14 Jan 2014 / Wired – PayPal president David Marcus is trying to make nice with bitcoin, the digital currency that could ultimately become a big competitor to his company’s massively popular online payments service.
Today, on Twitter, he said the folks at PayPal are in fact “believers” in bitcoin and that the company supports the sale of bitcoin mining rigs, the machines that help drive the worldwide open source software system that is bitcoin. It’s yet another sign that the influence of bitcoin is expanding — and that existing tech outfits like PayPal have no choice but to respond.
As it turns out, Marcus was responding to a bit of a firestorm that spread across the internet discussion forum Reddit over the weekend. On Sunday, a Redditor named Josh Best1 (jbest8283) posted a message from PayPal support that told him it was against PayPal policy to use the payment service for currency exchange, including the sale of bitcoin miners, bitcoin, or litecoin, a bitcoin alternative.
That message wasn’t well-received by the bitcoin community. While bitcoin and litecoin are digital currencies, bitcoin miners are most certainly not. They’re specialized computers that earn bitcoins by processing transactions on the currency’s peer-to-peer network.
PayPal didn’t respond to our request for a comment, but on Twitter, Marcus noted that the text in the PayPal support message was “bad,” and is “being corrected.”…… Read more
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/01/paypal_bitcoin/
