http://www.coindesk.com/paypal-announces-first-partnerships-bitcoin-space/

PayPal has announced partnerships with the three largest payment processors in the bitcoin space – BitPay, Coinbase and GoCoin.

Though the online e-commerce pioneer stopped short of integrating bitcoin into its digital wallet or payment processing services directly, the move marks PayPal’s first formal offering to the bitcoin community.

In a blog post penned by senior director of corporate strategy Scott Ellison, PayPal revealed that online merchants will now be able to accept bitcoin via all three companies through its PayPal Payments Hub, its product that enables its customers to accept credit card, mobile carrier payments and other payment methods through a single integration.

Ellison lauded BitPay, Coinbase and GoCoin for their commitment to ensuring consumer protections on their platforms, while suggesting that the offering will appeal to a number of its key customer groups, writing:

“We believe digital goods merchants will be excited to work with these industry-leading companies to sell ringtones, games and music and get paid with bitcoin.”

Notably, the announcement follows the decision of PayPal subsidiary Braintree to partner with Coinbase earlier this month.

Embracing innovation

Ellison went on to suggest that PayPal is committed to embracing innovation, and that this has lead to its early support of bitcoin. Further, he suggested the company will be monitoring its first formal bitcoin trial to assess how it moves forward with the payment method, writing:

“We’re proceeding gradually, supporting bitcoin in some ways today and holding off on other ways until we see how things develop.”

PayPal cited its commitment to allowing businesses freedom of choice and promoting safer buying experiences as key reasons for its decision.

BitPay, Coinbase and GoCoin will pay a referral fee to PayPal for new business they gain through the platform, meaning their existing pricing structures will be unaffected by the move.

Support for select business models

Ellison framed the decision as the latest way PayPal is seeking to support the bitcoin ecosystem, pointing to its past efforts to help companies in the bitcoin mining space accept PayPal for their products.

However, Ellison suggested that PayPal is conscious of the controversies that have dominated this segment of the bitcoin industry, and that its support will continue for merchants that meet certain criteria, writing:

“To safeguard customers, we’ve decided not to work with merchants who pre-sell these products. This is consistent with our approach to pre-sales of other goods; we hold off anytime we determine that pre-selling may not provide a good buyer experience.”

In recent months, a number of bitcoin mining companies, including early and current market leaders such as Butterfly Labs and CoinTerra have faced lawsuits from customers for failing to deliver equipment on advertised timelines.

Addressing security concerns

In his statements, Ellison also suggested that PayPal has been monitoring conversation surrounding how bitcoin will be regulated, clarifying that PayPal will only seek to work with bitcoin companies that offer certain consumer protections.

Reitterating that PayPal needs to follow local laws and regulations in every market it serves, Eillson wrote:

“For this reason, virtual currency exchangers and administrators interested in working with PayPal in the future must secure the appropriate licenses and put anti-money laundering procedures in place.”

At the time, PayPal also suggested it is only seeking to promote bitcoin, stating that while other cryptocurrencies have been available for some time “only bitcoin has achieved significant scale” in the payments space to date.

I just saw the latency updated on the Delegate page. IMO this should be removed, as perhaps it unfairly shows Chinese/ROW (rest of world) delegates as having high latencies. Latency will vary depending on where your server is setup.

To be more fair, you could setup servers on opposite sides of the world and use the lowest latency figures provided from both servers, but this may be unrealistic I don't know.

Good work with everything else though, the website is coming along nicely.

That moment when you realize you lowered your pay rate to 1% while publishing your version... facepalm.jpg

I think I am going to create a new delegate and ask for people to vote my current one out, as I can't really afford to be paying for a VPS and I need the delegate pay to cover the expenses. Would everyone be OK with me doing this & still support me? It is kind of embarrassing to have to ask this, but I would appreciate ya'lls support! Sorry for the inconvenience, I will be more careful in the future as to not accidentally lower my pay rate. If not, I'm probably just going to ask everyone to vote me out as I can't really afford the VPS costs. Let me tell you a little bit about what I've been up to during the past month as part of my delegate campaign and why you should keep me on board. My delegate campaign is kind of random, but I have been trying to help out where I can.

Most of my time has probably been spent trying to convince people BitsharesX is awesome and they should buy some and join us. I think growing the community and user base is important, along with trying to convince Bitcoin PoW people that DPOS isn't evil! I have been doing this mostly on Bitcointalk, but my website gets decent traffic as well.. I am trying to work on the SEO so it gets more exposure.

I have been providing some tech support to users here when I have the time, and updated the wiki a few times with support related things.. I am planning to update the Delegate page with some tips and applicable commands that are missing. I am also on planning on updating my Windows wallet troubleshooting section soon.

I also started a marketing campaign to get BTSX/bitassets added to more exchanges and payment processors here: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=8384.0

Thanks for your support & let me know if you will support me in this delegate change to revert back to my old pay rate of 75%. If some people voice their support, then I will create a new delegate and request that everyone vote my old delegate account out. Thanks again guys, it's been a fun first month here in the Bitshares community and I am excited for more DACs to be released!

I agree something needs to be done to protect users from alias scamming by making similar aliases to popular services. Although, I don't think adding more robots or changing the avatars is the proper solution.

I suggest adding a random 4 digit number at the end of each alias. Assuming you use 0 through 9, this provides 10,000 different strings of numbers a user could get. Only assign these numbers when a user registers their account, so there would be a huge cost for someone to imitate an alias and receive a similar number after it. By the time someone is lucky enough to generate a similar string to the account they are trying to imitate, the accounts that resemble the account that they are trying to imitate will be taken (ignoring the string).

You could further increase the cost of such alias squatting by increasing the entropy using alphanumeric characters instead of only numbers. I suggested only numbers so the strings are easier to remember, that is why I suggested only using 4 as well.

You could truncate the last 4 characters of the previous block's hash, or use some other method. Obviously this is all arbitrary data... there are other ways you could implement a similar system.

They also have price feeds which can be used for betting and contracts for difference.

I didn't know this, interesting.

Counter party's volume is shockingly low according to this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=789547.0

If anyone owns any counterparty or mastercoin, I would seriously think about selling them. There is too much competition in the asset issuance space, and other coins with asset exchanges also have numerous other features along with simply having asset exchanges. So, I don't see them being able to compete in the long run.

If the Willy report is true, which is not clear to me, then the last 2 bubbles where fuelled in part by fake demand.  If you look at the long term log chat, there was an increase in the rate of price increase during the last two bubbles, which could have been caused by Willy if it was really happening.  Therefore if the Willy report was true, then we could correct down to the rate of increase that was present before the bubbles, which would put the current bitcoin price at around $200, and the price may not recover quickly. 

If the Willy report isn't true then bitcoin is dead cheap and I'm long term bullish.

My guess is that Willy isn't true.  After all wouldn't something like that have been discovered by law enforcement and have been confirmed?  In which case there are many possible explanations for the current 'dip/crash' (Alibaba, ethereum cash out, traders giving up on bubble hopes, manipulation, simply not enough buyers, merchant sales) , but I am prepared for further downward movement just in case.  I bought my first BTSX today.  I'm still learning about it but it looks promising so far.

Hey Matt,

I didn't know you were around here in Bitsharesland.. Hi! 

I guess I'm living under a rock.. I've never heard of the Willy report.

More bearish news today.

Pirateat40 was sentenced:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=788805.0

Rumor BFL was raided by US Marshals:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=788886.0