the source and destination addresses belong to.
If you ever allow Bitcoin on SOP, you could make a rule that traders on SOP have to use a fixed bitcoin address for sending and receiving, and publish that address on SOP before they trade. Then every payment they make or receive with that address will be public, on the blockchain. It's a permanent, public record that anyone can see any time just by looking at a website. It's not like Paypal when you're investigating a scam, and you have to trust people to take screenshots from their Paypal accounts for you. There's none of that hassle: everyone can instantly see every payment that goes through a known Bitcoin address. Scammers can't fake it or hide it.
Thinking about notorious chargeback scammers here, like L4L, that would have been impossible with Bitcoin. Because there are no chargebacks, bitcoin scammers get found out instantly. The first trader they scam will post it on their rep thread within 30 minutes and it's game over. They can't build up rep with dozens of small trades for weeks and weeks, like L4L did, and then charge them all back later. They get caught within minutes the very first time they scam someone.
